"Doubt" - a Postmodern Epistemology

Brilliant movie! The best description I can think of is that it is a postmodern exploration of our sources for knowledge. The movie forces the viewer to ask questions about how we can "know" what it is we feel we "know". How do we come to "feel" certain? Is faith possible without doubt? Is doubt an act of faith? Is a search for truth a journey into the destruction of faith?

All of the performances are wonderful and each character helps us visualize a different foundation for epistemology. For some, our certainty remains in question until we acquire a particular level of evidence. For others, a declaration from some source of authority helps us claim to "know" with certainty. At times, we just can't locate the reasons why we feel so certain. These characters help us see that any search for truth is not a linear path from doubt to faith to certainty; it's more of a constant interplay between all three. In the end, the movie explores the risks we take when we attempt to locate truth, a search which demands a willful sacrifice of our certainty, a deconstruction of our faith, and a full embrace of our darkest doubts.

A few of my favorite lines from the movie...

"You just want things to be resolved so you can have simplicity back" - Sister Aloysius

"Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty" - Father Flynn

"It is unsettling to look at people with suspicion. I feel less close to God" - Sister James

"When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God" - Sister Aloysius

Julia Sweeney on God

The Happiness Myth

I finally finished “The Happiness Myth - Why what we think is right is wrong” by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hecht is a wonderful writer. I read most of the book from a beach chair in Aruba while sipping more than my fair share of cocktails, a combination that created more than a few ironic moments. I found it to be a helpful and enriching addition to my vacation. The only bad thing I can say about this book is that it’s a bit crowded with information. Had a less engaging writer written it, it might have risked boredom, but Hecht creates lovely prose to keep the reader engaged throughout.

The book takes us on a journey through history as we examine the shifts in cultural ideas about what makes people happy; such as, our ideas about drugs, money, religion, shopping, eating, exercise, celebrations, and sex. I’ve often pondered the notion that our measures of happiness may not always line up with what actually makes us happy. Hecht suggests the reason is that there are three main types of happiness - a good day, euphoria, and a good life. Often those things are in opposition and anyone looking for happiness will need to keep all three in balance or their quest may be doomed to fail. Understanding those categories of happiness might help us make better decisions. We might be willing to sacrifice a few good days in order to achieve a moment or two of brief euphoria; at other times, we may make the mistake of chasing euphoric moments at the expense of a happy life.

The mark of a good book is that it has the power to change the reader in some way. In order to create change, it has to first make us skeptical about the way things are. Hecht is a notorious skeptic, and this book is a wonderful adventure in the healthiest and happiest form of doubt.

Five Writers Who Changed Me

One of my favorite bloggers, Dr. James McGrath, tagged me in a meme that is working its way around the internet. The rules are, “name the five books (or scholars) that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. Note that these need not be your five favorite books, or even the five with which you most strongly agree. Instead, I want to know what five books have permanently changed the way you think.”

Here is my list:

1) The first time I picked up Marcus Borg’s book, “Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally”, I couldn’t get past the first 2 chapters. I thought I’d burn in hell if I kept reading it, so I put it back on the shelf. A year later, I returned to it and I not only fell in love with Marcus Borg’s writing, I also fell in love with the Bible. The difference in my perspective between the first time I picked up the book and the response I had a year later is the work of the second author on my list…

2) Brian McLaren and his trilogy “A New Kind of Christian” gave me permission to think, question, and reexamine my view of scripture. It seems silly that I would need “permission”, but I found this book at just the right time in my life. I wasn’t sure about progressive theology, yet I knew deep down that I was conflicted about the simplistic faith I was publicly professing. Even though I couldn’t buy in wholeheartedly to that Evangelical faith of my childhood, I didn’t realize I could question it without throwing away my life. In many ways, I’ve moved “past” Mclaren’s theology. He’s a trendy author who keeps one foot in the superficial pop culture of Evangelicalism. That’s not something I share with him any more, but McLaren provided an instrumental step in my growth and I’ll always thank him for that important push out of the nest. I’ll never forget his engaging characters and moving stories.

3) John Shelby Spong is famous for writing books that draw attention by being overly dramatic and extremely critical. I remember seeing the bright red book jacket on “The Sins of Scripture” and thinking he was just out to piss people off. I was wrong. The book that really won me over was “Resurrection: Myth or Reality”. In that work, Bishop Spong opens up the world of the Jewish Midrash and makes a strong case for how the New Testament authors followed this tradition in crafting the Gospels and generating the subsequent legends of Jesus. That theory assembled the key pieces of the way I now read and appreciate the gospel narratives.

4) “Jesus and Nonviolence” by Walter Wink is a small book, barely more than a pamphlet, but it packs a big punch. It is also a great book for small group discussions. You can read it in one sitting and unpack it for days. After reading this exegesis of Jesus’ teachings, I’ve never read the parables of Jesus the same way again.

5) When I first heard Walter Brueggemann speak, I avoided the Old Testament like a plague. I was certain that the prophets were antiquity’s version of a modern 1-900 psychic hotline. Brueggeman shattered that notion, and his book “The Prophetic Imagination” changed the way I approach the Old Testament. The prophets are now my favorite books in the Bible and “The Prophetic Imagination” may be the best book I’ve ever read.

Looking Forward or Looking Back?

