Social Justice

Review: Scars Across Humanity

/ rtrube54 / 10 Comments

scars across humanity

Scars Across Humanity, Elaine Storkey. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

Summary: A description of the global crisis of violence against women, possible explanations, and the measures being taken to address different forms of violence.

Selective abortion and infanticide. Female genital mutilation. Early, forced marriage. Honor killings. Domestic violence. Sex trafficking and prostitution. Rape. Sexual violence in war. From the Congo, Egypt, Pakistan, southeast Asia, to the metropolitan centers and suburbs of Europe and North America, there is a pandemic of violence in various forms against women–most of it perpetrated by men.

One of the signal contributions of this work, written by Elaine Storkey, an advocate for women, is to rigorously document this pandemic, describing specific instances as well as the overall prevalence of the forms of violence against women listed above. Some of the descriptions are graphic and heart-breaking of women facing debilitating physical injuries and psychic scars of the violence done against them. Nine of the thirteen chapters in this work delineate the extent and nature of this violence. Her comments on the effectiveness of gender-based violence as a tactic of war that “inevitably hits the target” is chilling.  Along the way, Storkey reports on efforts being taken in advocacy, law, and support to address the violence, much of it after the fact. Much remains to be done. For example, Storkey notes that “603 million women live in countries where domestic violence is still not a crime.”

All of this begs the question of why is this so universally a part of the human experience (a “scar across humanity”) and particularly why is violence against women so pervasively a male behavior? Three chapters explore evolutionary, patriarchal, and religious explanations. Each, to some extent, offer some explanation for this behavior but none are completely satisfying, and none can be used as a warrant to ever justify violence. A problem that I saw with the chapter on religion is that it focused exclusively on Islam. I felt a broader treatment would have been more even-handed and would avoid feeding anti-Muslim stereotypes (although she does describe movements defending the rights of women within Islam).

The final chapter on Christianity and gender acknowledges the sad history of patriarchy and a turning of a blind eye to domestic violence in the church but also notes how scripture gives warrant for the dignity, equality, and full partnership of women in marriage and the church, and no warrant for any form of violence. She notes the “texts of terror,” but argues these are descriptive rather than ever prescriptive. Finally, Storkey traces the root cause of gender based violence to human rebellion against God–sin. She writes:

“At a far deeper level than either ‘biology’ or ‘culture,’ then, ‘sin’ helps us explain the ubiquity of violence against women. We are responsible. Patriarchal structures are a product of human choices and attitudes; oppression and brutality are rooted in the power sin exercises in human communities. A Christian theology of sin places accountability for attitudes, culture and actions firmly on human shoulders; we have to own what we create” (p. 223).

This is good a far as it goes, and I would agree with everything here, but I found her brief treatment less than satisfying in explaining why violence against women is a preferred male expression of our fallen sinfulness, particularly in light of her extensive treatment of evolutionary and patriarchal explanations. For this, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen’s Gender and Grace goes into far greater depth.

Storkey’s book is an important one for men to read. This cannot remain a women’s conversation. As men, we need to own what we have created and face our collective “heart of darkness” and the tragic mayhem we have wrought across the globe, from date rape to femicide. We need to own that we are the reason that no girl or woman from eight (or earlier) to eighty can live without fear in our presence. This book faces us with the ugly consequences of the abuse of our masculinity and challenges us to join our mothers, sisters, and daughters as advocates and allies rather than aggressors. It challenges us to live redemptively, joining with Jesus, who elevated the status of women throughout his ministry.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: No Other Gods

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

No Other Gods

No Other Gods, Ana Levy-Lyons. New York: Center Street, 2018.

Summary: A liberal, progressive reading of the Ten Commandments, moving beyond personal morality to the social and political implications of the commands.

