¿What Are You?

I am legion, July 11 edition

2008-07-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

I am bi-literate/lingual after many, many years of hard work: Barack Obama this week is urging young people to learn another language. He suggests Spanish, which is a good idea considering the U.S.'s changing demographics. Chinese would also be good; so would Arabic, really. Man, just learn anything, Americans! Rudolph Giuliani, however, seemed to misunderstand Obama's target audience (youths who know English as a first language) completely and somehow accused the candidate of encouraging immigrants to not learn English.

OK, so 1: Huh? and B: I'd like to know how many languages English-only proponents speak.

Obama's suggestion is totally reasonable and practical: Learn your second or third or fourth or whatever language when you're young. Kids, they learn languages great. Adults, not so great. My mom started learning English in grade school and so when she started using it as an adult, she picked it up great. Me, a product of the American public school system (of which I'm actually a fan, I'm really more criticizing the era, not the system itself) had my two years of German in high school which amounted to nichts. At 33 I began minoring in Spanish and after four years of really hard, constant work I can now read novels and futbol articles online and understand a good portion of what I hear, and totally murder español when I try to speak it. But I got it. That's something. But learning a language as an adult is hard, man. You have to work at it constantly. Like every day and nearly every minute. And if you're not fortunate enough to have that time (because, you're totally wasting your time by, I dunno, working and mak

ing a living) then getting your second language will be nearly imposible. If we're serious about raising English literacy and fluency among immigrants, we need to find ways for adult to learn the language that can be incorporated into life.

I am all for restructuring the American family: A blogger at DailyKos talks about her dad, who recently got laid off from his auto industry job. She worries about what will happen to him now, since he was approaching retirement and has virtually few new-industry skills. She's worried about him and others in his position. Like most dads, she says, he worked three jobs to make sure she would never want for anything.

It's a very touching post, but I couldn't help but wonder what the blogger is doing for her dad, if she would be willing to work three jobs to make sure that he would never want for anything as well. It's an interesting phenom in the U.S. that our parents take care of us, but we're not expected to do the same back for them. I know that my traditional, Midwestern conservative EuroAmerican family members would have fits over the impropriety of the idea that

, if a time of need like this arose, that we pull together so that we kids helped take care of them; my Asian family would completely expect the family to join ranks and support them. The U.S. nuclear family is so individually structured, I don't know if that kind of extended support is possible. We'd need to rethink the way we do family, outside of the nuclear idea.

But this isn't just a non-Western idea, it's very American South, too. It's not unusual for families to live together and support one another in the South. Maybe it's not the American family model, it's just the American consumerist/hyperindividualist family model that we need to dismantle.

I am discovering hypermiling: Kinda sorta. I recently discovered that the mileage on my car went up in a big way if I drove 60 or 65 mph instead of 75 or 80 mph. No brainer, there. (Hey, I stay in the right lane. Freakin' pass me already.) Also, got more conscientious about parking, idling and route-planning. But here's the difference between me and a regular hypermiler: I drive a Toyota Echo; a lot of them drive an SUV. So when I boost my mileage, that means I'm squeezing about 500 miles out of one 10-gallon tank of gas, and they're getting .... ugh, I don't even want to think.

I am a fan of the barefoot shoes: I hate wearing shoes; if I had my way I'd live on a city on the beach where shoes were option. I hate the way shoes feel on my feet, I hate the way I have

to walk in shoes. So in summers I ditch socks and wear flipflops as much as possible. So I was

really interested in a recent New York Times magazine article about how shoes are bad for our feet. We're just not evolved to walk in shoes, the article says. People have trouble with walking in barefoot because over time we adapt to walking in shoes, so when we walk barefoot we walk around like we're wearing shoes. But now there are shoes being made to simulate barefoot walking, and I bought a pair yesterday, the Vibram FiveFingers shoe. And they roooooock. OK, so they're odd looking, but it really feels like

walking around barefoot. Take that, no shoes, no service. I'm gonna be wearing these shoes constantly.

I am a fan of what being PC really means

2008-07-10T07:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of years back, I took a class on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The students in the class were majority non-white and, nonthreatening Other that I seemed to be, the EuroAmerican students would invariably nervously confess to me about their fear of "accidentally saying the N-word" in class.

(I swear to Gawd I don't know how you "accidentally" say any racial slur. But anyway ... )

One woman, a very, very sweet white woman of the "can't we all just get along" variety, anxiously admitted to me that she was just trying so hard to be PC that she knew she was going to slip up and say the N-word. She was so nervous about it that she was a jittery, anxious mess the whole time.

Again, I just don't understand this. Outside of this class, she seemed to me to be a very good person who cares about other people. So why should she have to worry about 'being PC'? If we're trying to 'be PC' then that means we're more worried about ourselves and how we look, instead of hurting the people we're talking about, right? Wouldn't using the 'right' -- that is, nonhateful/hurtful -- words come naturally if we're concerned about the people and not about guarding the way we want to think?

You'd think. And yet ...

Someone recently told me that he overheard someone in his office loudly defending the use of the word "slant-eyes" to describe Asian people. After all, that's the way he always referred to him, and no one could make him say anything differently.

I wondered if that guy would have said that if I had been in that office. But then -- again, racial spy that I am -- he'd have to have figured out that I was actually one of them slant-eyes, and I'm not sure that he's that observant. But of course, Southern politeness probably would have prevented him from doing so (and that's another thing -- I was always taught that manners must come from within, that they teach you how to show respect for other people, not a façade we put on to make ourselves look better or save ourselves from awkward situations. And yet, maybe my mom and grandma was all old school about that). A good rule of PCness is: If you wouldn't say that if the person that word/phrase refers to is standing right next to you, then it's not PC. But then, that rule still just goes after the tongue and not the mind. And you know what ol'Yeshua of Nazareth said, it ain't what goes in, but what comes out. It ain't what's in the stomach, it's what's in the heart.

I just don't know how "principles" that are obviously hurtful can ever be held above flesh and blood people. If what we say -- and especially what we think -- hurts another person, why would we want to keep saying/thinking like that? What does it say about the way we really feel about people, how we regard and respect them? While I loved Barack Obama's race speech and that it attempted to get us to talk about race, I really feel like what it did was make most of us really aware of how painful the subject is and what treacherous territory it is to navigate (as demonstrated perfectly by John Steward and Larry Wilmore on The Daily Show!).

All 'PC' language comes with a human face. That's all I know.

I Heart Matt Taibbi

2008-07-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

I've been having Obama faith-fatigue lately, not only because he actually can talk about his faith but everyone seems so dang interested in it. Check it out, I'm sure he's the only candidate in the world who gets scrutiny for being a Muslim and the wrong kind of Christian all in the same news cycle.

So I was pleased to see a few articles -- finally! -- about McCain. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (who wrote one of my favorite pieces about him going undercover at a John Hagee weekend boot camp) has a piece in a recent Rolling Stone about John McCain and the people who love him. (Full-Metal McCain: Haunted by Vietnam, the one-time maverick has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger). Best part: when asked who his favorite author is, McCain names Joel Osteen.

Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook -- apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic, baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor" and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

I once watched Osteen, just for shits. I actually saw him reprimand a couple for praying that a dining room set would go on sale for them. God's more powerful than a sale, he said. Pray that God will get you the money to buy it retail.

Osteen's god obviously doesn't understand the thrill of getting a really good deal. It's sometimes enough to make me speak in tongues. Halelujah.

Ch-ch-ch-changes ...

2008-07-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've retitled the blog. After all the recent musing I've been doing about names, I'm trying out a new identity for both the blog and myself.

The new title, "What Are You?", is the question that multiracial/ethnic people and people who are classified as "Others" get asked -- and, quite honestly -- ask themselves. This question has variations, such as "Where are you from, no before that, where are you really from?" and, for me specifically, "What tribe are you?" and my sisters, "¿De donde es usted?"

Which is not to say it's bad to ask these questions. It's all about context. If it's one of the first questions out of your mouth when you meet someone, you need to ask yourself why you're asking that question. Why do you need to know? Trust me, if you hang out with that person long enough, you'll find out. It will come up. If you're friends and you pay attention, you'll find out. Finding out about the souls of people around you are gems that need to be unearthed with care, not strip-mined for speed and efficiency. It's about them, not you.

Now, if you're at, say, diversity training or something and one of the exercises are about deconstructing your heritage, then it might be OK to ask. Context. Good rule of middle-finger: Golden Rule. How'd you like it if you got this question? Wouldn't you wonder why it mattered?

This question, and questions like these, are attempts to put people in a box so we know how to react to them. It's why people round these parts ask, "What church do you go to?" Because we need to know if they go to our kind of church or one of the other churches.

Personally, I really think this is a question that we all could stand to ask ourselves, about almost anything. What are you? What are you really? And how do you know you are what you are? How could you back that up? What makes you sure?

For example, the "What Are You, religion edition": I want to say that I'm a christian, but I don't really believe in that whole Christ divinity thing. So am I a christian? But I like Jesus, or Yeshua, as my pastor keeps calling him, and I like his teachings. And I'm a big fan of Christmas and Easter, culturally speaking. But I really hate capitalizing third-person personal pronouns. So am I a christian? Well ... Yes. Because that's how I identify. Today.

But I gotta keep wrestling with it. It changes. And how elastic in my definition can I get before I ditch the identity completely? And is it my definition, or someone else's?

This is one reason why I'm in seminary.

The ID change is me being cheeky. We're finishing up Revelation in Bible class at church, and I'm reading Catherine Keller's God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys, and she was talking about the mother-maiden-crone imagery in Revelation, and called the whore of Babylon Babs. Now, my sister used to call me Babs, because it's a diminutive for my real name, and I haaaaaated it because it sounded like a nickname of an elderly rich woman who wore pearls and drank hot tea out of silver service sets. And my sister and her friends knew that and they tormented me with it (and still do, actually). About a year ago, however, I discovered that my 20-something friends at college were calling me Babs, affectionately, because it sounded cute and hip to them. And I wanted to get upset about it, but I couldn't because they meant to harm to me the way my sister did. So I embraced the name and the bad memories that came with it, too. And I started thinking that we overcome our evils by receiving them, welcoming them, not pushing them away and grinding them into the ground.

And for all the rage against empire that John of Patmos was screaming out, he didn't check his own imperial oppression against the women in his society. And today, when the consumerism associated with the whore -- and the rigid sex roles placed on men and women in our society's and John's -- is one way of oppressing us all, I think it's time to pull a Dante and go into Babylon so we can overturn all empire.

So Babalon I am for the moment. And it goes with my profile photo, which is graffiti from México that reads "If we don't think differently, nothing will change." That's apocalypto in a nutshell.

(Who Discovered) America?

2008-07-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

I bought the VotoLatino Benefit Album off iTunes this week, a diverse collection (15 songs for $3.99!)of incredible music by Latin@ artists who sing about patriotism; that is, loving your country despite its flaws and knowing that you belong there even when people tell you that you don't.

Celebrating the Fourth with open eyes. Estas letras brought to ustedes by the funky goodness that is Ozomatli.

I heard her story from across the sea,
There was never one as fair, lovely as she.
With sun soaked skin and eyes of green,
With all kindness and grace of a queen.
I set sail into a cold, dark sky.
I had to see this beauty with my own eyes.
I crossed the ocean in a tiny ship
With her image in my mind and her name on my lips. I set.

Ah, America.

I found her standing upon the shore.
She was everything I dreamed of and so much more.
I felt a love that I’ve never known
And I knew I had to make her my own.
She was light of the night. She was dark as the night.
I fell under her spell, couldn’t tell wrong from right. I set.

Ah, America.
She breathed new life inside of me.
A whole new world she gave to me.
Surrendered all she had to me,
Even silver and gold.
All she asked was my soul.

How could I’ve know I’d been hypnotized.
There was more to my queen than first met the eye.
She had a chain of lovers who died her slaves
With a notion of blood for every drop that she gave.
I never thought she could break my heart
but all her contradictions are tearing me apart.
The secret she hides.
The beauty she flaunts
She’ll stop at nothing just to get what she wants.

My Middle Name is Hussein, Too

2008-07-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

On Facebook there will be an event called "My Middle Name is Hussein, Too," on Aug. 4, Barack Obama's birthday. You can read about it at the HuffPo here, but essentially, some young voters got together to protest the stupid, kyriarchcal people who use the senator's middle name like a curse word, like a secret marker of Unacceptable Otherness that upholds all the reasons you should not vote for him.

So if you're a member of Facebook and you want to show your solidarity, change your middle name to Hussein on Aug. 4.

It's interesting how names define us -- or don't -- as if your name is supposed to encompass your entire being in a few (or many) syllables, a miniature resume that allows people to sum you up upon meeting you so they know which box to put you in. Names carry family ("Oh, you're Bob's boy"), heritage ("What kind of name is that?"), religion (see previous question), gender ("Isn't that a girl's name?") and sometimes even sexual orientation ("All gay men have track lightin'. And all gay men are named Mark, Rick or Steve.").

Names -- or rather, the expectations people place on those names -- are often an albatross. I can't count how many times I've been told, "You don't look the way I imagined you on the phone." Or stumbling through yet another explanation that yes, this is my real name, no I didn't change it, I'm not trying to duck my heritage, my mom gave me the name she gave me and she gets rather peeved when I bug her for a do-over. And no, I'm not adopted.

Sometimes I think life would be easier if Mom had given me a name that matched my phenotype, but then, isn't that just the ridiculousness that we attach to the social conventions of naming? The way we react to people's names tell us more about ourselves than the names tell us about the people we meet. Personally, I thought it was more interesting that the first name of Sen. Obama's mother is Stanley; hmm, I thought, that's interesting, why'd she get her father's name? (automatically assigning her name as "male," and so what does that say about the way I order the world?) Obama's middle name being Hussein? Meh. I'm more worried about remembering that his first name contains a C and keeping my fingers away from the S key when I write his last name, lest I slip from overuse (much like I put a T at the end of Chris most of the time without meaning to, because I write it so often these days). Because when am I ever going to spell it out? I'm actually putting more effort into figuring out which name is longer in old-style headline width counting, McCain or Obama, because a half-point makes all the difference in getting a headline to fit on one line or not.

So I'm thinking about names today. I'm still struggling with finding a name that I feel represents this blog, still struggling with my decision to take my husband's name when we got married years and years ago (really wishing I hadn't), still considering if I want to change my name and, if I did, what would I change it to? What story would my new name tell about me? And about the people my name and I will encounter?

Well, in any case, if you meet me on Aug. 4., my middle name will be Hussein, too.

Get this woman a pastor, stat

2008-06-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

I stayed up too late last night watching a recent rebroadcast of 30 Days on the FX channel. I'm a huuuuuuge fan of this show. For those who've never seen it: It follows the premise of "Walking a Mile in Someone Else's Skin" for 30 days, with the idea of, once you get to know someone intimately, you can no longer judge or hate them. So they took a Minuteman and had him live with an undocumented family, an anti-gay evangelical and had him live in the Castro District, a hunter with PETA activists, a born-again Christian with Muslims, etc. And if you think it's left-centered, that it's out to show that progressives have open minds and conservatives just need a crowbar, think again: One episode featured an atheist from Kansas living with an evangelical family in the Dallas area; the evangelical dad was completely defensive at first but really tried hard to make an effort to understand his houseguest and by the end of the 30 days had come to rearrange his thinking a bit; the atheist was a complete jerk who didn't budge a iota.

So last night, the premise was "Put staunchly anti-same-sex-parenting person in a home with a same-sex family." And it was a terrible experience for everyone around. Kati, the woman undergoing the experience, came in feeling defensive, and so she felt attacked every time the conversation came up and dug in her heels around her beliefs so hard that she left dents in the hardwood floors. She cried after nearly every engagement and progressively looked as if she was falling to pieces as the days went by, as she struggled to stand up for her beliefs.