HT: Tripp Fuller

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the title of David Dark's latest book, "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything", was just too alluring for me to pass up. Can a title get any better than that? The rest of the book is living up to the catchy title. I highly recommend this book for its unique combination of theological inquiry, political satire, and provocative cultural humor. How many books can you think of that link quotes from Augustine to Jon Stewart, Aquinas to Stephen Colbert, and a Muslim imam to South Park?

I probably wouldn't agree with all of David Dark's answers, but I love his questions. If I have to pick between answers and questions, I'll take good questions every time. If there's a skeptical side to your personality, or if you get frustrated when answers just seem to easy to be true, then you'll like this book too. If you enjoy a good theology discussion and Comedy Central is on your favorite channel list, then this book is likely to become one of your all time favorites. Here are a few of my favorite lines...

“This is how religions work. Devastating criticism of religion is always part of religion. The religiously faithful aren’t just permitted to critique and complain and reform; they’re bound to do as much by religion. Without it, there is no faithfulness.

Of course, when religion won’t tolerate questions, objections, or differences of opinion and all it can do is threaten excommunication, violence, and hellfire, it has an unfortunate habit of producing some of the most hateful people to ever walk the earth.”

"To be conned, after all, is human. To confess to having been conned is an act of awareness. To believe ourselves impervious to cons is to be in denial, to be dangerous, to perhaps have an especially telegenic personality, and in our day, to be uniquely electable to public office."

"If we’re more opposed, for instance, to what we take to be bad language and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. We have yet to understand the nature of real perversion. We aren’t as deeply acquainted with our religion as we might think."

HT: Zondervan publishing (thanks for sending me a copy of this book to review)

The Orthodox Heretic

Peter Rollins' latest book, "The Orthodox Heretic And Other Impossible Tales", is a treat. Rollins has written 33 short parables along with commentaries on each story. In his usual fashion, his stories leave the listener a bit unsettled. That's what good parables do. These stories not only make you question the easy answers, they make you wonder if you're even asking the right questions.

I've been thinking a lot about parables lately. I had one of the most bizarre conversations of my life, as a friend tried to insist that a parable is a lie if it "didn't really happen". Of course, he missed the whole purpose of telling a parable. Few people would take that absurd approach by interpreting a parable literally, but it does highlight one of the problems with modernity. During the last couple of centuries, mankind has come to understand some amazing things about the universe. Modern knowledge has been a huge benefit to society, but it had a peculiar side effect. The more we "know" about our world, the less we lean on telling stories to translate meaning. We can become slaves to the quest for certainty as we preference facts and devalue stories. Good parables don't simply communicate facts about some historical person or event, they take us on a hypothetical journey and leave us unsatisfied with simplistic answers.

Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “Jesus, Interrupted”, may be his best. Ehrman has written several controversial books over the years, but this book does more than sport a controversial title. It dives deeper into the author’s own experience and provides a behind the scenes glimpse into the world of literary criticism. By sharing his own journey, he opened up the world of literary criticism to a wider audience, and he dispelled several of the myths surrounding the discipline. Like his earlier best seller, “Misquoting Jesus”, this latest book includes the healthy doses of biblical criticism that we’ve come to expect from Ehrman. However, this time he went beyond his usual examples of discrepancies between the thousands of early manuscripts. This book continues by investigating the impact of this historical critical method on the big picture. Keeping the talk about discrepancies and errors to one chapter, he had space to dive deeper into topics about early Christianity, the authorship of the New Testament books, the canonization process, and the impact of biblical criticism on theology. One question provides the underlying theme of the book, “why has this information been common knowledge in seminaries around the world for two centuries, yet, so many mainstream Christians today are completely unaware?”

“Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and textual analyses.
…
Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, no shared it with their parishioners.”

I enjoyed reading a bit more of Bart Ehrman’s personal story because I think we’ve had similar adventures in faith. I can relate to his early years in a fundamentalist church, his brief period of disenchantment, and his current religious status as something less than “certain”. We don’t exactly agree eye to eye, but mostly, I relate to his infatuation with the Bible. In this book, Ehrman shatters the myth that biblical criticism is an attempt to belittle the bible. His dedication to the Bible comes through. In fact, he concludes with a chapter that makes the case for religious faith entitled “Is Faith Possible?”

My favorite chapter is a discussion of the historical Jesus and a description of the nature of historical studies in general. In this chapter, titled “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”, Ehrman dismantles the short sighted logic of the famous and often quoted C.S. Lewis argument. Thanks to a more robust understanding of our ancient texts, we now have a fourth option that Lewis was not willing to include. It turns out this forth option, “Legend”, is the most probable answer.

I need to give a big thanks to TheOoze Viral Blogger network for hooking me up with a copy of this book to review.

The Debate Over God's Existence

A great post by Michal Dowd...

"This is not theological rocket science. Theists are right when they insist that God is real and faith (trust) is transformative. Atheists are right when they insist God is imaginary and supernatural claims are fiction. If we do not understand how both of these can be true, we don't understand the evolved nature of the human brain and the metaphorical nature of human language. Arguing whether it was God or evolution that created everything is like debating whether it was Gaia or plate tectonics that created Mount Everest. Such silly and largely unnecessary confusion will remain the norm until we distinguish and value both metaphorical and descriptive language. In the meantime, I'm grateful to Richard Dawkins and the other "new atheists" for bringing this debate front and center. Perhaps in the coming decades we can finally move beyond the mistaken notion that science gives us a meaningless universe and religion is primarily concerned with unnatural (supernatural) entities." - Michael Dowd

...read the entire article at The Evolutionary Times

What is Progressive Faith?

HT: James McGrath