It seems that the most attention the Ten Commandments have received of late are controversies about whether or not they may be displayed in court houses and other public settings. Most would perceive that these commandments are the property of the conservative elements of Judaism and Christianity and that more enlightened, secular, humanist, spiritual-but-not-religious approaches liberate people from the oppressive laws and strictures of conservative religion. Yet, Ana Levy-Lyons, the author of this work and a minister of a progressive Unitarian congregation, contends that this freedom from religion hasn’t always been liberating, evidenced by record levels of anxiety and depression and an activism lacking in sustaining ethical foundations. She proposes in her introduction to this book:

“We may feel today that we’ve outgrown the need for the religious strictures of the past. But those very strictures might well have been devised for such a moment as this. Now be when we need them most. Especially today, we need shared commitments to hold ourselves accountable to history, to the future, to one another, and to something larger than all of us. We need faith in our collective power to transform the world toward justice–a power authorized and fueled by the ground of being itself. Choose-your-own-adventure spirituality is inadequate to the challenges we face. We need religious practices like the Ten Commandments that are rooted in a deep and multilayered tradition, that are spiritually rich, and that are intentionally insulated from modern culture.”

Levy-Lyons offers an interpretation of these commandments as a radical manifesto of liberation rather than of oppression, empowering resistance to a materialistic, capitalistic society. Inspired by the rabbinic tradition of midrash, she offers a fresh interpretation of the commandments that she hopes both secular liberals and the progressive religious might engage in common.

Beginning with the first command, to have no other gods, she argues that the message of this command is to “dethrone the modern deities of political, social, and corporate power” that pervade our daily life, as well as all the private personal gods that vie for a place in our lives, whether they are ideals of beauty or what she calls the “tyranny of balance.” She argues that our relation as a community to the one who is “Being” itself demotes all these other pursuits. Likewise, we should accept no “sculpted images” (the second commandment) as substitutes, whether they be material objects or the sculpting of ourselves or being lured by the power of a brand. She contends, “real life, unfiltered by brands, is spectacular.” The third command, of not taking God’s name in vain calls upon us to defend God’s goodness by refusing to allow others to justify immorality in the name of God, or justifying a culture that celebrates guns or destroys the environment with the idea that this is how God has made the world, that this is just the way things are. It is a call to assert the goodness of God in matters of justice and care for the earth.

Against a 24/7 mentality and a rigid sabbatarianism, the fourth command is an invitation to squander one day every week. It seeks the liberation of those in wage slavery so they can also rest, it says “no” to a relentless consumerism and “yes” to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “palace in time” where we rejoice in enough and linger over meals with friends. It is a dangerously radical waste of time that threatens the “gods” of the other six days. Likewise, in a culture that fosters accountability only to ourselves and leaving home for the next new thing, the fifth commandment calls us to honor parents, and in so doing stay accountable to where we’ve come from. While not justifying the wrongs that may have been done to us, the command challenges us to honor what made us who we are, that none of us are self-made. Levy-Lyons also extends this to the earth itself, that our accountability to it is connected to our living long in the land.

To not kill is not merely to not murder, but to not let die, and challenges our involvement in systems that kill, whether they are the third world sweatshops that produce our clothes or the bureaucratic systems of a city like Flint that channel toxic water into the homes while diverting them from automotive plants. Our commitment to life may go so far as to abstain from meat or animal products, considering how animals live and die. The seventh command against adultery rejects the idolatry of consumer choice (and unchoosing) in the most intimate of human relationship, to instead turn our choices to protect innocence and to stay in for the long run. The eighth challenges us not only to refrain from taking what is ours directly, but in what we pay for things, and how our choices affect the availability of the world’s resources to others. The ninth is not about what counts as a lie but the pursuit of truth, whether in the courts, or in the marketplace or the political arena. She makes trenchant comments about “truthiness” — lies that sound like they could be true but undermine truth-telling.