I was upset by Kati from the very beginning, because she started off with the statement, "I believe that children should be raised by a mother and father." Basically, the nuclear family is the only proper family. Well, I was raised in a non-nuclear family, without a dad, and I can tell you that it wasn't Not Having a Dad that was the problem, it was world being snotty (and it still is being snotty, mind you) about Me Not Having a Dad that was the problem.

Families do not fit in a single, narrowly defined box. What about extended families that help in raising kids? What about friends who live together and share responsibilities? Neighbors who help each other? Where are the boundaries of family? Does the raising of a child leave off at the parent(s)? Doesn't the efforts and work and love put in by grandparents, step-parents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, godparents, family friends count? Expand your mind to include all the possibilities, and you can't help but see that same-sex family is family, too.

But back to 30 Days. Kati held forth with her beliefs, blatantly telling the Patricks (the same-sex family hosting her) that she thought that their family was wrong, telling a child with lesbian moms that she was damaged, telling same-sex parents that what they were doing was against God and if they were hurting because the law didn't give them protective rights over their child, so sorry, it was their own fault for going against God and Law in the first place. And after nearly every encounter she was shown weeping at the unfairness of it, that why should she be punished for holding onto her beliefs?

I kept thinking, "Someone get this woman a pastor. Get her a pastor, NOW." This is interesting because a year ago I wouldn't have thought this, but ain't it funny how life is? There was no way Kati was going to be open to different ways of thinking as long as she felt like everyone was against her. As Kati was very religious (a devout Mormon), a supportive pastor would have helped guide her through her angst and used language Kati spoke to reassure her that turning over new and different ideas in her mind would not mean that God was going to smite her at any moment. Shown her biblical examples of the different kinds of families (and I tell ya, the Bible is NOT family-friendly). Read Ruth and see if that family arrangement is nuclear; it's Naomi who's left holding the kid by the end. Same-sex parenting, indeed.

This is not to say a pastor would have helped Kati change her mind on the issue. That's not really what a pastor is for. But maybe she could have helped Kati clue into the fact that maybe one reason she was crying after these encounters because she was seeing the human collateral of her beliefs and her expression of them. And helped Kati pray on that.

So I'm rather peeved at 30 Days for not giving her a session or four with a pastor to help her get through her crisis.

A Worst Worst Hard Time

2008-06-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

Back in December, when Husband and I were taking an evening of refuge at the Barnes & Noble from our frigid house, courtesy of the ice storm that knocked down power lines and left us in the dark for three days, I picked up Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Time, a tale of the Dust Bowl and those who lived it. Not the Okies who fled to California, so immortalized by Steinbeck that we're still known by this idea, but the Oklahomans (And southeastern Coloradans and Texas Panhandlers) who remained in the black, choking dust, drought and despair.

Born and raised an Oklahoman, I've always held that era with some morbid fascination, even though my kin lived in northeastern Oklahoma and, like most of the country, had some of the dust, but not its brunt. Egan's book is a real reader, a page turner (and it would be, he's a journalist, and we write the best stuff!). But it's also a rather frightening warning for us in this era of climate change. Because for all those who think that humans can't change the climate, think on this: We did it before. That's what the D

ust was, our stupid folly, incited by greed and ignorance, and a sheer naivete on what difference we really make on this planet.

And take a look. The first picture is from the '30s. The second picture is recent

The

ground is moving again. While Iowa and Missouri drowns, the Panhandles burn and wither, and the ground is movin

g again. Not all of it, thanks to soil conservation practices taught to the sodbuster farmers (t

hat is, farmers by economic opportunity, not by heritage) by the government.

I recommend that you read Egan's book. And pray.

Reading in tongues: Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18

2008-06-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

(A few of my favorite blogs are doing poetry Fridays. I thought that instead of poetry, I would try to do a translation of one of my lectionary readings each Friday.)

Your mercy, YHWH,
I will sing forever,
From generation to generation I will
shout out
your truth
with my mouth.
Because you said,
Mercy will be built
forever;
From the heavens I will establish
your truth;
I made a covenant with my chosen,
I swore to my servant
David.
So forever I will
establish
your seed
and I will build up
from generation to generation
your throne.

διάψαλμα (selah)

Blessed
are the people who have heard
the joyful sound;
YHWH
by the light of your face
they walked,
and in your name
they will be happy
all day,
And by your justness
they will be raised up
and praised;
Because the boasting of their strength
is you,
and in your pleasure,
our horn will be raised up
and praised;
Because our help is
of the Lord,
and
of holy Israel,
our king.

Personal pronouns to believe in

2008-06-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last summer I took a class called Religion & Politics. Great class, wherein we primarily learned about neoplatonic and enlightenment worldview structures and how they are involved in political framing, and we analyzed political speeches for use of biblical and civil religion references and metaphors. I know I say this about almost every class I take, but this was one of those classes that you can really use for the rest of your life. Maybe all learning is that way.

So armed with the knowledge from this class, I entered the endless 2007-08 political season with an eye and ear trained for certain key words. And I noticed something right off the bat about Barack Obama's slogans. Not just that he's smart enough to take a page fro

the

GOP's campaign playbook strategy (read Drew Westen's The Political Brain) and plaster his message across anywhere that he might be speaking, but that he crafted it in such a way to draw us in. Note that it's "Change That We Can Believe In" not "Change That You Can Believe In." "Yes We Can," not "Yes You Can" or "Yes I Can." If Hillary Clinton had been thinking, maybe she could have said "Our Solutions for America" instead of just "Solutions for America" with the implied "My" as the prefix.

What Obama is doing, see, is (technical language alert!) presenting a message of participatory eschatology. He is inviting us all to take part in the re-making of the new Eden, the new (beloved) community, to have a hand in the re-creation of American society, to save it from the powers of the universe that have sullied it. This is within the framework of the American civil religion that rose up most mightily with Kennedy (in Camelot, when the nation was "purer"), not of any particular Christian stripe (but still, mind you, very Christian. The Founders, though Deists, were still culturally Christian), and its telos is the renewal of the promise of America. I actually don't think this is a particularly Christian technique, renewal is a call in every religion. But I can see it through my christian lens, and compare it with Paul's work, which he was knocking around the Roman Empire. Christ, he said, died and we die with him, so that we are in- Christ, a renewed and now unbroken body of Christ. We take part, we invest, we feel like part of the family.

Take a gander at Bill Clinton's 1992 convention nomination speech and hunt for those important Wes and Uses. He does use "I" quite a bit ("George Bush doesn't care about you, but I will,") but one of his refrains is "Join us." Be part of an us. Take part. Participate in the new America.

Then take a look at John Kerry's 2004 convention nomination speech. Lots of Is and implied messiahship -- "Help is on the way." John Kerry will save us.

Vs. Bill Clinton's we'll save ourselves together.

So when I hear Barack Obama use the We pronoun, I get excited. I understand why people are backing him, why he's getting support in droves. Because he's asked us for it. He's asked us to help him so we can help ourselves instead of asking us to let him help us. We're Americans, for phuque's sake, and above all, we help ourselves and others who need it. We don't cotton to people who try to do for us.

Bob Burnett over at the HuffPo blogged along these lines today, comparing Obama to Lincoln and McCain to Rambo. McCain, he points out, is a fan of the I.

I'll stand with the We.

We Can Believe in Us.

Reading in tongues -- Genesis 22:1-14

2008-06-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

And it came after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, "Abraham, Abraham." And Abraham said, "See me." And God said, "Take your beloved son, the whom you love, Isaac, and go into the high land, and offer him there as a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains that I will tell you. And after Abraham rose in the morning, he saddled his donkey. And he took with him two servants and Isaac his son, and after he cut wood for the burnt-offering, he got up and went and on the third day came to the place which God had told him about. And Abraham raised his eyes and saw the distant land. And Abraham said to his servants, "Sit here with the donkey. The child and I will go ahead together, and after we worship we will return to you all." And Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And with his hands he took the fire and the dagger the two of them went together. And Isaac said to Abraham his father, "Father." And Abraham answered, "What is it, child?" And Isaac said, "Look, here is the fire and the wood, where is the sheep for the burnt offering?" And Abraham said, "God personally will see to the sheep for the burnt offering, child." After going on together, they came to the place, which God had told Abraham. And there Abraham built the altar and laid upon it the wood. And after he bound the feet of Isaac his son, he laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the dagger to murder his son. And the Angel of YHWH cried out to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham." And Abraham said, "See me." And the angel said, "Do not lay a hand on the child, and do not do a thing to him. For now I know that you fear your God and for me would not withhold your beloved son from me." And Abraham raised his eyes and saw, and look -- a ram caught by his horns in the plant of Sabec. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered him as a burnt offering instead of Isaac his son.
And Abraham called the name of the place there "YHWH Saw" in order that they might say today in the mountain YHWH was seen.

I am attempting to keep up with my Greek by reading the lectionary passages for the week. So last night I read the Isaac story out of my Septuagint. This is kind of tough, as I don't have all the words in the Septuagint in my lexicons, but I make do. So yes, that's my translation of the passage, in all it's roughness. I rather prefer the rough translation than the pretty, cleaned-up, modern version, it reminds me that this is not a story from my world. And it's rather interesting reading a familiar story in another language, it makes you pay attention to pacing and the weight of the words and puts the story in another way.

I always though that God was a bully and a thug in this story. Go sacrifice your beloved son to prove how much you love me. Ugh. But after translating this, I started to think again. I think the villain here was more Abraham than God. God was challenging Abraham to not sacrifice Isaac, to go against the practices of the day, waiting for Abraham to love his child more than he loved his convention. But because Abraham doesn't, God (rather, YHWH, because the word changes there in that last part, sign of redaction) intervenes. Yes, you love me. Don't hurt that boy. I know you would do it, but you don't have to. So just stop. Note that God was seen in the moment where violence was avoided through love.

In class, the professor pointed out that after this story, we never see Sarah again, leading some scholars to think that she died of a broken heart because she thought her husband killed her only son. So even intention can have terrible results.

Why Barack Obama is AWESOME

2008-06-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

So Barack Obama's campaign has started a Web site that people can go to to "fight the smears": You know, those irritating e-mails you get about Barack Obama not being eligible to be president because he's not a natural-born citizen. Yeah, I know. I really don't know why he needed to start a Web site, all he had to do was send everyone to Snopes.com, and people who believe that shit and pass it on aren't going to believe his Web site anyway. That, and you deal with rumors the same way you deal with trolls: Ignore them and they go away.

He's really got enough to deal with without having to deal with Internet rumor shit, like repairing his cred with America's Muslims (tell your volunteers to stop moving hijabis out of your photo ops! but thanks for the apology ...), because being a Muslim ain't a "smear" you know. The answer shouldn't be, "Barack Obama is not a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim and is a committed Christian," but rather "Barack Obama isn't a Muslim, but thanks for thinking so, he takes that as a high compliment. Because isn't it great if ANYONE of ANY religious faith, or none at all, can be president? Isn't that what makes this country so freakin' great? That's what FREEDOM is all about, folks! And the day we start denying people their full rights because of their religious affiliation is the day that this country stops being free."

Anyway, I found this great post on Slate on the rumors Obama shouldn't correct. Here's the ones that cracked me right up. Enjoy.

Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times. Even in the shower.

Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.

Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It's upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups.

Barack Obama is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. His favorite book is the BIBLE, which he has memorized. His name means HE WHO LOVES JESUS in the ancient language of Aramaic. He is PROUD that Jesus was an American.
Barack Obama goes to church every morning. He goes to church every afternoon. He goes to church every evening. He is IN CHURCH RIGHT NOW.

Barack Obama's skin is the color of AMERICAN SOIL.

Barack Obama says that Americans cling to GUNS and RELIGION because they are AWESOME.

I bet everyone knew this already ...

2008-06-21T14:26:00.001-07:00

I had this little realization yesterday that I've been studying Bible in such a way in order to prove that it doesn't suck and is going to piss me off in every way. That is, I've had it in the back of my brain that I've been lied to about it all along, that it's not a perfect tool for rationalizing hateful and divisive behavior, and if we could just learn how to read it properly, we'd be cool.

It's dawning upon me that learning how to read the Bible is just confirming that it really does support the divisive shit better than the justice shit, and that was kind of Jesus' point (well, Jesus by way of the the Jesi that were the creations of the gospel writers) all along. There's this shit that was written down, and then there's people. Err on the side of people. Err on the side of love. Feed my stupid sheep.

Maybe it's that we're Christians in spite of the Bible, not because of.

And maybe it really is time to switch from hermeneutics to theology.

Being unfunny is more offensive than being offensive

2008-06-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen Mike Meyers' The Love Guru, and I really didn't have any plans to. The posters and ads didn't thrill me, not only because it looked like one of those "Last Samurai"-type movies where you drop a Neocolonial guy into a different culture and he proves that he can do their culture better than they can -- and proves that we only care about other places when we can watch a Neocolonial interacting with it -- but it looked like he was out to offend everyone he possibly. Mostly Vern Troyer (whom I actually came to love after his stint on The Surreal Life), but also various facets of Hinduism -- rather, a stereotype of Hinduism.

Back when Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan came out, I avoided it because I thought it would be so offensive I wouldn't be able to sit through it. Lacking HBO, I hadn't seen Da Ali G Show but I 'd seen Borat from his visit to

the Oklahoma City Traffic Commission where he put out a very long rambling speech in which he apologized that our food made him create a terrible smell and said he wanted to make romance with one of the women in the room -- not by force, of course (and also made me very proud of my city officials for being so beyond-the-call-of-duty polite to him). When I heard he was an "equal-opportunity offender," I really didn't want to see it. "Equal-opportunity offenders" use humor like a blunt tool instead of a scalpel, whacking indiscriminately at anyone and everyone when they could be excising injustice and oppressive elements of society through satire.

I was wrong, Borat was very satirical and very good, and there was a moment where I almost cried because the offensive, awful, anti-Semitic character of Borat was the only one who treated a prostitute with respect. But he was also very very funny. Freakin' funny, actually. And funny makes up for offensiveness most of the time. I know that funny is very subjective, but it seems to me that when you're really funny, you make us laugh at ourselves, not other people, and you make us have sympathy with the clown who's pointing out our foibles, who also has sympathy with us.

I don't know if Mike Meyers does that, but it doesn't seem like it. There's been a lot of uproar over The Love Guru (check out The Washington Post's On Faith blog's blogs on The Love Guru), but it seems like the controversy can't save it. The reviews are out, and it's just not funny. I'm not actually surprised, I think that Mike Meyers hit his high point with So I Married an Axe Murderer and the first Wayne's World movie. So I won't even get to see if it was offensive or stereotypical. It just doesn't seem worth the $5 to go decide.

If you want funny, go watch the Borat link above. That's pretty funny.

Connubial fusion

2008-06-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

I am reading Sex and the Single Savior by Dale B. Martin, a really fascinating look at how our gender and sexuality -- and our hangups with both -- play a role in biblical interpretation. I just finished his chapter last night on what Paul says about marriage and it really put me in the mood for a ham sandwich.

Back at the turn of the century when Husband and I got married, we, like most young, christian-raised folks, we looked around for the right "Bible verses" to include in our ceremony. Of course 1 Corinthians 13 got in there (and then got knocked right out by the Unitarian preacher we'd hired to do the ceremony, which eventually led to us un-hiring him, but that's a story for another day). Pity we hadn't really read the whole epistle, specifically 1 Cor 7:9, the bit about how it's "better to marry than to burn." Being biblically illiterate at the time, I think I knew that was in there, but I don't know if I really knew what it meant; I think I probably drew on my Catholic upbringing and thought that if you had sex without being married it was off to Hell for you. And since I specifically left the Catholic Church for that reason -- to have sex without sinning (in my adolescent mind, and still to some degree in my adult one, sin is relational in that if your group thinks something you're doing is wrong but you're sure it's right, get a new group).

Turns out, that's only partially what Paul's talking about. The burning part has nothing to do with the fires of Hell and everything to do with the burning feeling of passion, that sensation of desire/lust that just takes you over and distracts you to no end. (Hah, like being married takes care of that! I love that feeling!) But for Paul, marriage was, essentially, a prophylactic for lust. ¿Qué romantico, no? Paul saw desire as something that would pollute the ekklesia, the community of Jesus followers, just like tainted meat-- idolatry-tainted, that is, and to only weak people, but still. Marriage and avoiding meat are for the weak. But be nice to them. (Why can't people take that away from Paul? He essentially keeps saying that, please be nice to each other.)

