Archtypal Abraham

The career of Abraham has been simmering in my mind the past couple of days.  It is well known that the land of Canaan, later the land of Israel, Judah, Palestine etc was often like a soccer ball kicked around by the power to the Southeast, Egypt, and from the other side from which ever state of Mesopotamia was in power, variously Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, etc. How were the people of  Israel to view their origins? Pedigree and genealogy was important to ancient people. Still is today to some extent.  I've looked into my own and I like it when I find stories about my progenitors and not just their names.  We all desire to know who we are and how we arrived to where we are.  And we think genealogy will tell us about that. So in 8th or 9th century Kingdom of Judah, when the writings that would eventually find their way into the early parts of the Bible were written, what could they have known about their origin from a wandering Chaldean?  At that point, about a thousand years separated them from father Abraham.  Of course they would feel a special connection to the North and East because their Semitic languages were similar.  And so, likewise they would share religious and cultural similarities.  And this in contrast to Egypt.  However, there was commerce with Egypt and other countries to the south and east, Ethiopians were common in Jerusalem. What could the authors of the travels of Abraham have really known about him and why did they choose to write what they did?

I'm sure others have written about Abraham from the perspective of the Hero's Journey.   I read Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces many years ago in which he describes the archetypal journey of the Hero.  I will not go into this in detail because I did not want to do a research project but speak from my memory and impressions.  I think Abraham's life journey bears similarities to the archetype hero's journey.  First there is the call to the journey.  Then the travels and adventures commence and it is critical that while on the way he learns certain things and passes certain tests.  He travels to Egypt.  It is fitting for the story and his descendants that he receive the friendship and sanction from the Pharoah. This is important to establishing his status.  His ultimate test is the ordeal of the sacrifice of his son Isaac.  (sidebar - the story also is for the purpose of ending human sacrifice in general).  Finally he achieves his goals, wealth and numerous progeny and a fine burial and he receives the Boon: all nations are to be blessed because of him.  It was fitting to have him originate from a place like the Ur of Chaldees, at the far eastern end of Mespotamia, so that his journeys take him, as the picture above illustrates, across the whole of the known civilized world.   This is meant to convey that his descendants are also first class citizens of the world, not hicks from the edge of civilization.   

Now the rationalist in me continues to think about the fact that for any person, the number of their ancestors going back a thousand years just about equals the population of the earth.  This is not actually the case because of cousins marrying and geographic barriers like the oceans, deserts, and mountains. but the point is that any enterprising person leaving home in Mesopotamia to seek their fortune in Canaan and who had descendants would be their ancestor.  Some who did that would not have passed the tests, dying early, giving up, continuing elsewhere. Some of the others may have. Abraham is the archetype.  He is not one person but many.

CSC Phyllis Tickle - 6/5/14

I've read her two books on Emergence and viewed/listened to several of her youtube videos.  This is the best produced video.  Sound is crisp and clear.  Very enjoyable.  The occasion was the Thomas Olbricht Christians Scholars Conference held on the campus of Lipscomb University.  I think that in general outline her observation that Christianity goes through upheaval every 500 years and we are on the cusp of a new one is valid, whether or not the term Emergence continues.  A change in mode of communication changes how people think and act.  The Reformation/Enlightenment followed the printing press and universal literacy.  Our digital era is now changing us.  She talks about some of the changes going on, noting how the younger generations already think differently than us oldsters.

Brian McLaren Interview: We Make the Road by Walking

 I enjoy listening to Brian McLaren when I'm on the road and driving a long distance. Here is one of his latest videos. He speaks with a couple from the Raven Foundation. They seek to explore and apply Rene Girard's mimetic theory of violence. And Brian has been studying that as well.  It is something that I want to learn more about.  Mimetic violence is what killed Jesus.  I see it in action in our contemporary world as well.

After the Future: Grace in the Wilderness

After the Future: Grace in the Wilderness

Because this is the difference between the Nietzschean and the Christian. For the first, the world is radically open-ended and any human future is a possibility. The Christian would also acknowledge that because humans are no longer fated by the gods and determined by outside forces in the way they were, that a wide range of futures is a possibility, but however it is attained the future has a goal, a telos,  an Omega point.  And the striving toward that endpoint is what gives meaning and significance to what we do now. 