She ends with the tenth commandment, to not covet, and recognizes the internal aspect of this command, how in fact coveting precedes all else. Coveting is subverted when we embrace a life of “enough”– that we have enough and we are enough. She recognizes that to cultivate a life of “enough,” that keeps the commands, takes a community (it was fascinating that as a liberal, she includes Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option in her further reading list–perhaps this is why). Her concluding chapter contends that it matters, that pursuing goodness and love multiplies to a thousand generations and in the end, the commands transform into ten blessings, a paraphrase of which she concludes the book.

I found this attempt to interpret the commands to those seeking to escape the oppressiveness of conservative religion fascinating both for the recognition of how these commandments are in fact for our and the world’s good, and the radical demands that keeping these commands raise, particularly extending beyond personal and private morality to our concerns about systems and structures and ideologies. Yet as one who exists in a different social space than the author, the insistence on the value of human relations while keeping the deity as a very impersonal Being was puzzling. I was perhaps most troubled by an unwillingness to ask questions about the use of abortion as birth control or the warehousing of the aged among our concerns about killing. There seemed to be more concern about the warehousing of animals than people. Likewise, can we truly talk about adultery without also questioning cohabiting without commitment? There was nothing about how pornography destroys marriages. It felt at times that her reading of the commands comported with the values of progressive community with whom she ministers.

We all find it easier to challenge the transgressions of others than our own. This, actually, is what makes this a good book for me to read because I often do not hear in my faith community the challenges Levy-Lyons gives in this book. At the same time, what I would contend is that these commands are truly radical in challenging “off limits” subjects for all of us, whether this has to do with our consumerism, our exploitation of the planet, or all the ways we distort the wonderful gift of our sexuality, or even our attempts to keep the infinite yet personal God at arms length. What a fascinating conversation might be had, like Bill Moyers’ Genesis series, were scholars and ministers across the spectrum gathered to discuss these ten words, ten commandments, ten blessings!

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary advance review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

 

Review: Race and Place

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

 

Race and Place

Race and Place, David P. Leong (foreword by Soong-Chan Rah). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Looks at how geography and place serve to perpetuate racial divisions and injustice and how the church may begin to address itself to these geographic forces and structures.

In many discussions about the continuing legacy of racial divisions and injustices in our country we focus on structural problems in our justice system, our political life, and in our economic life that perpetuate divisions. What is often less obvious is that place and geography places an important role in these structural divisions and in the perpetuation of racial discord in our society.

David P. Leong writes this book to open our eyes to the ways that our geography, particularly our urban geography helps perpetuate structures of racial division. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, Leong lays out terms, including a discussion of place and colorblindness. What I find him arguing here as much as anything is that we are “place blind” and we do not see how place and race interact. He traces this in part to a docetic theology that spiritualizes life and doesn’t recognize physical places as an essential aspect of life–that our embodied existence is lived in a place.

Part two looks at how patterns of exclusion work in our geography and how this plays out in education, housing, and our transportation patterns. He talks about our freeway systems as facilitating a suburban exodus. I was surprised that he did not talk about how freeways changed our urban landscapes, isolated neighborhoods and reinforced racial separation in many cities. This was surprising to me because he writes about Detroit, including the wall at Eight Mile Road, yet does not talk about how freeways also changed the urban geography of the city. He also addresses what he calls “return flight” and the resulting phenomenon of gentrification which perpetuates geographic isolation as poorer (and often racially distinct) populations are often displaced when an urban area gentrifies.

Part three addresses the phenomenon of relocation often advocated by the Christian Community Development Association. The author is part of one such community in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle. He explores the postures and practices involved in avoiding a kind of imperialism by sinking roots into a community, by practicing radical hospitality, and engaging in neighborhood renewal through a ministry of presence.

I think the strengths of this book are its analysis of the ways place and geography perpetuate racial divisions and inequities, and in the author’s story of the hard work of nurturing a racially diverse church community in urban Seattle. At the same time it seems that its primary solution to these problems of place is relocation and incarnational ministry. Perhaps in the very long term such communities can transform an urban environment. Yet I wonder if this is only a very small part of addressing the structural problems that sustain racism, even in terms of urban geography. It seems that there are issues related to law enforcement and the justice system, banking and financial services, business and commerce, the location of employment opportunities, fostering quality educational opportunities and more that this book leaves unaddressed, apart from acknowledging them.