Thankfully, what we believe, follow and participate in now really doesn't have much to do with the "fundamentals." But it got me wondering about christian marriage and what the Bible "says" about it. Keep in mind that I don't think the Bible "says" anything; if it speaks, it's only through us. Reading is interpretive. But here's the words on two types of marriage that the Bible has been used historically to forbid or prohibit: inter-racial and same-sex. Thanks to ReligiousTolerance.org for doing the heavy lifting for me.

Inter-racial: Verses usually used to prop up anti-miscegenation laws come from Genesis 28:1 (Isaac tells Jacob not to take a wife from Canaan); Leviticus 19:19 (don't let your cattle breed with other different types of cattle); Deuteronomy 7:2-3 (don't marry the Canaanites); Deut 22:9 (don't mix your seeds together in the same field); Deut 23:2 (don't let the bastards into the congregation); Jeremiah 13:23 (Leopards don't change their spots) and Acts 17:24-26 (God put different people on different parts of the world and determined when and where they would live).

(I think this list leaves out Ezra 10 where the Israelites who stayed in Israel during the Exile are forced to give up their foreign wives and their kids, and Nehemiah 13:23+, which recounts the same thing).

Same-sex marriage: Nothing! Not one thing in the Bible specifically forbids same-sex marriage. The Bible does mention polygamous marriage, Levirite marriage, forcing women to marry their rapists, slaves, but it doesn't say anything about same-sex marriage. It talks about homosexuality (kind of, at some points) at Genesis 1:27 & 28 (Be fruitful and multiply); Gen 2:23-24 (Marriage unites men and women as one flesh); Gen 19 (Sodom and Gemorra); Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (lying down with men is "an abomination"); Deuteronomy 23:17 (no sodomites in the house of Israel); Romans 1:26-27 (unnatural passions; and Sex and the Single Savior gives this a good going over, too! unnatural passions? more like, if you really follow the Greek, excessive lust, as in you're so horny you'll do anything); 1 Corinthinans 6 (effeminate men and "abusers of mankind," along with a long list of other bad people, won't go to Heaven; SatSS talks about this one, too. C'mon, do we really shun effeminate men in our churches?); 1 Timothy 1 ("abusers of mankind" are still bad people); and Jude 1:7 (sodomites like "strange flesh").

The point of this exercise is, well, rather ridiculous, except to point at the ways we not only interpret but also how we grow. We don't point to the Bible to justify keeping people of different races apart in marriage. Eventually, we won't point to the Bible to justify keeping people of the same gender apart in marriage. I think Paul really was wrong about marriage being a prophylactic against desire; marriage, when you do it right, makes that desire for that other person burn even stronger. Someday, we'll all burn together. What a flame that'll be.

Super Yes we can! ... with attitude!

2008-06-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

Even better! Gawd bless the Internets.

I (shhhhhh!) volunteered for politician today. Technically, I'm not supposed to, as in theory it causes an objectivity/impartiality issue. But as I'm about six weeks (again, shhhhhh! plans to be detailed when the time approaches) away from this not being an issue anymore, and since this business has changed so much, I'm thinking it's better to wear my subjectivity out there while at the same time I'm doing my best to make sure each side gets a fair shake.

Here's the dealy-o: I began working as a professional journalist in 1994, year of the Republican Revolution that, as far as I can see it, was the path toward all that damn near has ruined everything. I saw Inhofe introduce Charlton Heston at a fundraiser as his "Good friend Carlton," I did my very first professional article about how Coburn thinks condoms have no effect on preventing AIDS and followed him around the 2nd District as he rode into office on that big GOP wave.

I have spent every election night since 1994 in a newsroom, awaiting results with one ear on NPR through the little transistor in my ear and the other eye on the AP wire. In 200o and 2004, I left the office after 2 a.m. not knowing who the next president would be and dreading the next day (or in the case of 2000, the next weeks) because I could see the way the wind was blowing. I cried my eyes out the day after the 2004 election day while watching The West Wing because then-candidate Jed Bartlett apologized to a dairy farmer for keeping subsidies low because "I just couldn't stand the idea of poor kids not getting milk." Break my heart, why don't you, why can't we have that kind of world?

I walked into this candidate's office on a whim, ready to help out, ready to get involved, knowing full well that there's a good chance that I will get my heart broken on every level possible come this November. It's easier to sit in my living room, just observing and never getting connected so that you never get disappointed. And yet, there I went, doing this humble little task as well as I could because it was work that needed doing and there was the small chance that yes we can believe in change.

Change is worth the risk. Living is worth the risk. Life for everyone is worth any risk.

I would not have done this three years ago, before seminary and the UCC church and the various religiously linked groups that I've been hanging with and being changed by. I can honestly say I probably will never get the personal Jesus thing, but I think I'm really getting an idea on the christian thing.

Super Yes we can!

2008-06-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

My new favorite picture! Hat tip to Mixed Race America

Rescue the frog. Or, have some frog legs

2008-06-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

I blame Al Gore. Yeah, Al Gore gets a lot of blame for a lot of things (thanks for the Internets, buddy. As if I needed more things to suck my life away, I was doing fine in 1994 with my time wasting. Now look at me, 14 years later and I can't go five minutes without getting online!). Anyway, in the movie about his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, there is this little cartoon clip about the frog in the water. You know the thing: you put the frog in a pan of cold water, the frog floats around in the water, happy as a ... I guess, a frog in water ... and then you put the pan on the stove and start to heat it up. The water gets warmer and warmer and the frog gets a nice warm, then hot, bath, until finally it just cooks to death without realizing it.

In the movie, a hand reaches in and pulls the frog out of the water, and Gore son

orously yet cheerfully informs us, "It's important to rescue the frog."

He said that in earlier versions of the slideshow, he let the frog die, but people got upset. Al Gore, saviour of cartoon frogs. I bet they didn't mention that in his Nobel Prize.

But anyway, yes, it's important to rescue the frog, literal and metaphorical. That was the first time I'd ever heard the frog-in-the-water story. Now I heard it everywhere. Apparently this story has been around for more than a century, rooted (according to Wikipedia) in psychological experiments in the nineteenth century. It means, either, that bad things will happen because you're not paying attention, or, conversely, good things will happen because you were slow and steady in your approach.

And, according to Internet rumour-checker Snopes.com, it's completely wrong. Gawd love the frog, they're smarter than the people telling the story, they will try to get out of the pan when the water gets too hot.

So I'm browsing the Internets this morning when I came across this story at the L.A. Times about people in Virginia freaking out over all the happiness in California with the same-sex weddings. Seeing George Takei get married to his partner of 21 years just might make some Trekkers in Richmond catch the gay, apparently. The frog might catch it, too, come to think of it ...

Moore and Lux had never heard of West Hollywood. From their startled stares, it appeared they would have preferred never to have heard of it. Only Takei was a familiar face -- but a notion that Mr. Sulu was now something of a gay activist just made matters worse.

"You watch this celebration and I honestly worry about indoctrination," Lux said.

"It's like the frog-in-the-water syndrome," Moore added in agreement. "You know, the frog doesn't realize the water around it is heating up until it's boiled. I worry that Americans will get used to these images and they'll throw up their hands and say, 'Who cares?'"

Why is it that we never worry about lobsters and crab? We throw those in boiling water and no one seems to be upset about them boiling to death. I bet you could even boil them slowly like the frog and no one would care. Sometimes, the frog's supposed to boil. Aren't frog legs supposed to be tasty? I can't eat them thanks to The Muppet Movie, but still. Herb and Diana up there just haven't realized that frog legs are now on the menu, and they don't have to order them if they don't want to, but someone else might like some.

What I'm reading: Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation by Dale B. Martin. It upholds reader-response biblical interpretation over sociohistorical criticism and pinpoints instances of homophobia in biblical interpretation, especially in liberal/progressive interpretations.

If I were in California today ...

2008-06-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

... I'd be crashing weddings, all day. I would have taken the day off and wedding-hopped, from church to church, registry office to registry office. Cake? Why thank you, I'd love some, and some champagne or alcoholic beverage of your choice that you happen to be serving.

Of course, I would have had to planned ahead. First, I would have either had to take the day off or call in sick. It's worth it. I'd have had to buy a wedding-guest outfit that would be fabulous enough to be seen at all the weddings that are humanely possible to crash, yet not prone to wrinkling. Shoes, also, of the "looks to die for yet are gellin' in comfort" variety that can stand up to a lot of walking and cab and bus/trolly rides to get from one event of connubial bliss to another. And I'd have to not only buy and festively wrap a sufficient number of toasters to take as wedding gifts, but also take a large amount of money-stuffed envelopes, in case I ran out of toasters.

I would hug, kiss, congratulate and shower love upon people who finally get to do what I did eight years ago, that is, get married to the person they love, with all the joys and frustrations that entails.

Hopefully, if I were in California, I'd know enough same-sex couples who would be taking the plunge and they'd invite me and my new fabulous, wedding-guest outfit. All my GLBT friends and family aren't in that stage yet. But someday ...

I found this video while I was wandering about the Internets this morning, Ron Zimmerman's "Defenders of Marriage." It's hilarious. Go watch.

Happy Loving Day

2008-06-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

Today is Loving Day! No, not the day where we all get to be all smoochy with each other ... wait, that's exactly what it is, that we all get to be smoochy with each other! Loving Day is the commemoration of the June 12, 1967, Supreme Court ruling that struck down the U.S. anti-miscegenation laws that prevented whites and other races from marrying.

The day is named after Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple at the center of the case who saw that love was more than skin deep. I could give the entire history of the case here

, but the Loving Day site has done a great job of laying out the history, so you can read it there. But this is one of my favorite parts of the case: According to a New York Times story, when Mr. Loving's lawyer was explaining to them all the legal strategies involve with the case, Mr. Loving said: "Mr. Cohen, tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia."

Mrs. Loving died in May, and throughout her life she remained a private person who rarely gave interviews about her courageous act. Throughout her life, she didn't think what she did was extraordinary. Rather, she said, "It wasn't my doing. It was God's work." However, last year on the 40th anniversary of Loving Day, she issued this statement, which moves me to tears every time I read it:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.

California begins marrying lesbians and gays on Tuesday. How cool it is that both of these days of loving are marked in the same week. Hopefully this is the event that finally normalizes love for everyone.

Now here's some disclosure: As you all well know, I'm biracial. But even though the state where I was born and still live had the anti-miscegenation laws on the books until they were struck down by the Loving case, that law specifically addressed black/white marriages, so I'm not sure that anyone would have had a fit by my parents' marriage. Not only that, but the U.S. legalized marriages between U.S. military and Japanese nationals in 1952, so again, I'm not actually affected.

But you know, none of us have our civil rights unless we all have our civil rights. We can't love freely until we all love freely.

Loving for everyone. Loving for all.

Hope changes everything

2008-06-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hope Changes Everything.

If you haven't checked out the Yes We Can site at DipDive lately, head on over and watch the other awesome videos people have been creating and posting based on the Will.i.am song. I especially liked the John McCain No We Can't vid. Sí podemos!

I heart Gov. David Patterson

2008-06-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

First off, I thought it was awesome to see a man with the same disability as my mom, rise to a position of power with such grace. Being blind, even being legally blind, is tough, and this world does not make it any easier on you.

Then, after getting the governor spot in a sex scandal, he normalized human sexuality by talking openly about various incidents in his sex life that might be considered fodder for gossips. Was savvy enough, essentially, to keep the media out of his private life by showing them he had control of it.

And now, New York Gov. David Patterson is working for gay rights in New York state.

“In many respects, people in our society, we only recognize our own struggles,” Mr. Paterson said. “I’ve wanted to be someone in the African-American community who recognizes the new civil rights struggle that is being undertaken by gay and lesbian and transgendered people.”

New York, in case y'all didn't know, is going to start recognizing all marriages performed in other states. Like California and Massachusetts.

Yay.

So, outside of this governor-love, I'm on summer break (just got grades yesterday, and thankfully passed all classes with the grades I needed. Which I was worried about, because I'm not so hot in the preaching classes, you know), which really doesn't mean much for me. I have no classes, but I've got quite the to-do list and a reading list that would scare just about anyone. I'm doing independent research this fall on literary and critical theory and theology, which entails doing a lot of prep reading this summer. Right now, I'm reading selected writings by Michel Foucault, theologies by David Tracy (The Analogical Imagination and Blessed Rage for Order), Laurel Schneider (Beyond Monotheism) and Catherine Keller (God and Power), and postcolonial heremeneutics.

Also, I ended my study of biblical Greek for the time being, so I've got to try and keep up with it on my own lest I forget it. So I'm slowly, painfully reading my way through the Second Testament in Greek. Yesterday I read the whole paragraph in Matthew about the magi showing up to Herrod without having to look at the dictionary more than twice, so that's something, maybe I did learn something. Aaand, I also need to keep up my Spanish literacy (I need reading ability in two modern languages for doctoral studies), so I'm reading my way through various Spanish novels I've bought over the years and never read. Right now I'm reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

So I'm pretty busy in a parked-on-the-couch sort of way.

Ain't Nothing Wrong with Oklahoma ...

2008-05-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

... that ain't wrong with the rest of the U.S.

Over on AlterNet, a progressive opinion site I found back in 2004 as I was working through the depression caused by the election results, there's a column titled "Xenophobia and Anti-Gay Legislation Galore: What's the Matter with Oklahoma?" (yup, thanks, Thomas Frank, for re-introducing that phrase for us to overuse). The article, written by someone who lives here, gives a fair, though sensational, account of what's been going on legislatively in our state over the past few years, with HB 1804, the latest attempts to get English as the official language (have fun with those lawsuits, if that ever passed!) and Sally Kern's "I got the Bible behind me" rants against GLBTs. And he concludes the article with a fair question that someone who loves his home would ask:

Still, the question remains: Why have these sorts of comments and such legislation gained traction in Oklahoma and other parts of the United States?

I say this is a fair question, because if you live here, you know, we're for the most part good folk. I can't remember where I read this, but someone once said that despite the racism, sexism and gay-bashing in the South, there's no place better if you're in immediate danger, like if a tornado took out your house or even if your car breaks down on the side of the road. We're helpful, we're kind to our neighbors in times of need. So yes, it's a fair question because in order to help our more status-quo-loving sisters and brothers see the terrible consequences that racism, sexism and heterosexism have on their lives and even their souls, we have to ask it. Why does xenophobia get expressed so easily, not just here, but everywhere? What are we so afraid of that we've targeted infants whose parents lack legal documentation?

Typically, the commenters at AlterNet prove that being progressive is not immunity to stupidity. Here's a taste:

what college-bound young Okies do when they graduate from the local universities. Where do they go to find work? Their attitudes must be soooo out of sync with most Americans, who happen to live in large metropolitan areas, that they must appear as freaks. Who would hire them?

...

Been there Too- My sister lives outside Tulsa.Beautiful state, but nearly all appear to have been beaten repeatedly about the head as children. Is there any laws regarding marriying your 'Brother Daddy'...Though Not.

...

Lots of contradictions and totally illogical unfactual reasoning from their elected governing body. The message is clear to me though, stay out of Oklahoma.

...

God Bless Commie Red Facist Okalahoma. The former home of the late Timothy McVeigh, Americas first citizen terrorist. Pardon me if I never visit your state again. But then again I am sure NONE CONSIDERED THE EFFECTS ON TOURISM of this most communist repressive state. Why don't you just cecede and declare Putin your leader. He has no problems with policies and laws of this sort.

...

All you have to do to these poor slobs in OK is hypnotize them with guns and bibles and keep them frothing at the mouth on social issues such as guns, god, gays, flag-burning, patriotism, terrorism, machoism, abortion, etc ..., and BINGO, they're yours for the RAPING, er "taking" !