Underlining is my emphasis

Sack cartoon: Climate-change denial | Star Tribune

Sack cartoon: Climate-change denial | Star Tribune

Deviant and Proud

Last night I stopped by the site of George Monbiot, an author who writes for the Guardian in the UK.  I was thinking to myself that I had not been there in a number of months.  He's a thoughtful guy.  I was so glad I did as he provides a critique of what is called neoliberalism in Europe which he interprets as free market fundamentalism.  Below is much but not all of the article.  Please go the site and read the whole thing.  I have never bought the idea that unfettered greed is good.  I admit there is value in competition but can't believe it stands by itself as the key to everything.  

Do you feel left out? Perhaps it’s because you refuse to succumb to the competition, envy and fear neoliberalism  breeds

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 6th August 2014 

To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed. 

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe(1). What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why. 

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

...........................

The same forces afflict those who can’t find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy. 

These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders. Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia; both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors, the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us. The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways(5): just as we congratulate ourselves for our successes,we blame ourselves for our failures, even if we had little to do with it. 

So if you don’t fit in; if you feel at odds with the world; if your identity is troubled and frayed; if you feel lost and ashamed, it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
www.monbiot.com 

Antarctic and Greenland Ice Mass Change

I downloaded data from this NASA site and plotted it up.  I combined the data into one plot as shown below.  Data is from the Grace Satellite and here is the reference.

Quoted from the NASA site:

Data from NASA's Grace satellites show that the land ice sheets in both Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass. The continent of Antarctica ... has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002.

Along the same lines, here's an article Putting Antarctica Sea Ice Loss Into Perspective.

Creation Has Not Stopped

In recent years I’ve been reading John Haught and Ilia Delio.  They are associated wth Georgetown University and each has written several  books that take seriously the writings of Teilhard du Chardin and seek to interpret and build on what he said.  The first quote is from a John Haught book, Deeper Than Darwin, and the remainder from a compilation of different authors, including John and Delia, titled From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe.  Of course these are things I’ve highlighted and then downloaded from my Kindle and the Highlight locations are given. I find these writings comforting and exciting.

Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age Of Evolution (John Haught)
- Highlight Loc. 785-86 | Added on Saturday, May 17, 2014, 06:03 AM 

By our best  reckoning, the universe is a story in the process of being told. Evolutionary  narrative clearly implies that the cosmos is still coming into being.
 From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 184-87 | Added on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 07:12 AM 

He found the basis for spiritual renewal in the awareness that “creation has never stopped.” “The creative act,” he concluded, “is one huge continual gesture, drawn out over the totality of time. It is still going on; and incessantly even if imperceptibly, the world is constantly emerging a little farther above nothingness” (PU 120–21).
 From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 203-4 | Added on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 07:17 AM 

With rare exceptions, Christian thought has not yet looked carefully at the dramatic implications of evolutionary biology and astrophysics for our understanding of God and the world.
 From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 272-74 | Added on Thursday, May 22, 2014, 10:34 PM 

Lack of interest by theologians in the new scientific cosmic story only weakens their intellectual opposition to the current academic cult of cosmic pessimism. Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. the ancient Hebrew discovery of the future can hardly object.

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 313-15 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 07:31 AM
 Those who dwell within a worldview rooted in the motifs of promise and hope will rightly suspect that Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, and most modern philosophies have blunted the futuristic edge and thrust of early Christian life and thought. 

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 321-23 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 07:33 AM
 A sense of darkness, a realization that the intelligibility we seek is always partly obscured by shadows, is inevitable in any universe that is still in via. As long as the universe is not yet fully actualized it cannot possibly be fully intelligible to those who journey along with it (CE, 79–86; 131–32).

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 324-25 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 07:34 AM
 Like truth, intelligibility is something for which we must wait, since—if it is to be a continuous source of nourishment—we can never possess it.

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 351-52 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 07:40 AM
 That is, contemporary physicalism and its attendant cosmic pessimism are based on the uncritical belief that only through breaking things down into their subordinate parts can we finally satisfy the human craving to understand the world.

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 385-86 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 08:10 AM
 it leads Christian educators and ministers to ignore both the dramatic, emergent character of the universe and the promissory thrust of biblical faith.

From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (Ilia Delio)
- Highlight Loc. 398-99 | Added on Saturday, May 24, 2014, 08:13 AM
 Teilhard’s search for a grounding of solidity and consistency, therefore, led him eventually to claim that the universe leans on the future as its true foundation (AE, 139, 239).