Perhaps this calls for a much longer book, but even more an aware presence in these communities. It seems that this is what the author wants as he writes:

“As you witness these oppressive systems at work in your own neighborhood and reflect on these personal tendencies in your own life, I hope you’ll never look at another freeway, public school, or suburban home the same way again. Beyond those new ways of seeing, I also pray that you’ll be disturbed with our complicity in these problematic walls of hostility, to the point of further study, research, and lament.”

Leong’s book does this and something more. It shares the story of a community that has started looking at these things, not clinically from the outside, but as a hospitable and learning community from the inside. Over time, that may be far more significant than one more grandiose solution imposed from the outside.

 

Review: Reinhold Niebuhr (Makers of the Modern Theological Mind)

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments

niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr (Makers of the Modern Theological Mind), Bob E. Patterson. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017 (originally published in 1977).

Summary: An introduction to the life and theological contribution of this mid-twentieth century theologian, known for re-introducing a conversation about sin into liberal theological circles.

Reinhold Niebuhr was one of a group of “neo-orthodox” and more liberal theologians who dominated the theological landscape of the mid-twentieth century, along with Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. Niebuhr’s distinction was that he was the one American in the group (Tillich emigrated to the U.S. during World War II). He may have been the most influential American-born theologian since Jonathan Edwards. His “Christian realism” informed the thinking of architect of Cold War era policy George Kennan and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and he was a favorite theologian of both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

This book marks the re-publishing of the Makers of the Modern Theological Mind series, originally published in the late 1970’s.  Each of the volumes provides a concise biography and  theological contribution for most of the above named figures. They are ideal for theological students preparing for comprehensive exams, but also as accessible summaries to the lives and works of these important figures who still exert influence in both theological, and in Niebuhr’s case, political circles.

Patterson begins with an extended biographical essay that traces Niebuhr’s formative years, his Detroit pastorate, his advocacy for workers and socialist causes, his pacifism and then the turn in his life as he renounced socialism and endorsed U.S. involvement in World War II. Likewise, he shook the theological world with his Gifford Lectures later published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, where he enunciated his theology of what it means to be human, and particularly the reality and universality of human sinfulness, especially the sin of pride, evident even in the best of our noble political and spiritual pretensions. This marked a kind of summit in his life, during his years at Union Theological Seminary and as a highly sought-after speaker on university campuses and other fora. A series of strokes and heart trouble hampered his later life, although he continued to write prolifically, particularly on questions at the junction of theological and political life.

The rest of the book is devoted to his theology. Patterson begins with his anthropology and Niebuhr’s emphasis on the tension humans live in between their freedom and finiteness, and the anxiety that results from this. He goes on to show how this anxiety, when it is not turned to faith in God, inevitably leads to sin. One of Niebuhr’s distinct contributions, according to Patterson, is his focus particularly on the forms of pride that result from that anxiety, rather than the sensual sins, although Niebuhr also gives an account of this. The sin of pride colors all human pretensions to noble social, political and even spiritual ambitions. This leads Niebuhr to the “paradox of grace” which both empowers moral transformation, and yet extends the continuing forgiveness of the intrusions of sin through the atoning work of Christ.

Niebuhr’s understanding of sin and grace informs his “Christian realism” in the pursuit of love and justice. The grace of Christianity inspires us to acts of agape love, yet the pretensions of pride remain, and love may best be translated into the upholding of justice in society. For Niebuhr, he recognizes the structural as well as personal dimensions of sin and its impact on movements of social justice. We are, in the language of one of his books, “moral men in an immoral society.” Furthermore, realism cautions against the extremes of totalitarian efforts to bring in the good society and the utopian dreams of much liberalism. We will not bring in the kingdom in human history, only proximate goods that look toward an eschatological fulfillment.