...

Although many of the comments are fair, mostly from people who either live here or have lived here or have family here, this just goes to show how easy it is to fall back into superficial, narrow-minded rhetoric as easily as Ann Coulter. I know I shouldn't be surprised, Oklahoma has a bad reputation, and stuff like this doesn't help it on the world stage, but stereotypes piss me off. And then there's the whole "No one makes fun of my sister except me!" thing going on. I live here, I live under this shit and fight against it, I live next door to these folks and am related to many who have the same opinion and I love them and they love me despite our differences in opinion, and I'll be damned if they're going to be judged like this by people who don't know them. I'll do that, thank you very much, I've earned it. After all, criticism works best when it's delivered by someone you love.

So, go over to AlterNet and let those ignant people have it. And let's really ask ourselves what we can do about shit coming out of people who make us look so bad in the media's eye.

Boom-de-yada

2008-05-22T19:15:00.001-07:00

I love these commercials, for one reason or another the chorus just brings to tears to my eyes every time I hear it. Could be because I'm a rabid watcher of Discovery Channel (Yes, I'm addicted to Deadliest Catch. And How It's Made. And Mythbusters. And Dirty Jobs. I think most of what I watch when I can watch TV is on Discovery Channel.). Could be because it's based on a children's song and it makes me nostalgic for those nice hazy fall days in Mrs. Siegle's first-grade class when Mr. Crow was teaching us to sing old folk songs. Or it could be that the chorus just gets to me, because it's so true.

I love the whole world
And all its sights and sounds
Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada ...

I love the whole world
And all its craziness
Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada ...

I love the whole world
It's such a brilliant place ...
Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada-boom-de-yada ...

What were we thinking when we decided that the world was bad and some otherworldly heaven is good? Let's hear it for material existence. It really is just awesome.

Take us out, Mr. Sulu

2008-05-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

George Takei is getting married! Yay!

Now that California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have the right to get married, Takei and his partner of 21 years are fulfilling their dream wedding. As you might have guessed, George Takei is one of my heroes. When I was growing up, we watched all the shows that featured Asian people, even if we didn't like them, simply because, I realize now, my mom was lonely for faces that were familiar to her. So we were regular watchers of Quincy, M.E. for Robert Ito and Star Trek for Takei. We watched that awful Shogun miniseries and Hawaii 5-0 and anything that remotely had an Asian cast. But I was always a fan of Star Trek, because I'm a big nerd, and my favorite episodes were Sulu-heavy (The Naked Time, which features a hot Takei brandishing an epee and Shore Leave, where he gets the girl. (Huh, I didn't realize that Sulu was actually haafu -- half-Japanese and half-Filipino. Go figure!) Anyway, he was always a hero of mine when I was growing up. Here was this guy who looked like me who was steering the Starship Enterprise and doing all sorts of heroic deeds. He was not a red-shirted ensign who would die in any episode, but permanent! When I was growing up, I never had any idea that the world would give people like me any shit, because there was Mr. Sulu in that spot, and if Mr. Sulu was there, if Sam from Quincey was there, hell if Margaret Cho was there, why couldn't I be there someday, too?

When Takei came out a few years ago, I was happy that he was taking that brave step to again lead people forward. And now he's getting married! He wrote about it on his blog and compared the laws that prevented GLBTs from getting married to same-gender partners to the discrimination he faced as a child in the internment camps.

As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.

With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, "Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress." (SOURCE: Takei's blog)

He was, is and always will be my hero and one of my biggest role models. Thank you, Mr. Takei, and congratulations to you and Brad. I wish you all the happiness in the world!

8 Things Never to say to a Mixed-Race Colleague

2008-05-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

I found this post (8 Things Never to say to a Mixed-Race Colleague) through Racialicious today. I just got done writing about hybridity and mimicry issues in the Antioch Controversy, as presented by Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, and a portion of that paper had to do with racial/ethnic identification. Interesting that this article would be published today, if I hadn't turned in my paper already I'd include it.

Anyway, here's my answer on these 8 things. And yes, while I understand that people are caring individuals who are trying to express their appreciation or affection by trying to know more about the person, we really need to start questioning why we feel the need to know. And just so you know, I get these questions asked at me ALL THE TIME.

1. "What are you?"

I have to say, this question beats the hell out of "Where are you from? No, really, before that, where are you really from? At least it's honest, they really want to know why I look the way I do. Actually, most of the time I get, "What tribe are you?" because I seem to look either Cherokee or, it seems, Eskimo (that was the last one, "Are you Eskimo?"). Go figure. But here's the thing: What am I? Well, as much as I'd love to be, I'm not Gallifreyan. I'm not a Cylon, either. That alone should give you ample fodder for a more productive conversation about what I am (i.e. a huge sci-fi fan. And, oh yeah, HUMAN.). You don't get to ask this question without coming across as a total idiot, as there's no way to ask it intelligently.Trust me, if you're really my friend, it'll come up in conversation.

2. "What's your nationality?" "You look foreign."
If I lived in any other country on the planet, I'd have somewhat more sympathy for askers of this question. Nationality seems to have a racial/ethnic component to it in most of the world; that is, if you ignore the reality of minority populations in most countries that have been oppressed or dismissed (ainu or Roma, for example). In the U.S. -- we have no racial/ethnic component. Everyone gets to be a estadounidense. And unless you're First Nations, you're a foreigner, too.

3. "You're all beautiful." "You make beautiful babies."
Thanks for the objectification. So I guess beauty really is skin deep? That must mean that your monoracial kids are butt-ugly.

4. "Are you X or Y?" "Which side are you more on?"
The interesting thing about this question is, it's in the mind of the questioner more than it is mine. It also plays into the idea that we all wear just one identity. I identify with both my sides, more so one than the other at certain times and in certain environments, but it's not like my Asian side goes away when I'm at the calf fry singing along with Hank Junior. And it's not like we round up, either, i.e. I identify 55% with my Asian side, so that makes me really Asian. Nope. And there are no benchmarks: I don't speak, read or write Japanese, I don't often cook Japanese food and I'm not a Buddhist, and even if I were, there are plenty of non-Asian people who do any or all of these things.

5. "How in the world did your parents meet?"
This is a silly question in this day and age. We're so global, people move around so much, people from all over the place meet other people from all over the place. I actually don't get this question as much as I get the "Did your parents meet during the war?" And then I wonder which war they're thinking about, because I'm not THAT old.

6. "You're the future." "You're the best of both worlds."
Heh. If I'm the future, then does that mean you're history? Trust me, just because you're mixed race does not mean you're the answer to the world's problems with racism. We don't shag our racism away. And if in the future we were all mixed-race, then we'd just find another reason to be an ass about. And that "best of both worlds" thing is crap, too. Trust me, I get the worst, too, just like anyone. And again, thanks for the objectification.

7. "You don't look ..." "You're not ..." "You sound white."
I get to decide what I am, thank you. That's the right of any human being, we get to determine our own identities, even if they fall outside of the little check-here boxes. And I used to get the "You sound white" thing all the time, at least in the form of "You don't look like I expected when I talked to you on the phone." I found pretty quickly that the best way to get a comment from someone over the found was to match your accent to theirs so you'd sound like one of the bunch. I'm from here, I can have a local accent. But I really watch too much TV to sound local all the time. And what does "sounding white" mean, anyway?

8. "Aren't we all mixed, anyway?"
Technically, yes. There's no such thing as a genetically pure person. Race is a social construct. But if we really did accept that we're all mixed, then you wouldn't be pestering me with these questions, would you? The fact that I claim my biracial mix wouldn't be an issue. We'd all accept that we're each different.

On privilege

2008-04-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Am in T-Town today, hanging out at the Chain Bread Bistro and am irked that I got more bread than bowl in my Soup in a Bread Bowl meal.

Anyway, so in class today we took the Privilege test. A variation on the test can be glimpsed at this discussion here, but here's the basics: A series of statements are read ("My grew up in a home my parents owned." "I am able to publicly show affection to my partner.") and you either step forward or backward depending on what you answer. The role of the exercise is to let people understand exactly what privilege is; not racism, but privilege, defined not as "I hate (person of differing race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation) and wish they'd diiiiiieee!" but to unmask how subtle privilege is, that we really do NOT start off at an equal spot, that some of us got a leg up that we weren't even ever aware of. Trust me, having parents who understood the college application process is a HUGE advantage right there.

So we go through this exercise, and I actually fell a lot farther on the "non-privileged" side than I did the "privileged" side, which surprised me and seriously bummed me out. Weirdly, I was totally prepared to deal with my privileges, but I was stunned to see the lack. I really didn't realize that some of the shit I deal with were actual disadvantages.

But that's neither here nor there. The response to the test by one member of the class was fairly typical. "White, middle class America is under attack! If you're poor or a minority, you get financial aid and so much help, but you're all alone if you're white and middle class, and these people make it feel like it's all your fault that they're poor! I didn't do anything! I'm a good person!"

Not the first time I've heard this. Not even this week. So, here's my one reply. Spread it around, y'all, please, so I don't have to keep repeating it.

First off: You're attacking the wrong people. "If you're poor or a minority, you get advantages?" Yes, because Pell grants and food stamps are such a great thing compared with being treated like a non-human (pssst, they're not.) Think about this: To get said "advantages" you have to live in areas that are both socially and environmentally harmful to your health; you have to go to substandard schools; if you can go to a "good" school that has all the resources (like a computer! with Internet! Folks, there are schools in the U.S. that don't) you have to work your ass off to stay there; you probably won't see your parents much, since one or both of them is probably absent; and you're hungry, probably often, and you didn't get the nutrition you needed to help your brain develop properly when you were a kid. Oh, and if you can survive and thrive past all that, and you get financial aid into college, well, it's still tough because you'll have to work, and you probably won't have a car to get you around. Extra-curricular activities, you know, those things that help you make connections and points to put on a resume, will probably go out the window because you'll be working and studying too much.

So yes, let's 86 the idea that being poor or a minority is so great for financial aid. Turn your ire on the people who deserve it: The 2% or whatever that have all the money, who are working through corporations, media and government to turn us against each other so that we won't notice what they're doing. We should be pulling together, people! Think on this: Your kid's spot at Yale is being taken up by the next Dubya Bush. Your kid, who was all As in high school, on every team, in every club and read to old people at the nursing home every day after school, will be denied entrance to Yale because of a C average legacy who will spend his whole 4 years partying.

And here's the other thing: OK, so some poor kid got financial aid and your kid didn't. OK, so I guess he'll have to do what the rest of us do: sacrifice. He'll have to work and not get all the things that'll make college pay off big, like the extra activities and the study abroad classes. He'll have to go half time to work so he can pay. He'll (gasp!) have to go to a land-grant university instead of the Ivy League place. He may even have to go to community college first because it's affordable and he can actually afford to pay for it.

And that, my friends, is privilege in a nutshell -- thinking that your kid SHOULDN'T have to do all that, because someone else has scooped up his opportunity.

Sucks, don't it?

This is the way things are. You are being PLAYED. Someone's making life tougher, and believe me, it ain't us (the poor, the minority, the gay). You are being duped into thinking that life for you means no-life for us, when in fact, no-life for us means no-life for you, too. We are only as strong as we all are together.

We can have a better world, but we've GOT to get rid of this notion that we're entitled to shit because we EARNED it somehow. No on earns anything. We do what we do, and it works out for some of us and not for others. We're entitled to shit because we breathe. And if we're not greedy about our air, there'll be enough for everyone. God loves us all.

So own your privilege and then let it go. Breathe. Love.

'We are miseducated as a people'

2008-04-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was on Bill Moyers' Journal Friday night. Go watch. Or read.

REVEREND WRIGHT: I think I come at that as a historian of religion. That we are miseducated as a people. Or because we're miseducated, you end up with the majority of the people not wanting to hear the truth. Because they would rather cling to what they are taught. James Washington, now a deceased church historian, says that after every revolution, the winners of that revolution write down what the revolution was about so that their children can learn it, whether it's true or not. They don't learn anything at all about the Arawak, they don't learn anything at all about the Seminole, the Cheek-Trail of Tears, the Cherokee. They don't learn anything. No, they don't learn that. What they learn is 1776, Crispus Attucks was the one black guy in there. Fight against the British, the- terrible. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal while we're holding slaves." No, keep that part out. They learn that. And they cling to that. And when you start trying to show them you only got a piece of the story, and lemme show you the rest of the story, you run into vitriolic hatred because you're desecrating our myth. You're desecrating what we hold sacred. And when you're holding sacred is a miseducational system that has not taught you the truth. I also think people don't understand condemn, D-E-M-N, D-A-M-N. They don't understand the root, the etymology of the word in terms of God condemning the practices that are against God's people. But again, what is happening is I talk a truth. Reading the scripture or the hermeneutic of a people who have-
BILL MOYERS: Hermeneutic?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Hermeneutic is an interpretation, it's the window from which you're looking is your hermeneutic. And when you don't realize that I've been framed- this whole thing has been framed through this window, there's another world out here that I'm not looking at or taking into account, it gives you a perspective that-- that is-- that is informed by and limited by your hermeneutic. Dr. James Cone put it this way. The God of the people who riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, "Bless our slavery" is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, "God, get us out of slavery." And it's not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You're saying flip a coin; hope God blesses the winning team, no. That the perception of God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country. Same thing you find in Psalm 137. That those people who are carried away into slavery have a very different concept of what it means to be the people of God than the ones who carried them away.

Amen, brother

2008-04-26T14:46:00.001-07:00

(I mean that in a completely secular way ...)

Atheist soldier claims harassment:
Hall said he enjoys being a team leader but has been told that having faith would make him a better leader.
"I will take care of my soldiers. Nowhere does it say I have to pray with my soldiers, but I do have to make sure my soldiers' religious needs are met," he said.
"Religion brings comfort to a lot of people," he said. "Personally, I don't want it or need it. But I'm not going to get down on anybody else for it."

"... but His girlfriend was a whore."

2008-04-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

(Above title comes from a line in The Wolves of the Calla, book five in the phenomenal Dark Tower series by Stephen King. The exchange goes like this:

"Your Man Jesus seems to be a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women," Roland said. "Was He ever married?"

The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked. "No," he said, "but His girlfriend was a whore."

"Well," Roland said, "that's a start."

Which, despite the Old Catholic School understanding of the Magdalene and Jesus' relationships with women, is a pretty damn good line in my book.

Anyway, I bring this up because I saw this posting this morning:

“I’m not comparing myself to Rosa Parks or Jesus Christ. I’m comparing myself to someone standing up for their rights. I’m just saying you can have an unpopular person who is criminalized and demonized. Jesus Christ was crucified by Pontius Pilate at my age. He was not a popular guy.” POST
-- From The Prisoner in Cell Block DD in GQ

Yes, folks, that's Girls Gone Wild producer Joe Francis comparing himself to Jesus! And that automatically brings to mind a rather surreal image of Buddy Christ hanging out at Padre (where else?) on Spring Break and getting drunk young coeds to take off their shirts in front of a video camera and make out. Take that, Willam DaFoe's hallucination about marrying the prostitute!

Seriously, though, everyone go read Mark Lewis Taylor's The Executed God so we can be sure about what we're talking about here. I find that dialogue best begins when we've defined the terms properly. Kind of like you really can't talk about privilege until we make sure that everyone understands that the word doesn't mean, "I'm buying my second Hummer because my first one was too small," but rather "I can drive to work at Princeton in my Hummer and not get stopped simply because I resemble the stereotype of someone who steals Hummers for a living." (Cornel West). Because losing a popularity contest is not what gets you executed by the state.

I hate this Jesus meek and mild shit. Really I do. This Jesus walks with me and talks with me and laughs at all my jokes bullcrap.