Some Links Related to Climate Models and Antarctica Sea Ice

Some things I've been reading lately.

Study Vindicates Climate Models 'Missing the Pause'.

And here is the study the above article refers to:

Well-estimated global surface warming in climate projections selected for ENSO phase

And, with regard to Antactica Sea Ice:

Global warming expands Antactic sea ice:  In a polar paradox, melting land ice helps sea ice to grow

A New Church

We have been in the Memphis area, Collierville actually, since last September.  This is the longest I've ever gone in my life not affiliated with a particular church.  I have visited 11 churches so far.  Only five have been of the Churches of Christ which is my heritage and where I've been all my life.  It has been interesting seeing how others handle their worship.  We've been to traditional and contemporary.  Conservative and liberal. What I don't like about the contemporary ones is that they are basically concerts and you sit or stand passively.  Some of the time no one or just a few people in the pews will sing along.  When there is congregational singing, often the instrumentation drowns out the singing.   Another thing I noticed is how the services are more complicated.  There may be a march into the auditorium by participants all dressed up, maybe carrying a banner.  There is reading and response by the crowd.  There is more popping up and down than I'm used to.    After all these years reading about mainline Protestant liberal churches, it was a surprise to see how much they talk about their love for God and Jesus and what God has done for them and how Jesus is important.  

I've been wondering about what kind of church I might invent if I could.  Here are some off the cuff thoughts. It would be on Friday or Saturday night so as not to interfere with Sunday churches.

The Mysteries of the Universe Church 

1.  Welcome to everyone and a few announcements.  Background music is played but not loudly.  Instrumental contemporary but not obtrusive.  Something that builds up and leads one to think that something good will be coming along. 5 minutes. 

2.  A short message and video that relates to Art and Beauty.  10 to 15 minutes 

3.  A short message and/or video that will be known as the Science Moment.  5 to 10 minutes.
A break to visit.  5 to 10 minutes 

4.  A message from our Christian and Spiritual Heritage and History.  This may be the closest thing to a sermon.  A Biblical passage may be highlighted or a story from subsequent Christian History.  10 to 15 minutes. 

5.  Practical News and Service.  What has everyone learned this week that we can use.  Some new health tip, recipe, investment advice, shopping recommendation, whatever.  Discussion about how to help others and status of various projects.  5-10 minutes 

6.  Food .  Not sure if to do a meal or snack.  

Need to add music in between segments.  External and participatory.

The Point of Writing

I have not been writing enough lately.  Been to London, UK and Raleigh, NC recently.  Lot going on.  Still getting settled with our new life here just outside of Memphis.  Need to get back to this.  Why write?  I took on my trip and read on the plane over the Atlantic Kevin Hart's book titled "Postmodernism".  Originally read it five or so years ago. Here's a nugget.  Kevin is describing what Maurice Blanchot said:

he declared that the point of writing is not self-expression but meeting risks that will change the writer.

and a few sentences later.....

In outline, the claim is not a new one:  St. Augustine testifies in one of his letters that he comes upon new ideas only by writing.

Even in my technical writing, I find this is true.  One takes data and in the act of analyzing and gathering up background and supporting information, one always learns.  I enjoy that exploration.
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I was in London on business but did have time to stop by the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone and other wonderful ancient things.

James Joyce Quote

I loved this James Joyce quote that popped up on my screen a few days ago.  

“The spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.”

Hit me at just the right time.  Noticed on David Dark's Facebook post of his article at the web site On Faith.  The article is titled, "Top Ten Reasons We Are Glad a Catholic Colbert is taking over Letterman's Late Show". 

The End of Apologetics Chapter 4 - The Politics of Witness

"We are not going to be able to reason ourselves back to paradise."

That is one of the closing sentences from Penner's book The End of Apologetics.  The book as a whole is a critique of using an over reliance on expert reasoning as the primary means of combating skepticism and atheism in defense Christianity. 
 

"... I cannot use the objective truths of Christianity to tear down others and think that I am thereby communicating the truth of the gospel."

He looks to the prophets for example of effective, fitting and appropriate witness:

"What is also true of prophets, then, is that while they challenge and even speak against their traditions, they are also more deeply committed to them than those who are comfortable in the status quo.  It is precisely because they are so committed to their tradition and believe in its deepest impulses that prophets sometimes attack it.  The prophetic call is always to a deeper fidelity to the founding event of the tradition, but not in such a way that controls it or even tries to make it into a univocal, monochromatic tradition."