Although some of the language and references in this 1970’s work reflects this time, the author is prescient, in my view, in his appreciation of the relevance of Niebuhr to our own day:

“We still need his genius to see that human behavior is complex, that demonic possibilities are built into church and social structures, that human pride and spiritual arrogance rise to new heights precisely at the point where they are closest to the Kingdom of God, and that advance brings vulnerability to new temptations. Since overweening self-regard is ubiquitous, religious and political groups need Niebuhr’s caution about special arrogance, about the self-righteous smoke screen laid down by the powerful, and about cheap grace” (pp. 130-131).

Niebuhr wasn’t an evangelical, and this perhaps accounts for why his influence has not shaped either evangelical political engagement or a suburban-oriented church growth movement in the last thirty years that has been blind to the “demonic possibilities” in our structures that have contributed to a racially divided church and a deeply divided political discourse. His trenchant analysis of the human condition and of what is possible in a fallen world, certainly not infallible in all its detail, nevertheless provides the lineaments of an intellectual, moral and spiritual framework we desperately need in our day.

___________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Review: The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Uneasy Conscience

The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, Carl F. H. Henry (foreword by Richard J. Mouw). Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003 (originally published 1947).

Summary: Henry’s classic manifesto challenging the heirs of the fundamentalist movement to a recovery of a social and intellectual engagement while maintaining gospel integrity.

In a recent conversation about people leaving evangelicalism because of the “rootedness” of those in traditions like Catholicism, I wondered aloud whether many who are repudiating evangelicalism have much knowledge of what they are repudiating, other than the uncomfortable experiences they likely have had personally. In my experience, most evangelicals are sadly out of touch with even their own history, let alone the great history of the church over the past two millenia.

The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism is one of the keystone works in the rise of the twentieth century evangelical movement. In it Carl Henry decries the regrettable loss of a social conscience in fundamentalism’s retreat from a vibrantly engaged evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.  He writes:

     “In a company of more than one hundred representative evangelical pastors, the writer proposed the following question: ‘How many of you, during the past six months, have preached a sermon devoted in large part to a condemnation of such social evils as aggressive warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, the liquor traffic, exploitation of labor or management or the like–a sermon containing not merely an incidental or illustrative reference, but directed mainly against such evils and proposing the framework in which you think a solution is possible?’ Not a single hand was raised in response.”

He attributes this in part to the retrenchment from theological liberalism and its associated “social gospel.” But he also lays part of the blame on an eschatology that is indifferent to all efforts to address social and physical needs since “it is all going to perish” and what must be done is simply to rescue lost people. He argues that the exclusive focus on the “not yet” of the kingdom to the exclusion of the “already” that heralds the work of Christ leads to a great imbalance in preaching. He writes this as one who embraces rather than denies premillenial theology.

Furthermore, he calls for an intellectual recovery of a Christian mind and social ethic that roots a vigorous engagement in the realms of higher education as well as societal needs in theological orthodoxy. He proposes protest that roots advocacy in evangelical belief while also recognizing that ameliorating social needs without spiritual regeneration through Christ is inadequate.

Carl Henry represented a vanguard of evangelical leaders who created journals like Christianity Today and began to assert a socially engaged and intellectually rigorous Christianity that remained rooted in fundamental beliefs. It was a movement that advocated for a “both-and” approach when everyone else had assumed an “either-or” approach to Christian faith–either socially engaged or doctrinally orthodox. Henry argued for both and believed this reflected gospel integrity.

While there were things Henry and others no doubt didn’t get right, many more don’t even know he existed or that his manifesto anticipated the socially engaged evangelicalism of Sojourners, the intellectual and doctrinal rigor of the neo-Reformed folk, and the movement toward a recovery of a Christian mind in the world of higher education.

This slim volume “stirred many pots.” It is worth a read in our day, both for the vibrant vision it articulates and for the glimpse it gives us of the beginnings of twentieth century evangelicalism after World War Two.