Jesus was tortured and terrible done to death for opposing a system that brutally dehumanized a majority of the world. For daring to tell people that they were worth more than the sacrifices they were paying or making. For letting them know that they were human beings, even though they were treated like dirt and property. And even though we in the West have reduced Jesus to a personal Superman who rescues us from our individual psychic distress, at the heart of the matter is, we all deep down understand that something is robbing us of our true human feeling, our willingness to reach out and touch a stranger with love because we really do love ourselves and when you love yourself you can't help but love another, because if we're all in-Christ, then we see our Others as Ourselves, we realize that we are Others to Others -- that we are even Others to Ourselves -- and we can bridge that gap anyway. Jesus loves us so we can do that.

So think about who or what are keeping us from that? Our desire to really live in community with the gentiles in our lives?

And let's also think about people who we can really compare with Jesus. NOT Joe Francis. Let's see ... Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. Oscar Romero. Malcolm X. Jean Donovan. Dorothy Kazel. Maura Clarke and Ita Ford. John Brown. James Chaney. Andrew Goodman. Michael Schwerner. Many more who die so that others will not be brutalized or tortured any more.

"A carpenter, worked a miracle, his name was J.C. ..."

2008-04-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

Did you hear that former President Carter got the leaders of Hamas to agree on the right of Israel to exist. STORY

Hamas leaders "said that they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders" and they would "accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace," Carter said.

...
Carter urged Israel to engage in direct negotiations with Hamas, saying failure to do so was hampering peace efforts.

"We do not believe that peace is likely and certainly that peace is not sustainable unless a way is found to bring Hamas into the discussions in some way," he said. "The present strategy of excluding Hamas and excluding Syria is just not working."

You can hear NPR's Steve Inskeep talk with Carter here.

As I listened to Carter talk with Inskeep I was struck by how dead-on accurate the King of the Hill episode "The Father, the son and the J.C." was. (I'm a big fan of King of the Hill, although I'm often quite baffled at how anyone outside of Texas or Oklahoma can find it remotely amusing. It's so Red River specific.) Anyway, in that episode, Carter brokers peace between Hank, the main character, and his father during a Christmas Eve Habitat for Humanity building event. Tell me if this line doesn't sound like something that he could have said during his talks with Hamas:

JIMMY CARTER: Say there was a magic button you could push that would make Hank disappear. Everything else in the world would stay the same, but Hank would never have existed. Would you push that button?
COTTON: I ain't got to answer no hypothetical sitchyations!
JIMMY CARTER: Would you push that button!?
COTTON (growls): No, not yet.
...

JIMMY CARTER: You both seem to prefer a universe in which the other person hasn't magically disappeared. I think we have a framework for peace.

Monday

2008-04-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

On Saturday as I was going to work, I noted a woman with straggly hair and a dirty face walking down the street, carrying a ratty red blanket in one hand and a stem of blue-violet wisteria in the other. She was either singing or talking to herself, or someone I just couldn't see with her.

That night, as I was driving home, I spied that blanket in the doorway of a business, covering a woman-shaped lump. The temperature was about to drop below freezing.

Today I paid $3.23 a gallon for gasoline for my car. A quarter-tank fill-up cost $10. Not six years ago that was a little less than what I paid to fill up the car.

And this:

Riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention, the head of an agency focused on global development said Monday. SOURCE

It's not a very cheerful nor hopeful day.

New York minute

2008-04-06T21:39:00.000-07:00

I am tired and cranky from a very long there-and-back-again trip to Union Theological Seminary, in which there was too much to do, not enough time or space to do it. Will share more later, but will leave this thought:

How do Paul's letters change if while you're reading them you think "Roman law" or "nomos" instead of "Jewish Law" or "Torah"?

All the news that fits

2008-03-31T13:24:00.000-07:00

A couple of links here from the New York Times:

A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith: A really good article about Sen. Obama's relationship with the Rev. Wright. Note the date: April 30, 2007. So why did it take almost a year for this dialogue to really get going? Really, why did we have to take so long to start talking about race? And are we talking? Maybe if we had been talking all along, you know ...

Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race: Published today, a nice article about being mixed race in the Obama era. He's done for us what Tiger couldn't.

"Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person’s racial appearance.”

Also, check out this page at Union Theological Seminary (where I'll be on Friday and Saturday to attend the New Testament and Roman Empire conference) that highlights black liberation theology in light of Rev. Wright's media attention, and discusses everything you ever wanted to know about black liberation theology. I especially found the link to the Forbes magazine interview with James Cone (whose book God of the Oppressed we're about to start reading in my theology class) particularly interesting.

Throw Grandma from the train

2008-03-22T15:10:00.001-07:00

What is UP with all the right-wingers pouncing on Obama's race speech by saying he threw his white granny under the desegregated bus? Check out this post on Media Matters about Fixed News anchor Chris Wallace himself getting PO'd about how Fox & Friends were snarking on and on about it.

I had flipped by Faux News the night after the speech and saw Hannity going off about that very point but I didn't think it was going to be the nail on which the right-wingers would hang their argument. And then I saw Ann Coulter using the same argument in her weekly column and realized it was going somewhere.

On the night of the speech I was watching Olbermann and was absolutely spellbound at the way he, also, fixated on that point because he was able to relate to it so well. He told this rather touching tale of hearing his grandfather complain about Hawaii 5-0 getting interrupted over "some (insert racial epithet here) getting shot" (MLK) and realizing that even though he loved his grandfather, he'd never be able to trust him fully, that even discussions about who the greatest baseball players would from then on be tainted.

I think I owe ER somewhat of an apology over my dismissal of personal confession in race. While I don't believe that Obama is calling us to confess our personal race sins and focus totally on our personal feelings and responsibilities, it suddenly hit me today what role confession serves. Used wisely, it's a personal reflection that helps you sift through what's helpful and hurtful in your life. It's SELF-reflection, which is quickly becoming a sadly lost art in our world, one that needs reviving. Personal confession/self-reflection allows us to think critically about the things we think about, about the things that we take in and shape us, and determine whether they benefit or harm us.

In the people who are attaching Obama for his confession about his grandmother -- which is as much a self-reflective act for him as it would be for grandma, since trust me, there's pain in understanding that someone you love is being hateful toward other people who have traits similar to yours -- I sense a lack of self-reflection or even just reflection about what goes on in their heads and around them. This is reaction to something they find upsetting, with no excavation to discover why they're upset.

So many people who fixated on Obama's line about his grandma -- and I'm one of them -- were transported with that sentence back to the moments in their lives where they realized the dark side of their beloved's humanity, decided to keep loving them anyway but knew that a shadow would always hang over their relationship. Or they realized this about themselves.

Here's my confession. My mother hates nearly everything about the way I look that indicates that I'm Asian. She, like Obama's grandmama, also said things about nonwhites, especially African Americans, that made me hurt. She threatened us girls once we reached our teen years with the dire prediction that our names would be sullied if we ever dated anyone who wasn't lily-white, and threatened to disown us if we ever did.

Years later, after dating a succession of men of a variety of ancestry because I knew my mom was wrong about the race thing, I saw a white woman walking hand-in-hand with a black man and still thought, "You'd think she could find someone better than that." And was immediately horrified by my own thought and what it meant, which seemed to come out of nowhere but obviously was down there close to my heart.

Here's my biggest sin: While I tend to regard most people warily, I especially do not trust white people who profess color-blindness, who ask me where I'm REALLY from, who use racial slurs in my presence and then apologize by saying, "I forgot because you're not really Asian." Deep in my heart, I really don't think they get the race issue and maybe never will, and I'd almost prefer to let them go.

I wrassle all these down on various occasions. I especially need to wrassle down that last one if I'm really committed to building bridges and dialogue. It's ugly, but OK. Time to take a bite and swallow it down. Better than choking on it.

I realize that if we don't think about racism, we don't recognize it when we see it in the wild or in our own houses. (And we all have, no one's unblemished enough to throw that stone.) Our loved ones are racist or we're racist, and we say nothing because we either didn't notice or didn't want to think badly about us/them so we just didn't think about it, fiddle-dee-dee. Because it's true -- once we realize something like this in someone we love, even ourselves, things are never quite the same. But then, we don't have to stop loving someone even though we don't agree with them 100 percent. That's mature love. It's like costly grace, hurts and it don't come cheap, but you treasure it more.

So, ER, you were right about the personal.

Now, on to other things ...

I saw Horton Hears a Who today, and it's fantastic. Forget all the yahoos who think that Dr. Seuss was writing an anti-abortion parable; that's the shallowest interpretation -- and very much taken out of context -- of what "A person's a person no matter how small" means. This story is a classic Hero Quest, following the myth story so perfectly and so well that you can almost attach any meaning to it and it'll come out. For me, I thought it was one of the nicest allegories for God I'd ever seen. I like the idea that God is all-powerful and all-loving, yet evil exists, why? Because God's also kind of bumbling, too, and a little distracted.

And oh holy shit, back to race: Look at this crap that's going around the Internets. Beware if this lands in your inbox.

Better stuff on race: Check out PBS' Religion & Ethics weekly page about The Speech:

(Obama) represents a post-racial approach to engaging difference and oppression. But again looking forward in a hopeful fashion ... a focus on what we have in common as Americans. Again, Dr. King did that. JFK did that. Obama has much of that appeal. And I hope that we can take his invitation to move forward. It has to be multi-racial, it has to be interfaith. And it has to start with what we have in common as the children of God.

The Sermon

2008-03-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post put up the ENTIRE video of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermon (well, the important part) -- hat tip to What Tami Said -- but you can watch it below, and I strongly urge it. Find out more about Trinity UCC at the Truth About Trinity blog.

To Rev. Wright -- Amen. God bless you for your love and your truth.

The Speech II

2008-03-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

You can read the whole thing here or here or watch the YouTube post below. Most interestingly, read comments.

The Speech

2008-03-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

OK, gang, what'd'ja'think?

I, for one, am blown away and amazed that Barack Obama actually pulled it off. I know this partially because I'm watching commentary on MSNBC and Pat Banana's face is peevier than usual because there's not much for him to grab onto. But Obama did it. He denounced the words without abandoning the man, he addressed race as a lived experience, a reality that affects all of us regardless of our skin color. He acknowledged our anger, resentments, frustrations and fears as legitimate and asked us to channel that not against one another but at the forces that are their genesis.

As a religious scholar in training, I mostly am grateful that he addressed the fact that our religions, our denominations, our churches themselves are not monolithic, that we may worship together and stand together in solidarity as fellow beloved human beings in God and Christ without having to agree with one another (which, by the way, is the hallmark of the UCC -- see the UCC's comments on the whole controversy here) and in fact ought to disagree with the things that we say or beliefs that we harbor that have the potential to truly divide us, though in ways that do not distance each other from our fellowship (Heaven knows as much as I hang on every word that drops from SuperPastor's mouth, there are times that he makes me wince; and as much as I love my church there are people there who drive me nuts and make me move away from them -- and that's something I need to work on).

I'm proud to be a member of the UCC, which includes Trinity UCC and even includes all the conservative churches that want the UCC to change its policy of inclusiveness to gays. Our table is open for everyone, and that includes them. I'm proud to be a supporter of Barack Obama, who is dealing with race honestly and from reality, recognizing our tragic pasts without apologizing for its tragic legacies. We do not move forward into hope without acknowledging our despairs. He did that today. Onward into hope. Let's go. Sí se puede.

Original Sin-suality

2008-03-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

I bought Chris Hedges' (I) Don't Believe (in) Atheists yesterday and spent most of yesterday reading through it. I also bought Bart Ehrman's God's Problem (I admit, most just to yell at him). Comments and reviews on both to come in time.

Something in the Atheists book sparked a rather interesting realization though. Hedges writes that we do not need to afraid of anyone who does or does not believe in God. We should, however, be afraid of anyone who does not believe in sin. The concept of sin, Hedges writes, is the recognition that we human beings can never be omnipotent.

Wow, I thought, and read it aloud to a friend. He looked at me rather puzzled and said, "That doesn't make any sense at all." After a few moments of debating back and forth on why that didn't make sense to him, I finally asked, "What is sin to you?"

"It's when you do something wrong."

Well no wonder. I explained where Hedges was coming from, that one of the biblical views of sin is not the act of doing something wrong, but a state of imperfect being. It wasn't small-s sin, that you list during your weekly confession, tallying up as either venial or mortal, or even take up to the altar call and swear you'll never do that again lest you make Jesus cry. We're talking about big-s Sin, the stalking monster, the disease that gets within in or is within us and in the end makes us do what we do not want to do and not do what we should do.

"Oh," he replied. "Now that makes sense."

We are both christians, mind you. You'd think that we'd have the same basic understanding of what sin is. And yet. It never ceases to amaze me to discover how often we human beings who speak the same language actually translate our words with different meanings.

And what a difference this makes! Sin as something external that you do vs. Sin as something that lives within your soul. Sin as a medium in which we live, breath, think, love, laugh and be human, vs. something that we commit.

Sin as something that we can wrestle to the ground with Jesus as our tag-team partner. Sin as the acts we commit, the vile thoughts we think, the decisions we make. And if we can do right,well so can anyone else.

Or.

Sin as the inner unconscious mystery that drives us to do the act, think the thought, make the choice, the boiling force inside us that's as fundamental to our nature as our taste in lovers that makes us choose one woman over another, without really understanding why. Something that, despite our best intentions, will usually lead us to hell if we refuse to look at it fully and claim it as our own. And which will lead us there even when we do.

That's the Sin that makes grace make sense to me, that underneath our human veneer lies a beast, and every hair on our heads is loved anyway despite this, even when and especially when we fall.

So, I ask you: What is Sin? Try not to use the words you grew up with. Try not to rely on words that are comfortable. Take your best shot. No wrong answers.

What's in the middle?

2008-03-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Hoo-kay, over at Erudite Redneck's blog, he's got a meme-thing going on with middle names (ER by way of Geoffrey, that is. Here's the rules:

1. You have to post the rules before you give your answers.

2. You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).

3. At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.)

Y'know, for many years I've been going back and forth on changing my name. My moms, when she immigrated to the U.S. back in the melting-pot '70s, was -- there's no other word for it, really -- bullied by all sorts of people to "raise" us kids as "Amurikin" as possible. So we didn't learn her language, we didn't get Japanese names and we learned next to nothing of our heritage. Although we did eat a lot of Japanese food, thank God, they couldn't take that away from us!

But I've gotten rather used to my first name, I'm rather attached to my family names, so I've considered changing my middle name to a Japanese name, with the same first letter so my monogram doesn't change (all those towels, you know). But man, it costs to change your name, like $280. So I'll go with the name I've decided on; it's also the name I bowl under. I seem to hit higher scores when she bowls. The 194 I scored (new career high! five strikes!) last week was under this name.

So I guess I'm (h)apa Ayame Thealogy.

A: Asian. How's this a fact? Well, because being multiracial means that you tend to look like whatever people are around you, or whatever people that other people are familiar with whose skin color is similar to yours. So around here generally I get asked a lot, "What tribe are you?" One of my best buddies at school is multiracial Chickasaw, and whenever we're hanging out people ask us if we're sisters. My sisters, who live on both coasts, get mistaken for Latinas or Arab constantly. I have to name it and claim it: Loud, proud Asian.

Y: Years away from being finished with my education. To think, I went back to school in 2002 just to have something to do in my spare time. Five years later, I finished two bachelor's degrees (well, I cheated a bit, I left school the first time with a measly three hours to spare on my first degree, and when I showed up 14 years later to finish it they said, "Take anything, we don't care!). Now I've got a target graduation date of 2010 for the master's (which FINALLY got changed over to the Master of Divinity!), and then there's doctoral work that I'm shooting for, which is another five years, minimum. I'm going to a conference in New Yawk next month, partially to check the school out as potential grad school material.

A: Apatheistic. That is, I don't know if there's a gawd and I really don't care. As I've said before, I highly suspect that there is some sort of whatzis in the universe making the right moments fall into place, but suspecting or even believing is not the same as knowing. I'm a fan of the push to translate the Greek pisteuo as "trust," and not knowing makes the trust part much more profound for me. I trust that the universe is running like some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, and that the boot will fly over to the oven door on cue.

