Daniel Larison takes issue with Obama’s Notre Dame speech and especially Obama’s use of doubt, which Larison maintains is not a quality, but rather “a function of a mind clouded by the passions”.  Doubt, Larison writes, “is the result of confusion. It does not teach us anything, but rather prevents us from learning.”  This is interesting coming from Daniel – and a bit surprising, since I think doubt plays a much more nuanced role in our lives (politically and spiritually) than merely as an agent of personal obsfucation and confusion.  Where Daniel finds the most fault  is in Obama’s inability to separate apophatic theology from doubt – the one being an acceptance of the “unkowability of God” and the other being the “function of human confusion.”

Doubt, to my mind at least, is not at all the “function of human confusion” though it can certainly lead to confusion if we let it consume us.  Then again, if we let our appetite for any emotion or passion or pursuit consume us it is possible we will be rendered helplessly confused – by love, by greed, by faith even.  By certainty, even.  [Read more →]

I read Leviticus last year while studying Judaism and I noticed exactly the same thing Ron Beasley is on to in this post. The problem with fundamentalism is it can’t really operate in the real world; no Christian follows all the laws and commandments set forth in the Torah.  Few Jews – even Orthodox – can manage that, and some Orthodox Jews go to extraordinary lengths to follow all 613 mitzvot.  Find me a Christian who even comes close.  Some Orthodox Jews keep two kitchens just to make sure they’re staying kosher.

This is because in Christianity Jesus said, essentially, that there were two commandments that superseded all the rest:  to love God, and to love our neighbor.  To love in other words, wholly and freely.  Jesus was responding in large part to the folly of the priesthood of His day, which had lost sight of love in favor of all those damn laws and commandments.  There is something strikingly similar about those days and our own.  We condemn gays because of a commandment in Leviticus, but we certainly no longer stone people to death for skipping out on the Sabbath – a far more weighty commandment at least from the ancient perspective.  We’ve largely abandoned the Sabbath in the modern world, but still cling quite fiercely to any and every sexual taboo.

The truth is that we could never, as people actually living in the world, as a part of the world, follow each and every ludicrous, ancient commandment, many of which may have made sense – perhaps even on a purely sanitary level – for the ancients, but which miss the point of Jesus’ two great commandments altogether.

Damon Linker and Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have been tossing this ball back and forth now for a while.  In his latest, Linker writes:

It seems to me that Rod’s opposition to gay marriage and social acceptance follows less from an argument or an assertion about the world, nature, or God than it does from a disposition or temperament — from a disposition or temperament inclined toward fear. (In retrospect, I can see how significant and telling it is that one of the first questions I posed to Rod in my original post was “What are you afraid of?”, and that Andrew fastened onto that passage in his initial response and returned to it in the title of his longer post in response to Rod. Fear has been at the center of this debate from the beginning.)

Conservatism and faith are both inextricably tied to doubt; the former utilizes doubt as a sort of gauge by which to check and evaluate progress, the latter as a sort of balancing force.  True faith must be contrasted with real doubt.  But what faith and conservatism do not need, and what inevitably leads to their corruption, is fear.  And Linker is right to note that what this debate – at least for Dreher – boils down to, is fear.  This is not to say that all arguments against gay marriage are based in fear, as Conor notes, but certainly many are, and they all miss a larger point. [Read more →]

I can utterly relate to what E.D. is saying when he writes,

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with this sense that all of this is an exercise in futility – that there is simply too much to know, too much I don’t know, too much I don’t or can’t understand.  My ignorance on this or that subject is laid bare by the revelation of some new fact, some history unearthed that changes the entire game.

A variation on that exact same thought occupied my mind to paralysis on Saturday night, rendering all attempts at writing useless. As is my way in those circumstances, I went on a late night walk to the river by which I live to try to clear my head out and place myself in a context of space larger than my apartment affords. The goal is to provide my thoughts with some room to stretch out and hopefully arrange into some kind of meaningful constellation that might offer something in the way of insight, instead of the clustered muck they appear prior. As I sat on a park bench in the chilled night, looking at the frozen-over river stretching windingly through the centre of the city, my mind calming with the sight of each frozen breath splaying out in front of me, a familiar frustration revisited my awareness.

When I was nine my father passed away. It wasn’t a prolonged and agonizing procession through one sickness or another, but rather a brutally abrupt and sudden occurrence. One night I went to bed and when I awoke the next morning my father was gone, lost to a heart attack. Looking back now with my thirty-two year old eyes I know that there were signs that something wasn’t right, but to the nine year old me those years ago his passing struck without any warning. When I woke up that morning, I remember being able to sort of sense that things were amiss, something about the air seemed heavy and thick. Descending the stairs and walking into our kitchen my mother sat puffy-eyed and distant until her gaze found my face. Crying out loud, she pulled me in as I noticed my grandmother’s presence in the kitchen, as well — there might have been others, I don’t really remember. I began to cry, primarily because my mother was crying as she hugged my brother, who had followed me into the kitchen, close as well. I was awash in confusion, more than tears.

My father’s death left me with an early feeling of dislocation from a linear sort of stability in the world. The lesson I quickly learned was that things, even the stalwart presence of a parent, change; circumstances, even the most important, are highly contingent. But we persist.

That lesson has followed me into my adulthood and informs much of current predisposition to eschew or at least look skeptically at hard and fast political affiliations. There have certainly been times in my life where I thought I had found the end-all-be-all answer to everything in a certain political and social outlook. But as E.D. notes, “suddenly the veil falls away, and the great big universe of doubt washes over me again.” I take that doubt to be a positive thing and a lack thereof to be the sign in political identification to more often than not indicate the futile exercise of intellectual empire building. All empires fall and often times there is much damage that is inflicted in the process of their construction.

But more to the point, the building of an intellectual/political empire strikes me as an inherently absolutizing endeavour, one almost never seeks to build an empire just so that one can discover its fault lines and generally chooses instead to ignore the cracks inflicted by the imposition of reality on one’s smooth edifice. In this way it worries me that too much of our political discourse is more about our own introverted, intra-tribal battles than it is about those spheres of life that politics deeply affects.

At the end of the day I can’t help but see all of us as shivering in the tide of a stunning sea of unknowns, engaged in a beautiful struggle to make sense of our lives, our world, and our very existence. The shifting contexts of that world are nothing if not a Sword of Damocles strung precariously above any hubris we might muster in determining that we’ve figured it all out, or that we ever will.  Our persistence in trying is not in this view to be considered folly or useless, but rather to be approached with the requisite humility about our capabilities in the process. The mystery of life is the dwarfing backdrop against all of our endeavours to categorize and compartmentalize, and our tendency to ingore that mystery is the palpable frustration I feel that renders me speechless and uncertain about the worthiness of saying anything at all.

So can we construct a politics whose trajectory is as much exploratory as it is proclamatory? Can we attentuate our efforts at figuring out how we are to live together to the stage on which those lives play out? Can we engage in this beautiful struggle in a fashion that befits the enormity of our task and cultivate in ourselves a respect for the leviathan we’re attempting to birth?

On nights like last Saturday I wonder and think that I’m simply asking too much of our politics. Perhaps that frustration is destined to persist, as are we.