Just found out yesterday that our baby is a girl; this is the first picture, rather fuzzy ultrasound image but you can see her head and her foot (which is touching her forehead). pretty cool.
Feb 18, 2009
baby picture
Just found out yesterday that our baby is a girl; this is the first picture, rather fuzzy ultrasound image but you can see her head and her foot (which is touching her forehead). pretty cool.
Feb 10, 2009
Christian discipleship and suffering
I want to jot down some thoughts on suffering in Christian theology. Christians have often made suffering into a large pillar of our practical theology as well as folk theologies. Penance and sacrifice have often been considered important spiritual practices and disciplines, crucial to the Christian pilgrimage through life. Years ago sacrifice was the big word for this, today I often hear people say that suffering and taking on others suffering is what the christian life is about. We've shifted from sacrifice to suffering and suffering with, but it's all cut from the same cloth as far as I can tell.
My concern with this is that it causes us to place precedence on suffering itself; that we come close to making suffering something necessary or good in itself. I have no problem with suffering per se, but I do have a problem when it becomes an end in itself, or something that is considered (if not consciously, in practice) something to be sought out or the purpose of our existence as Christians in this world. Theology of suffering comes up most clearly in theologies of incarnation, and I have heard often enough that our purpose as Christians is to bear the cross, sacrifice, suffer etc.
I would rather place love as primary; and note that suffering in its truest sense (can one make a distinction between suffering and pain?) only comes when one loves. Suffering in this sense is a result of loving the world around one (world in the John 3.16 sense) even when that world is not how it should be. If I do not love it is difficult for me to really suffer, beyond simple physical pain. The suffering, say, of a person dying of cancer is not simply the pain of the illness, but the emotional anguish that “this ought not to be,” of a life taken too soon, of anticipating the loss of those left behind who must carry on without the one who is dying, the one both loved and loving. In relationships, suffering comes about often when one loves another who does not return that love, or loves another who is going through something that raises our indignation, evoking the attitude of the lament psalm.
But let us not say that this is some how the goal or the telos of the Christian life—not something necessary. Suffering, like evil, pain, and all the other infirmities brought about by the fall, are absences and aberrations.
My concern with this is that it causes us to place precedence on suffering itself; that we come close to making suffering something necessary or good in itself. I have no problem with suffering per se, but I do have a problem when it becomes an end in itself, or something that is considered (if not consciously, in practice) something to be sought out or the purpose of our existence as Christians in this world. Theology of suffering comes up most clearly in theologies of incarnation, and I have heard often enough that our purpose as Christians is to bear the cross, sacrifice, suffer etc.
I would rather place love as primary; and note that suffering in its truest sense (can one make a distinction between suffering and pain?) only comes when one loves. Suffering in this sense is a result of loving the world around one (world in the John 3.16 sense) even when that world is not how it should be. If I do not love it is difficult for me to really suffer, beyond simple physical pain. The suffering, say, of a person dying of cancer is not simply the pain of the illness, but the emotional anguish that “this ought not to be,” of a life taken too soon, of anticipating the loss of those left behind who must carry on without the one who is dying, the one both loved and loving. In relationships, suffering comes about often when one loves another who does not return that love, or loves another who is going through something that raises our indignation, evoking the attitude of the lament psalm.
But let us not say that this is some how the goal or the telos of the Christian life—not something necessary. Suffering, like evil, pain, and all the other infirmities brought about by the fall, are absences and aberrations.
Feb 7, 2009
the self justifying status quo
the following bit from the NY Times sparked a few, vaguely related thoughts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html
basically an attempt to make the public feel the pain of those poor wall street bankers who Obama wants to limit to half a mil a year salary (my question, does that include bonuses/stock options/other perks, or just base salary?). The article is almost offensive, boohooing about how it's simply impossible to live the lifestyle of a wall street CEO on only a half a mil. The one interesting point raised is the importance of the appearance of success--arguing that these chaps simply need 1.5 mil just so they can maintain the look of success in that culture, and that this is somehow required for the functioning of western civilization (ok I made that last part up).
I've read a few business type articles lately that pick up on this same idea, and there is something to it. But in both articles what bugs me is the simpering conservatism of such a stance--the outright inability or unwillingness to imagine that we could live differently than we do, accepting fatalistically that this is just the way it is, thus the status quo justifies the maintenance of the status quo (somehow, lurking in the back of my mind is a connection between this thought and the business school students references in this article by Michael Lewis, students who attempt to convince Birkenstock USA to stop being so damned good and nice without giving a thought to what the company will get out of it). This entirely misses the point that Obama and many others have been raising about the Wall St. banking culture, namely that the entire culture needs to change because it is unhealthy in significant ways.
This doesn't do away with the point (one I'm at least willing to consider as valid) that to succeed, we have to conform to certain cultural assumptions of success. What bothers me is that this assumption is taken for granted and then overrides the suggestion that, while we are always bound by social conventions and furthermore that our very lives are webs of social expectations, conventions, etc., this does not mean that we cannot challenge certain of these cultural and social expectations or that all social contracts are equal. Again, the status quo justifies the status quo.
All that to say, such articles remind me how inherently countercultural Christianity is at its root. For us, at least, the status quo does not self justify, the way things are is not the way they ought or even must be. Christianity is also certainly conservative, at least in our hypermodern world bent on reducing reality to its atomized bits to the detriment of those wholes which are more than the sum of the parts (think families, communities, human consciousness and experience, etc.). In this world Christians also paly a conservative role, reminding the world of what we lose when we allow reductionism to destroy the fabric of human existence. Yet even this conservatism is a countercultural phenomenon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html
basically an attempt to make the public feel the pain of those poor wall street bankers who Obama wants to limit to half a mil a year salary (my question, does that include bonuses/stock options/other perks, or just base salary?). The article is almost offensive, boohooing about how it's simply impossible to live the lifestyle of a wall street CEO on only a half a mil. The one interesting point raised is the importance of the appearance of success--arguing that these chaps simply need 1.5 mil just so they can maintain the look of success in that culture, and that this is somehow required for the functioning of western civilization (ok I made that last part up).
I've read a few business type articles lately that pick up on this same idea, and there is something to it. But in both articles what bugs me is the simpering conservatism of such a stance--the outright inability or unwillingness to imagine that we could live differently than we do, accepting fatalistically that this is just the way it is, thus the status quo justifies the maintenance of the status quo (somehow, lurking in the back of my mind is a connection between this thought and the business school students references in this article by Michael Lewis, students who attempt to convince Birkenstock USA to stop being so damned good and nice without giving a thought to what the company will get out of it). This entirely misses the point that Obama and many others have been raising about the Wall St. banking culture, namely that the entire culture needs to change because it is unhealthy in significant ways.
This doesn't do away with the point (one I'm at least willing to consider as valid) that to succeed, we have to conform to certain cultural assumptions of success. What bothers me is that this assumption is taken for granted and then overrides the suggestion that, while we are always bound by social conventions and furthermore that our very lives are webs of social expectations, conventions, etc., this does not mean that we cannot challenge certain of these cultural and social expectations or that all social contracts are equal. Again, the status quo justifies the status quo.
All that to say, such articles remind me how inherently countercultural Christianity is at its root. For us, at least, the status quo does not self justify, the way things are is not the way they ought or even must be. Christianity is also certainly conservative, at least in our hypermodern world bent on reducing reality to its atomized bits to the detriment of those wholes which are more than the sum of the parts (think families, communities, human consciousness and experience, etc.). In this world Christians also paly a conservative role, reminding the world of what we lose when we allow reductionism to destroy the fabric of human existence. Yet even this conservatism is a countercultural phenomenon.
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