M: Multi-literate. I would say that I'm literate, at least functionally so, in at least four languages, two of them dead -- English, Spanish, Latin and kione Greek. I'm planning to add biblical Hebrew, French and Portuguese in there, too. Ah the rigors of academia, huh? Not that Latin really gets you very far, except once you know Latin you realize how funny the "Romani ite domum" scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian really is, and the Harry Potter books get a little more fun. Keep in mind that being literate is not the same as being fluent. I'm good with English, my native language, enough to have spent the last 14 years employed by working with it, but I'd say that I speak it just as atrociously as most Americans. I can speak and understand Spanish, but not terribly well, just enough to watch los partidos de futbol y las telenovelas and listen to my favorite rock en espanol bands (Mana, Jaguares, Juanes, Julietta Venegas, Aterciopeladso y otros). And Greek, well -- I found a coffee mug at Tarjet that had "hello" printed on it in several languages and after phonetically sounding out the Greek word -- kalimera -- I realized that it was made up of kala -- good -- and hemera -- day/morning. So it must be coming along. I know I've got ho huios tou theou (the son of God) down pat. Ugh.

A: Aficionada de futbol. Am I cheating by going into another language? But it's a fact -- you can't really talk about being a fan of futbol -- what we ignorant folks in the U.S. call soccer -- in the United States without speaking a little Spanish. Hell, a good portion of the Major Leage Soccer players are from Mexico, Argentina or another Latin American country, and most of our US Men's and Women's National Teams speak Spanish because our conference is a Spanish-speaking one. Most US games are broadcast on the Spanish channels, with better commentary because the Univision announcers actually know something about futbol. I could have cried during the last World Cup when the doofus they got from ESPN started talking about the opposing country's major exports like he was reading a social studies textbook. The US Men's Team is currently in competition for an Olympic berth, and they're struggling. But heck, Mexico, our conference's powerhouse, is struggling too! MLS's 2008 season begins in two weeks! Anyway, yeah, I'm a yuge futbol fan.

OK, I guess I've got to tag Geoffrey, ER, Kirsten, Dr Lobojo and MFranks to take part, except ER and Geoff already did! Oh well.

Sex, stupidity and fudamentalist atheists ...

2008-03-13T07:14:00.000-07:00

There's too much going on this week while I hunch over my desk typing papers! It's like when news of the ridiculous breaks while The Daily Show is taking a week off! I ... can't ... not ... snark!

Sex: We begin with Eliot Spitzer, at least, we begin there so I can say -- political sex scandals are getting to be a bore. Yes, we feel bad for the wife, but marriage is private so let's not go there. Although I'm waiting for the day when a spouse of a politician caught in a sex scandal takes the mic at the press conference where said sex scandal is announced and says, "I'm divorcing this (insert nasty epithet here) right freakin' now, any divorce attorneys in the room?" Stand by your spouse? Good advice, Tammy Wynette. What I find the coolest thing: David A. Patterson becomes New York's third African American governor and the nation's first blind governor! My moms has a similar type of blindness, she began losing her sight when I was about 10 or so, and it's been a struggle her whole life to just live day to day. This world is not set up for the blind and visually impaired -- for most people with disabilities, for that matter. So I'm super happy that Mr. Patterson is running New York, it's something my moms and I can look at and get more dialogue going on with.

Stupidity: If you did not watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night to see his special comment on the Geraldine Ferraro "I'm not a racist, but ..." comment, go here. Here's a taste:

Senator, if the serpentine logic of your so-called advisors were not bad enough, now, thanks to Geraldine Ferraro, and your campaign's initial refusal to break with her, and your new relationship with her -- now more disturbing still with her claim that she can now "speak for herself" about her vision of Senator Obama as some kind of embodiment of a quota...
If you were to seek Obama as a Vice President, it would be, to Ms. Ferraro, some kind of social engineering gesture, some kind of racial make-good. Do you not see, Senator?

So, was it racist? Mmmmmm, yeah. It was also sexist and classist, but then the three always go together. Is Ms. Ferraro a racist? She seems to be confusing, both in her comment and in her rather ridiculous defense, who people are with what people do. I was rather shocked when I heard her say that her vice-presidential nomination was an affirmative action stunt, which in an of itself is a clear misunderstanding of how affirmative action is supposed to work. Affirmative action is supposed to make us look not at other people, but at ourselves and the preconceived assumptions we make about other people based on race, sex, orientation and ability. Instead we made it a quota, about the person being hired or chosen, confusing who they are with what they do. For her to designate her successes to her gender alone means that she's a profiteer who took advantage of a flawed system in order to get ahead. But hey, at least she's honest about it, right? And if we tend to look at other people the way we look at ourselves, then it's no wonder she would go that way for Sen. Obama. So she's a victim, all right, but she victimized herself.

So is she a racist? What she did/said was racist, no doubt. That doesn't mean she's a racist. People make boneheaded, ignorant mistakes all the time. Mistakes can be fixed. Ignorance can be corrected. This is how we learn. Except that she keeps saying it. So ... what does that say?

If Sen. Clinton doesn't do something about this, other than offer a lame apology for what her former president husband said a few months back, well, if she's the nominee, come November I might just vote for Bill the Cat.

Fundamentalist atheists: Salon has an interesting interview with Chris Hedges -- not to be confused with Chris Hitchens -- about Hedges' new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. I read Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, so I'll probably go hunting down Atheists to read that, too. Hedges rightly points out that fundamentalism of any stripe is bad, bad, bad for humans, but it seems to be something we have a tendency to fall into, no matter who we are or where we come from. The interesting thing about the interview is that it doesn't seem as if the writer understands the difference between secularism and fundamentalist secularism, much like many religious people don't understand the different between religion and the fundamentalist forms of their religions. Fundamentalism invariably leads to legitimization of killing the Other. Check it:

If we're afraid to privilege Enlightenment values, don't we run the risk of sanctioning religious rituals that discriminate against women and minorities?

But I would never argue that! I mean, I think genital mutilation is disgusting. I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think that if you live in Somalia, it's fine to mutilate little girls. There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship. That's what the New Atheists have, and that's what the Christian fundamentalists have.

Dude, how is it that we always go to the extreme but we never see it when we're there? Why does someone saying, "We must be careful not to privilege our worldview over and above others" become "We must throw Western Enlightenment values out the window"? Hedges is right on the money with his answer. I'm looking forward to reading his book.

OK, back to papers ...

I'll make a deal with you blogsphere ...

2008-03-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

Dear blog,

I know we haven't chatted in about a week or so, but it's been really busy for me. Well, sort of. I had an opportunity to hang with you last week, but I got that migraine and just couldn't be on the computer. And I was reading that monster book by Gayatri Spivak, which is taking all my time, and I'm trying to throw in that book about moving Christianity beyond monotheism.

And it's not like I don't have things to talk about. Oh yes, I do. I've got all sorts of news (New Testament conference in New York! AP/ONE award! Bowling score of 194! Skinny pants fit again!), and some rants I'd like to go off on. Sally Kern is going to get an earful from me, don't doubt it.

But it's crunch time now. I've got two papers to write in five days, one on pastoral counseling strategies for transracial adoptees struggling with race identity issues, the other a midterm for theology class ("Reflect upon the earliest reception of Jesus' teachings within and outside of Judaism. How was he viewed by difference groups and why? ... Compare the religious teachings of Marcion, Valentinus and Justin. ... How do you assess the significance of Constantine for the development of Christianity?")

And another paper on language and hybridity in border areas. But that's for next week.

So if I can get done with these things on time, I promise I'll get back to you soon.

Review: Incognegro

2008-03-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

I purchased Mat Johnson's Incognegro at my comic book shop yesterday and gave it a read-through between Keith Olbermann's deliciously snarky comments on on Tuesday's turnouts and reading through various postcolonial theologies for school and personal edification. That divided attention span may or may not play in to my first thoughts.

The Good: It's a gripping story, a detective story/social commentary on not only race but gender and human failings. It puts the spotlight on what has been traditionally hidden in our muddy mainstream, not just that lynchings were a regular part of American life until just a few decades ago, but also the blurred edges of identity that we would do well to wrestle with except that we're too busy trying to ignore it. Warren Pleece's art is exceptionally good for the task, as the clarity of the black-and-white drawings obscures the racial differences between the characters, which is the whole point. Even though race and gender are the two things that people allegedly notice about us when they meet us, they are not absolutes and not concrete and can be changed or developed as needed or desired. This is why passing -- either into another race, another class or another gender -- has been such a horror in a society that revels in the comfort of uniformity and categorization, even as, or especially as, it pays lip service to diversity.

The Not-So-Good: The weakness of Incognegro is in what I've called the John Grisham effect: an author writes a book (in this case, collaborates in a graphic novel) with an eye toward the silver screen. Ever noticed how much movies made off John Grisham novels stick to the book so closely? It's because Grisham writes books that are easy to turn into scripts. The pacing in Incognegro has that Hollywood feel to it, with each section a scene rather than a chapter and comic characters appear at the right time to lighten the heavy moment. The graphic novel/comic book is a medium in and of itself, with plenty of creative room for dramatic and incredible storytelling. It would have been nice to see Johnson to push the boundaries of the graphic novel format to tell his story, rather than just using it as a vehicle for his story. Also, as suitable as Pleece's art was, I think he could have gone into more graphic detail to present the violence and horror of what the protagonists were experiencing.

The main character, Zane Pinchback, the Incognegro, also suffers from what I call the Det. Bobby Goren effect (from Law & Order: CI). Like Goren, Pinchback is all-knowing, all-sure, in-control, where he notices every little detail, understands more than anyone what's going on, has the inside track. He's got enough flaws and makes enough mistakes to keep from being a Mary Sue-type character, but I think this might be part of the script-like flaw of the presentation. Once the story gets going, we no longer get a chance to see what's going on in Pinchback's interior, his thoughts, feelings, rationals or understandings of what he's experiencing, and I think the dialogue-only format robs the reader of a deeper experience.

Overall: I should come up with some sort of rating system, huh? What, four-out-of-five stars? Six-ouot-of-seven communion shot glasses? Whatever. Incognegro is a good, important book that I'd recommend to just about everyone to read. Hopefully it will spur discussion, not only about America's history that needs discussion, but also about the present issues of identity, race and gender that we call inappropriate for polite society. Fuck polite. Let's get upset for once. And if they do make a movie/TV show based on Incognegro, you can bet I'll be there to watch it.

A Candidate Whose Time Has Come

2008-03-04T08:24:00.000-08:00

Ronald Takaki, author of the seminal book on Asian American history (and, incidentally, the book that woke me up to my own history, for which I'll always be grateful) wrote this Op-Ed piece about Sen. Barack Obama. Sí se puede! (Hat Tip to Reappropriate)

Barack Obama: A Candidate Whose Time Has Come
by Ronald Takaki
Like Barack Obama, I grew up in Hawaii. He went to Punahou, while I attended Iolani. Both of us lived in a part of the United States where everyone belonged to a minority. Both of us left the islands for our college education on the mainland. But our Hawaii roots shaped our perspective on what America was and could become.

In Palolo Valley on the island of Oahu, my neighbors were Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian. As children, we visited each other’s homes and heard a variety of languages. But we all spoke Pidgin English as our common language.

After graduating from high school in 1957, I attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, where I experienced a culture shock. My fellow students asked me questions like: “How long have you been in this country?” “Where did you learn to speak English?” But my grandfather had come here from Japan in 1886, before many European immigrants. Yet, they could not and did not see me as a fellow American. I did not look like an American, and did not have an American-sounding name.

Looking back at my Wooster experience, I realize that the ignorance was not their fault. What had they learned about Asian Americans in courses called U.S. history? Or about Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. Nothing or almost nothing. They saw me through a filter – what I call the Master Narrative of American history. This narrative is the familiar story that our country was settled by European immigrants and that Americans are white or European in ancestry.

The Master Narrative is so deeply embedded in our mainstream culture that it is a powerful current swirling beneath the surface of everyday conversation, the curriculum, the news and entertainment media, and political decision-making. This narrow definition of who is an American is something we take as a given.

“Race,” African American writer Toni Morrison explained, has functioned as a “metaphor” necessary for the “construction” of Americanness.” In the creation of our national identity, “American has been defined as “white.”

Today, the Master Narrative is being challenged by the tremendously expanding diversity of the American people. Demography is declaring: “No all of us came originally from Europe. And we are all Americans.” Here the numbers do the telling. According to the 2000 Census, whites have become a minority in California. What has happened in California is happening in Texas, and will happen to the total U.S. population within the lifetime of young people today. Indeed, in the coming future, we will all be minorities!

Youth are aware of the changing colors of America. They can see diversity on the faces of students in classrooms across the country. They want to change America, to make it more multicultural not only in demography but also in education, employment, and most importantly, in politics. They include young people of all races and ethnicities.

And, across America, now in Ohio and Texas, many of them are energetically and joyously seeking to “Barack” the vote. They are fired up by the fact that Obama has already made history as a viable African American candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. They are also wildly excited over the probability that, if nominated, he will become the winner of the presidential election.

For me, regardless of what will happen in the primaries or the general election, Obama is already a winner. He has challenged the Master Narrative of American history. He has made his complexion an American one, and his name an American-sounding one. He has opened a new identity not only for African Americans, but also for Asian Americans and Latino Americans. As the son of a father from Kenya, he has remembered his immigrant roots; as the son of a Caucasian mother, he has represented mixed race complexity. Like Tiger Woods, Obama has inspired bi-racial and multi-racial Americans everywhere to embrace their ethnic multiplicity.

Moreover, as a historian of multicultural America, I welcome Obama’s affirmation of America as a nation peopled by the world. He personifies diversity as America’s “manifest destiny.” A leader of vision, Obama has reached for the ties that bind -- Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory,” seeking to unite us as a diverse people belonging to one nation. Crossing racial, economic, and political boundaries, Obama has already inspired millions of us, both young and old, to be audacious in our hopes for changing America and the world.

Obama’s is a candidacy whose time has come.

Ronald Takaki is professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Little, Brown).
Phone: 510 527-1926
Email: rtakaki@berkeley.edu

Sí se puede cambiar (Yes, we can change)

2008-03-04T08:09:00.000-08:00

Good lyrics and more powerful visuals than will.i.am's video, which, by the way, has a new version and opportunities for you to get involved with the movement.

Singer/songwriter Andres Useche (30), an immigrant from Colombia whose father lives in Houston, will arrive in Texas on Saturday morning. He will volunteer on Latino outreach with California State Senator Gilbert Cedillo, who makes a cameo in Useche’s video.

Useche said of his new hit song, “I felt disillusioned and powerless for many years as I watched our government fail us. But Obama’s message awakened me. While volunteering for him, I experienced the spirit of renewed enthusiasm that has touched so many people, and this inspired me to write the song.” (From Reappropriate blog)

Going Incognegro

2008-03-04T07:12:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of the comic book, or of what the slightly higher-brow of us would call the graphic novel. Anyone who poo-poos the comic book as a medium for rotting kids' brains, well, they've obviously never read them and are poisoned by the homophobic rantings of Fredric Wertham. On my shelf is a small collection of graphic novels that are theologically relevant (we own more than 2,000 in all, but this collection has less than 30 titles in it as of yet), ranging from Preacher (and ER, you might like this one, it's a Suothern-fried commentary on the fundamentalist view of God, done in a style that's a cross between Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Kill Bill) to A Contract With God by graphic novel granddaddy Will Eisner to Art Spiegelman's Maus, a biography of a Holocaust survivor and first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

So I have to say that I'm really excited about reading Incognegro by Mat Johnson. Incognegro is the story of a biracial African American man, Zane Pinchback, who goes undercover as a caucasian to investigate black lynchings in the American South. The idea for the novel comes from Johnson's life:

"Well, I grew up ethnically and racially black, but looking white. The other pieces came to me: learning about Walter White, the birth of my twins, one of which looks more European, the other more African. ... It just seemed like a natural story to tell. And I always wanted this hero to be out there. Someone just like me, who turned what many see as an oddity into something priceless." (from interview at Racialicious)

I read a teaser page for Incognegro in the latest Jack of Fables (which is another fun series, spun off from the widly imaginative Fables by Bill Willingham). It depicted the aftermath of a lynching, the moment in which the men involved would line up to get their picture taken with the body (I realize this is a very link-happy post, but if you follow one link today, follow that one. It heads to a site for a book called Without Sanctuary by James Allen that shows this terrible part of our history. Watch the Flash movie. Note, fellow Oklahomans, how many of these photos were made in our state.). Zane, the novel's hero, circulates the crowd and takes names of those involved, posing as the assistant to the photographer taking orders of the photos for home delivery.