And he looks to Paul whose approach is an example for us of what prophetic witness should be. 

"Paul engages believers and unbelivers, Jews and Greeks, men and women, slaves and free, all patiently and carefully in terms of their concrete, particular identities within the context of their actual situations.  He lives with those to whom he preaches.  He eats with them.  He works and worships with them.  Consequently, his theological categories do not blind him to the particularities of those to whom he witnesses - to the point where Paul does not even think of others in terms of a "universal human condition,"  Paul's preaching calls the people of the nations not to be conformed to the theological categories he inherited from Jewish orthodoxy (e.g., "circumcision"), but to faithful confession of Jesus as Lord within their cultural forms, whatever they may be.  It is as if for Paul, as missiologist Andrew Walls observes, Christianity "has no fixed cultural element" and is therefore "infinitely transferable."  For not only can the Christian gospel be translated into new cultural and linguistic thought forms, but given the missionary imperative explicit in Paul's letters (and the entire biblical narrative", there is a sense in which the truth of the gospel requires this kind of translation:  'It is as though Christ himself actually grows through the work of mission.'"

And this, after Penner has initiated the chapter by conveying that the social dimension of Christian witness and states that "edification is taken to be the primary act of witness." 

In closing out my comments about this interesting and, for me, difficult book, I direct your attention below to a page from The Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia 1952 edition.  I grew up with this set and it helped to form me.  This page shows the development of the pen from Roman times to the middle of the last century.  You see that it has changed drastically as the medium upon which it writes has changed.  This is a metaphor for Christian witness and even for Christian belief, in my opinion.  Change will happen and we do not help ourselves if we become obsessed with using exclusively the tools that have outlived their usefulness. 

Truth Is That Which Edifies

From Chapter 4 "Witness and Truth" of The End of Apologetics, Penner says:

The modern concern with truth marks a sharp departure from the premodern focus on natural substances that make the world what it is and, in turn, make it possible for our words or thoughts about them to be true.  It is because things are already true to themselves that premoderns believe we can perceive, think, or talk about them truly.  Prior to modernity, just as with reason and rationality, it is the cosmos and its being - the it is - that make our thoughts and our words about it possible.  It is because things have forms or essences that are identical to themselves, as it were, that our minds and our words can ever have any thruth in them.  This is not the case, however, for moderns who reject the old-world cosmology.  Modern thinkers tend to believe that our thoughts and statements can be true when the things we speak and think about are self-evidently the same as our words and thoughts.

We are at the beginning of a new era where we are moving beyond this modern way of doing truth.  It seems to work well when trying to do science and technology.  This is the domain of simple inanimate things or simple biological creatures.  When it involves creatures with consciousness then things get sticky.  How we know or think we know truth matters.  Penner suggests we move from a "correspondence" theory of truth, the modern conception, to consider that truth is that which edifies.

When we speak about edification and witness, we are never talking about a purely private relation to anything......There is something of an intrapersonal and public element to truth, and because we are social beings, the edification of an individual person necessarily takes place within a community of other persons wo share (very nearly) the same commitments, values, and vocabularies.  

Is Reality Ironic?

Irony generally involves an incongruity between how we act in, talk about, or think about a situation and the usual expectations for that situation - between what is formally presented in a statement or situation and what is obviously true about it.   

The above is another quote from Chapter 3 of The End of Apologetics by Myron Penner.  For some things irony is the best way to communicate.  Irony is indirect.  Jesus ministry is full of the indirect.  He often uses reverse wisdom like in "the first shall be last".  Have you ever wished that Jesus would just come right out and say it sometimes.  Why did he use parable?  Are you or aren't you?  Speak to us with what we think are words of common sense. Say it like it is?   But he often does not.  He replies with a question or story.  His life was the ultimate irony.  God and Man.

This is the supreme irony, as Kierkegaard would say: that God was a human being and there were people who lived with him, spoke with him, ate with him, and heard him speak, and yet did not realize they were in the presence of God.......God, to put it another way, is a master ironist whose Word comes to us in a form that is not directly identical to the message.

I don't seem to be able to bring anything up inside me so I continue to quote.

The nature of reality, the world, and God himself is such that truthful speech about them - the kind of speech that communicates what is most important - ultimately is ironic.