Incognegro is commentary on the social construction of race and its impact on all of us. Johnson stands those constructions on their heads, especially those of "passing" and the "Tragic Mulatto."

The rest of Zane’s subterfuge can be chalked up to philosophy and role playing. “Race doesn’t really exist,” he says. “Race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting. Playing roles. That’s what white folks never get. They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical. They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal and that everyone else is an odd deviation from form. That’s what makes them so easy to infiltrate.” (New York Times review)
...
"Well, I have a different concept of race, more distance. Yes, I wanted this to be a different story. This is not a Tragic Mulatto story. While I am interested in the form, I’m also interested in taking ownership of it, not borrowing it. I took the shame and judgement out of Passing, and tried to show it being used in a positive, practical light." (Interview on Racialicious)

Tomorrow is comic book day -- the day the week's new comics hit the shelves -- and I'm hoping my guy will have this so I can get read it. Personal review to come.

We who are strong

2008-03-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at church, Superpastor let fly with a smack-you-upside-the-head sermon, the challenging, prophetic kind of rhetoric that is the very reason I go to church, and especially this church. Yet again departing from the lectionary (for us UCCers, would have been John 9:1-41, the story about the blind man who gets kicked out of the synagogue) Superpastor instead picked a passage -- actually, just one verse -- to address an ethical issue that his congregation faced. Not only did he jump the lectionary, he jumped the NRSV entirely and read instead from the King James! He said he felt the older translation got at the heart of what the verse really meant over the NRSV's blander translation. Our scripture lesson yesterday was the King James Romans 15:1

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

Which, quite honestly, is the very essence of Paul's theology. This is Paul fighting the corrupting forces of empire with the power of community, held together by love. I've been looking for an NT verse for a tattoo in Greek, and this might be my next skin art.

Superpastor was speaking truth about a civic issue in our community, but this verse and this sermon also spoke to something person for me. You might have noticed that I've redecorated the blog a bit -- added some blogs and sites to the links on the right -- but also altered the name and my profile a tad.

This is a blog is one from my context, which is that of a biracial woman of Asian heritage. I grew up being called "half" my entire life, and when I reached adulthood I began to wonder exactly which "half" was my Asian half and which was my European one. Top or bottom? Left or right? Or is it scattered throughout my being so that when my parts become a sum, I add up to 50% Asian and 50% European? I'd love to take a DNA test, just to see if the numbers really do add up this way. But "half" sounds reductive -- I am half a person, half an identity based on who's doing the looking, because you know, I'm only half-Asian around other Europeans. And, of course, the only words available to describe my racial-ethnic identity were not polite. Ainoko and konketsu are two from my Asian side, but they both essentially mean bastard. And on my European side -- halfbreed, mutt, mongrel, and of course, being half-white doesn't keep you from being called a japchinkgookslantslope, go home, go back were you came from. Oh how we Other anyone who is Other.

So a few years ago I discovered the word hapa, a Hawaiian word that sort of means "half" but also means "mixed" but, I learned, essentially is used for anyone who is multiracial and of Asian heritage. It became really out there in the last year or so thanks to artist Kip Fulbeck's Hapa Project. All I get out of this identification is personal satisfaction of being able to name myself -- an important factor in good mental health -- because I have to explain what hapa means as much as I (still) have to go through the torturous conversations of Where Are You From No Really Where Are You Really From Oh I Thought That You Were Asian I Could Tell From Your Eyes You Look Like You're Indian Which Tribe Are You How Long Have You Been In This Country You Speak English Very Well De Donde Eres No Verdad?

Since I've been attending seminary, I've been opening up to new ways of looking at the world, and one of them is postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial criticism is, to put it not so simply, the voices of those who have been oppressed under colonialism, who have had their identities decided by people who don't know them, Others. Postcolonialism is the speaking to former colonial powers and current imperial powers by people who have traditionally been ignored, silenced, rubbed out. It calls to the carpet those who have privilege of any kind, and turns on its head the notions of who matters. It's the recognition that there are more ways of looking at the world that the one that we've been given. It's a fairly new field, academically speaking, but then it'd have to be, since colonialism's not yet in its death throes and empire is still a factor.

As you can guess, I'm quite enamored with this field.

There are moments when I read these works and collapse in relief because my context as a woman of color finally has a place to be heard. And there are moments when I burn in shame because my context as a woman of privilege hears and understands the human price of that privilege.

So the other night I was reading entries from Mixed Race America, a blog on race issues in America that I've added to my blogroll, and I came across a link to an essay by Wei Ming Dariotis, a scholar who had embraced and championed the world of the hapa, or mixed, individual, and had even proposed a field of study she called Hapa Studies. In fact, it was her Web site with its examination of the need for Hapa Studies that put me over to embracing the word for my own self identity. However, in this essay, she was giving up her identification with the word. Native Hawaiians who were hapas had been miffed for years that us mainlander mixed-race, non-Hawaiians had taken up the word as our own. I didn't know, or rather, I knew but thought it was a small, disgruntled group, much like the people who say that Barack Obama can't be black just because he says so, who want to jealously guard the racial barriers of self-identification.

Dariotis, however, came at the argument from a postcolonial angle.

Increasingly, many Native Hawaiian people object not only to the way the word has been changed in its grammatical usage, but also to how it is applied to anyone of mixed Asian and or Pacific Islander heritage, when it implies Native Hawaiian mixed heritage. This is not merely a question of trying to hold on to word that like many words encountered in the English language has been adopted, assimilated, or appropriated. This is a question of power. Who has the power or right to use language? Native Hawaiians, in addition to all of the other ways that their sovereignty has been abrogated, lost for many years the right to their own language through oppressive English-language education.

Given this history and given the contemporary social and political reality (and realty) of Hawaiian, the appropriation of this one word has significance deeper than many Asian Americans are willing to recognize. To have this symbolic word used by Asians, particularly by Japanese Americans, as though it is their own, seems to symbolically mirror the way Native Hawaiian land was first taken by European Americans, and is now owned by Japanese and Japanese Americans and other Asian American ethnic groups that numerically and economically dominate Native Hawaiians in their own land.

In Foregrounding Native Nationalisms: A Critique of Antinationalist Sentiment in Asian American Studies, Candice Fujikane argues that Asian Americans are "settlers" in Hawaii, and therefore "support American colonialism" even while trying to fight racism and discrimination in a "colonial context". She defines the term "settler" in opposition to "native," and argues that Asian Americans "refuse to see themselves as the beneficiaries of [the US] colonial system." Although Fujikane does not specifically mention the use of the word hapa by Asian Americans, her argument is certainly in line with the critique that Asian Americans have wrongfully appropriated the term in a way that disenfranchises Native Hawaiians from their culture.

I have to admit, this upset me quite a bit, and Dariotis mentions in her article the reactions of people who, like her, like me, love the word and have come to use it as a way to self-identify. I am something, it is this word that sums up all my parts without giving emphasis to one or another. Can't we all just share it? I asked. For heaven's sake, I'm not a colonizer, I'm not a power, why do I have to be the one to suffer, to compromise, when it wasn't me who did those oppressive deeds? I'm with you now! I want to keep this word that is my identity!

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

I am a woman of color. I am a woman of privilege. I choose to exist in tension between these two poles, and never fully claim one or the other, so that I never forget either. Even when I do, and oh how I do.

The heart of the gospel is this, that we live in community, bounded by love for one another and the love of God. To live in community is to be aware of the needs of others and to fulfill theirs before we fulfill our own. This means we give up privilege, we give up power, we give up comfort. We wear new markers of identity over our old ones, not excising them but adding to them and enriching them, so that we become new people under God's heavenly rule, in which there is no hunger or poverty, where there is no oppression that we live under or we live out. We do not live there yet, but we can see it, and we live like it's already happened in order to taste some of its blessings.

So I give up hapa. Admittedly, now I'm stuck for a word, because mixed is OK, multiracial/biracial is OK, but for me it lacks the power of hapa. So I've cheated a bit, gone with (h)apa, which for me will stand for (half) Asian Pacific Islander American, which is still my context and what I study (postcolonial and APA hermeneutics and theologies). But I can't say I'm wild about that either. But like the man said, we can't always get what we want. I'll keep it for now, and I'll keep my theological ears open for a more accurate title.

Moving and shaking

2008-02-25T13:23:00.000-08:00

Zip on over to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (one of my favorite interesting places to browse) for U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Lots of really interesting factoids there (who we religious -- and nonreligious -- folks are, where we are, what we are) but what Time.com chooses to focus on is all us unfaithful faithfuls, that is, all of us who started out as one religion or denomination and ended up as another.

(That's me, by the way. I started out as Roman Catholic, made a brief attempt at being a Methodist and finally got comfy in the UCC. And I do not guarantee that I will not stray in the future. Me and God, see, we have this open relationship, but God started it first!)

According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."

Or is that like futbol, where a draw means there's no losers, but there's no winners?

Anyway, does that mean that religion is like a house, you trade up whenever you need more space? Like marriage, you trade spouses when you get tired of feeling unloved? Would church/temple/mosque/synagogue-hopping bring us to a closer understanding of diversity, since we've all come from somewhere and we know what it's like across that line? Or is it like our teenage years, where when we become parents we immediately forget what our hormones were doing and all the drinking we did, as we admonish our children to say no to sex AND drugs (but rock'n'roll, which has become corporate pop, is OK now) -- that is, we immediately reject what we used to do in order to cling to what we have now?

Speaking of that, this weekend (as I said earlier, while I was skipping church in favor of reading textbooks at the bookstore) I browsed through a book called Choosing Your Faith (In a World of Spiritual Options) by Mark Mittelberg. I grabbed it off the table because I had this theory about where it was going to end up and I was hoping to be disappointed.

Mittelberg lays out the case for making a reasoned, conscious choice for be a part of the faith tradition you're in, which is not a bad thing and is, in fact, a good thing. Which is not to say that being a part of your faith tradition because you were raised in it is a bad thing, either. There's a lot to that, such as family ties, culture, psychic and spiritual comfort, which are all part of being human. Still, though, choice is nice (but very American, don't you think?). But, alas, the book did NOT disappoint me, because -- surprise, surprise -- the faith that Mittelberg is trying to lead his readers to "choose" is Christianity, particularly evangelical apologist Christianity. The title made me hopeful that maybe the idea was "I'm a Christian, it works for me, but here are arguments on why rationally choosing your faith is a good thing, regardless of what you choose." No, instead it was "Don't be X-brand of Christian because you were born that way, be my brand of Christian because mine is the only logical one!"

Ugh. Choice means just that -- choice. Not validating someone's decision and instead pushing what you want on someone hovers between persuasion and bullying. We get enough of that in politics, why bring it into faith?

Music break

2008-02-25T07:39:00.000-08:00

My theology professor played this before class the other day, right before we spent the 3-hour class period watching the documentary Race: The Power of Illusion, as a way to prep for the contextual theologies we'll be reading in the second half of the course. Race, class, gender, sexual identity and social location matter in how we talk about God, about human beings, about the entire world. As all theology is contextual (yes, even the classic, Old-Theology views we moderns inherited from the Greeks by way of medieval Europe) it's important to know our own contexts as well as the context of others. It seems kind of daunting and too diverse-for-unity sometimes, that everyone has their own lens through which to peer, darkly, at matters divine, but I think that's just a case of looking at the hole instead of the entire donut. Our contexts may differ, but we are all humans, and we all are under grace, which is the unconditional love of God which frees us to love and welcome others.

Anyway, I heard this song yesterday while I was at the bookstore, skipping church in favor of academic catch-up, and I thought I'd share it and its message, which is a pretty good one. Enjoy!

Sheryl Crow, "Out of Our Heads"
If you feel you wanna fight me
There’s a chain around your mind
When something is holding you tightly
What is real is so hard to find

Losing babies to genocide
Oh where’s the meaning in that plight
Can’t you see that we’ve really bought into
Every word they proclaimed and every lie, oh

If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts
If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts

Someone’s feeding on your anger
Someone’s been whispering in your ear
You’ve seen his face before
You’ve been played before
These aren’t the words you need to hear

Through the dawn of darkness blindly
You have blood upon your hands
All the world will treat you kindly
But only the heart can understand, oh understand

If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts
Children of Abraham lay down your fears, swallow your
tears and look to your heart

If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts
Children of Abraham lay down your fears, swallow your
tears and look to your heart

Every man is his own prophet
Oh every prophet just a man
I say all the women stand up, say yes to themselves
Teach your children best you can

Let every man bow to the best in himself
We’re not killing any more
We’re the wisest ones, everybody listen
‘Cause you can’t fight this feeling any more, oh anymore

If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts
Children of Abraham lay down your fears, swallow your
tears and look to your heart

If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads
And into our hearts
Children of Abraham lay down your fears, swallow your
tears and look to your heart

If I had words ...

2008-02-16T15:55:00.000-08:00

... to make a day for you
I'd give you the morning
golden and true
I would make this day
last for all time
and fill the night deep in moonshine
-- Farmer Hoggett, Babe

For an assignment for my pastoral counseling class, we've been asked to write a paper describing our metaphor for pastoral or Christian care. Of course, we've been inundated with shepherd images. Twenty-third Psalm this, Feed my sheep that, you know. You've read it (or you haven't, but you're not missing anything).

Quite honestly, I've got no real love for the shepherd metaphor. Nothing really against shepherds; I know they're cowboy-like -- the real kind that work for next to nothing in crappy conditions, the kind that get that for a job because it's either what their family does, or there's no other job in the world that they can get, or they are the kind of person who really does love the life. Think the protagonists in Brokeback Mountain and you'll have more of an idea of what the image of shepherd means to me. Or the shepherds in the deleted scenes of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Or the shepherds in Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels. Or the shepherd in The Alchemist. Or the shepherd in the short story Pecado de Omission de Ana Maria Matute. Wow, I just realized that there are lots of movies and books that feature shepherds.

Anyway, but in christianity, we romanticize shepherds to make the 23rd Psalm imagery work; yes, the shepherd is a good one because it overturns the idea of what a messiah was supposed to be back in that day. But the thing I just can't get past is that the shepherd-sheep relationship is typically hierarchical, a top-down affair in which the bleating little shit-covered mincing piles of fluff are managed by a person with a staff and sling/gun that may or may not actually give a damn about them. And, for all the verses about the shepherd loving the sheep so much that s/he'll leave 99 to go look for the lost one -- at the end of the day, the sheep are a commodity. They will be eaten, shorn or sold, and the care that they're given is primarily based on the price that they will fetch.

As far as pastoral/Christian care metaphors go, that doesn't do a lot for me. Considering all the evils that people in power do in church (men to women, women to women, adults to children, one religion or denomination to the other) I think I've had enough metaphors that are rooted in power. Maybe it's OK that in the end it's God that eats, shears or sells us, for whatever those metaphors might mean to God, but I'm not a fan for applying them to a human being.

So it occurred to me that maybe we need less shepherds and more sheep-pigs.

If you haven't seen the movie Babe, you should go out and rent it immediately. It was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1995, and it's so good it'll make you cry. The sheep-pig, I realized upon another viewing of the movie to confirm my notion of refashioning the shepherd metaphor to include a cuddly little oinker, shows a different view of the shepherd-sheep relationship, even from the movie's opening line:

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.

Instead of sticking to the barnyard script of dogs have one purpose and sheep another, the ousider Babe befriends both sheep and sheep dogs, and becomes a sheep-pig and herds to sheep by treating them not with aggression or intimidation, but with respect and kindness. This, in turn, catches the attention of Farmer Hoggett, who comes to treat his piggy prodigy with the same love and regard and upends the wisdom of the world to a new, inclusive idea.

If you think I'm pushing the image just a tad, check out what the director, George Miller (you know, from the Mad Max movies) said about the theological dimensions of the film:

I must say that Babe is much closer to a Christ figure than Max. Particularly in Babe (dir. Chris Noonan), he does change the established order. In fact, in Babe, Pig in the City, he's much more a Christ figure because he turns the other cheek. He goes to save from drowning the one who was about to kill him. But in Babe, he relinquishes his self-interest in order to save Farmer Hoggett [James Cromwell] and to help fulfill the dream for Farmer Hoggett and to show that a pig can, indeed, be a champion sheepdog. He does it in part for himself but it's mainly for the farmer. Yes, he's closer to Christ— not that a pig should be Christ but he's more Christ-like than Max!

So that'll be my pastoral metaphor, not the Good Shepherd, but the Good Sheep-Pig. And it brings me to what I really meant to post about all along, that the above quote came from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, which along the Journal of Religion & Film is one of my new favorite academe places to visit. If you're interested, I'll post the paper after I get it back. But what's your metaphor for Christian care? Let me know. Or, what's your favorite shepherd movie or book or story? Or your favorite movie/book that seemingly doesn't tie into a spiritual message but you've done it?

More about money

2008-02-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine who hosts the Border Reflections blog turned me on to this post at J. Blake Huggins' blog. It's a graphic that compares a country's wealth vs. its religiosity.

Any thoughts on what my contribute to this trend? Do you think it's accurate? Of course, I'm not exactly sure what the criteria are. What is religiosity? How often you go to church? Your actual feelings about the divine? Whether you're an actual member of a denomination?

To be honest, I've got no idea. I have ones that would probably border on being snarky, but I'm trying to get away from that on about half the things I think about. I am surprised that the U.S. is in the middle of the religiosity axis, though. We boast about being so religious, with church attendance figures in the 70s or something, the last I heard or read. (Of course, I might be pulling that number outta my butt.)

Grace, or your money back

2008-02-13T15:06:00.000-08:00

LifeChurch's 3-Month Tithing Challenge:

I would like to test God's faithfulness by accepting the Three-Month Tithe Challenge. I agree that for the three-month period I state below, my household will contribute to God, through LifeChurch.tv, a tithe equal to 10% of our income. At the end of the three-month period, if I am not convinced of God's faithfulness to bless my life as a result of my obedience to His Word, then I will be entitled to request a refund of the full amount of contributions made during that 90-day period.

I used to do refunds at Wally World, so when I heard someone talking about this, the first words out of my mouth were, "Do you need a receipt?"

But I have to say, I'm utterly appalled at the idea of getting a money-back guarantee on your tithing. I know, I know, they're just daring people to say that God didn't bless their lives. And quite honestly, how would you know? Greek translation this week was Romans 5:1-11, which includes the lovely thought, "We boast in our troubles, since we know that troubles bring endurance, and endurance, character, and character -- hope" (my translation). And it seems that every time someone in the Bible gets the full portion of God's attention, shit happens. Life doesn't get easy for you when your living by God's word; ask a prophet.

And yet, the person kept trying to convince us that if you give your money, it's your sign that you're giving your full trust in God. That you're honoring your blessings by giving of your firstfruits, which is harvested out of your bank account.

Bull. Oh, and shit.

Since when are our blessings only about money? Since when are our first fruits of harvest financial? Blessings in my life since I decided to trust in God and stop trying to control things are, actually, a lot less money, a lot more frustration, but a huge cracking opening of my worldview about myself and the world. And trust me that God gets 10 percent of that at least. My first fruits include my love and solidarity with all people, but especially those in the margins. God definitely will get 10 percent of that, if not more. Capitalist-driven christianity has got to go. I honor God with the things that mean things to me, and I tell you, money is pretty far down on the list.

Thoughts?

From the wires

2008-02-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

From AFP:

Whites to be minority in U.S. by 2050

Immigration will drive the population of the United States sharply upward between now and 2050, and will push whites into a minority, projections by the Pew Research Center showed Monday.

More than 80 percent of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving in the country and their US-born children, who will make up nearly one in five Americans by 2050 compared with one in eight in 2005, it said.

Whites, who currently make up around two-thirds of the US population, will become a minority (47 percent) by 2050, the report said.

The Hispanic population, currently the largest minority group, will triple in size and double in percentage terms from 14 percent in 2005 to 29 percent in 2050, the report said.

The Asian population will roughly double in percentage terms, from five percent to nine percent, while the black population will remain static at around 13 percent.

I think we need a new word than "minority." The word is generally used to mean people who are numerically less, but also means people who are socially/politically less powerful. I imagine that the power part of the definition won't change, or will it? I also wonder what the mixed-race numbers will be, and what impact we mixed folks might have, if any. I was all for the change on the Census that let us check all races that apply, as I was tired of feeling like I was lying on every government form, but I'm also pretty concerned at the way the numbers of mixed-race people are used to de-power and divide racial groups. I also wonder if by 2050 the default for "American" will still mean "whiteperson," (ala Sam Huntington) or will we finally let that go and accept the diversity that this country is?

From Bloomberg:

Obama Drive Gets Inspiration From His White Mom Born in Kansas

Barack Obama's mother was most at home a world away from her Midwest roots, trekking the old Silk Road or arranging small loans for weavers in Indonesia.

" I'm so tired of seeing her described as just a white woman from Kansas,'' says Bronwen Solyom, 63, who first met Ann Dunham in the 1970s when they were graduate students in anthropology at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. "She
was much more than that.''

Her son, who may become the first black U.S.
president, displays a penchant for defying convention and forging his own path that those who knew Dunham well trace back to her arrival with her family in Hawaii after high school. Although the son has channeled the rebelliousness of
his early years, he remains impatient with customs, such as the political dictate that he should wait his turn for national office.

"She certainly gave us her open-mindedness and our desire to challenge ourselves with new vistas and perceptions,'' says Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister from Dunham's second
marriage to an Indonesian businessman.

Too bad the headline writer wasn't paying attention to the actual point of the story -- Obama's mama wasn't just a whitelady from Kansas, she was a multifaceted, world-trekking, adventurous individual who apparently shook off labels like dust from her intrepid feet. Never mind about Barack, I'm inspired by his mom!

It's a small world

2008-02-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

Ha!

Japanese town of Obama has a new hero

In the coastal city of Obama, about 300 miles northwest of Tokyo, some residents formed a support group called "Group that Supports Barack Obama Voluntarily" in early February. Of course, none of the group's original 18 members in this city,
with a population of a little more than 32,000, are qualified to cast a vote in the election.

View Larger Map

How I love the Internets!

Today's wisdom brought to you by the letter ñ

2008-02-09T08:12:00.000-08:00

Taken at the CCAMYN guest house for migrants in Altar, México. CCAMYN is staffed and supported by volunteers, with the blessing and prayers of its Catholic community, which prays for migrants daily. At CCAMYN, migrants preparing to make the dangerous journey across the U.S. desert borders are given information on what to expect when they cross, food, a few days shelter, and clothing. They are told about the dangers in the desert, of the coyotes, of the exploitation they might come across. Workers take information and data from migrants on human rights abuses and criminal acts. And families of migrants who have lost touch with their loved ones often turn to CCAMYN to help track their last known movements.

Translated: "If we don't think differently, nothing will change."

Business leaders in Oklahoma are calling for the repeal of the House Bill 1804, which has been called the harshest anti-illegal immigration legislation in the country. These business leaders cite negative economic impacts on the communities -- essentially employers are not able to find workers, retailers are not able to find buyers for their stuff.

I hate to agree with Randy Terrill, the author of the bill, but I believe he has something there when he says, "The moral dilemma for them is that they are defending the functional equivalent of modern-day slavery."

An economic argument is the least firm foundation on which to build opposition to this law. This is old thinking.

We need new thinking. We need to start putting value on human lives that isn't economic. Where do we start?

Truly inclusive?

2008-02-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me the other day that the problem with "inclusive" thinking is the sure certainty that the other person who isn't of the inclusivist's faith tradition is welcome in the inclusivist's afterlife, but the inclusivist doesn't necessarily conceive of the fact that the she is might be welcome in the other person's afterlife.

Do we truly respect another person's faith or the person himself if we carry around the assumption that our worldview is the right one? Is toleration the same as respect?

I will admit, my christian agnosticism/apatheism leads me to be pretty suspicious that it comes down to Jesus alone at the end (Why not Buddha? Why not Odin?), and I'll also admit that I'll claim christianity simply out of sheer laziness: Seeing as that's the religion that most influenced my worldframe, I've decided to work with that instead of going out to find another one. But I also find myself a little excited that maybe just maybe it's Buddha's compassion that saves me instead of God's. I'm good with that, too. Not very "Christian" of me, but I reserve the right to redefine what christian means for me.

Of course that makes me wonder where we draw the line between faith and blindness, between skepticism and over-thinking-it.

Yes We Can

2008-02-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

Will.I. Am, on why he recorded Yes We Can:

When you are truly inspired..
magic happens...
incredible things happen...
love happens..
(and with that combination)

"love, and inspiration"

change happens...

"change for the better"
Inspiration breeds change...

"Positive change"...

no one on this planet is truly experienced to handle the obstacles we face today...
Terror, fear, lies, agendas, politics, money, all the above...
It's all scary...

Martin Luther King didn't have experience to lead...
Kennedy didn't have experience to lead...
Susan B. Anthony...
Nelson Mandela...
Rosa Parks...
Gandhi...
Anne Frank...
and everyone else who has had a hand in molding the freedoms we have and take for granted today...

no one truly has experience to deal with the world today...

they just need "desire, strength, courage ability, and passion" to change...
and to stand for something even when people say it's not possible...

Opio Toure

2008-02-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

Former Oklahoma state legislator Opio Toure died today.

Opio was an amazing man, one of the most genuine people I've ever had the privilege to know. I met him the first time about twelve years ago when I was a cub reporter in Muskogee, covering his visit to some group or another, and being utterly stupid about how to spell his name, but he patiently spelled it out again and again for me.

We met again a little more than three years ago, at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey. We were part of a tour group traveling through holy sites in Turkey for an interfaith education trip. Opio joined us late, and I introduced myself by mentioning that previous incident. Of course, he didn't remember me, but during our 10 days abroad, we talked a lot and got to know each other. He told me about his grandsons, whom he spent time with every week. He encouraged me in my studies and told me that I needed to go to seminary. And he followed through; he called the admissions office of my seminary, told them to call me, and then did. And the rest, as they say, is history. And I am in seminary because of him.

What amazed me about Opio was his presence, his utter inability to ever know a stranger or an enemy. In his time in the legislature, he believed in being bipartisan, of crossing lines to do the right thing. In Turkey, he borrowed the tiny Turkish phrasebook I had brought along and learned all the words he'd need to know to get around: hello, thank you, grandpa, grandkids, tea. Unable to join the group for the most strenuous activities like scaling hillsides to visit one fabled place or another, he would sit down with some tea, pull out pictures of his family and share himself with others and invite them to share themselves. I remember thinking I wanted to be like Opio when I grew up.

I knew last month that he was in the hospital, but I put off visiting. I planned to drop him a card, but I forgot. It never occurred to me that Opio wouldn't be here. Sick as he was, he was one of the most vital people I've ever known.

Thank you, Opio, for bringing me to seminary, for being a light to drew people and showed the way. I wont' forget you again.

"A carpenter, worked a miracle, his name was J.C. ..."

2008-02-02T16:59:00.000-08:00

(Prizes to the person who knows from which animated TV show I grabbed the line that is this post's title.)

When I was about five or six, I remember standing in the Safeway with my mom, sounding out the big words on the bright orange posters hanging from the windows. "Mommy," I asked, "What's inflation mean?"

She answered, "It's when prices go up, and it's Jimmy Carter's fault."

(Mom, you should know, voted for Reagan when she became a naturalized U.S. citizen about four years later, and a framed picture of the Great Communicator hung in our den for as long as we lived in that house. She probably still has it, I haven't checked.)

Despite my upbringing, I always liked Carter, probably because we pronounced nuclear the same way (nuke-u-lar), but a few years ago I read his book, Our Endangered Values, and ended up being a huge fan of his. Between that, his work with Habitat for Humanity, the Carter Center's dedication to mediating peace and ensuring fair and democratic elections worldwide just puts him over the top for me. You go, J.C.!

And now, he's taking on his biggest challenge: Baptists.

(Carter) has spearheaded the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, an unprecedented three-day gathering of more than 10,000 Baptists that began Wednesday (Jan. 30).

"It's hard to find an example of a Baptist layperson who has done more to put feet to his faith than President Carter," said Mercer University President Bill Underwood, who started planning the Atlanta gathering with Carter two years
ago.

"I don't think there's anyone in the world who could have brought this diverse array of Baptists together ... other than President Carter because he is so respected for the work that he has done."

The former president continues to teach Sunday school about 35 or 40 times a year at his Maranatha Baptist Church, a small congregation near his home in Plains, Ga., which supports the mission programs of both the Southern Baptist Convention and the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

"Whenever a Sunday comes and I'm in Plains, then I teach," he said in an interview.

On Wednesday, in an emotional moment, Carter said the celebration was "the most momentous event" in his religious life and urged a renewed focus on the key aspects of Baptist faith, including salvation and unity.

"Unfortunately, the arguments and even the animosities that exist among Christians are like a cancer that is metastasizing within the body of Christ," he said.

Bruce Prescott with Oklahoma Mainstream Baptists is blogging from the Celebration of New Baptist Covenant, and you can keep up with it here.

Morality, Men and You

2008-01-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

Great bit today on Talk of the Nation about how morality is hard-wired into our brains, and how that, if morality is part of our programming, doesn't mean that morality still isn't moral.

Of course you had a person call in and say, "Well, God decides our morality anyway." The guest, Steven Pinker, tore that argument apart with a great reply that's part of his essay that was published in the New York Times:

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not -- if his dictates are divine whims -- why should we take them seriously? Suppose that
God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others -- if a command to
torture a child was never an option -- then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

He also gets very Lakoff-ian about the moral left-right divide: libs focus on fairness, convervos focus on authority and yadda-yadda.

There's a lot about us human beings that are hard-wired into our brains and our bodies. Love, for example, is completely biological, that doesn't mean it's not romantic or meaningful. I think that we in the West, and we in religion, have let this body-spirit divide go on for far too long. We need to reclaim the body and stop regarding it as secondary or superfluous to spirit, and, in that same vein (literally) stop letting the body run the show of the mind by ignoring all the influences that it does have on how we think.

I've been considering the concept lately that we can't get to the spirit unless we go through the body. Maybe that's a reason for the Incarnation.

Also on Talk of the Nation there was a discussion about the "Child-Man" -- you know, the 26-year-old guy who lives in a ratty house with his buddies and plays X-Box all day who may or may not be employed. You usually see these guys featured prominently on Judd Apatow movies. Neil Conan talked with a woman who wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News called "The Child-Man" where she takes these guys to task for not being "grown-ups." They talked a bit on the radio about how the Child-Man might be a reaction to feminism, which created new roles for women and men are reacting to those roles. They act that way, she says, because we let them. Now it's time for them to start acting like adults -- husbands, fathers, good jobs, mortgage, nice lawn.

Give me a crappin' break.

How is creating such a tightly defined role for men any different that creating tightly defined roles for women that revolved around wife, mother, good helpmeet, nice clean house, etc.? Wouldn't we feminists be all up in arms if someone tried to decide what it is to be an adult woman? What it is to be acceptable? I started leaving those ideas behind me a loooong time ago. My house is a pit, I'm opting out of motherhood, and while I love my husband and will be with him forever, I'm not really happy with the idea of "marriage." I create my own ideas of being a woman. I do this because I let me. And I'm happy about it.

Maybe the whole "Child-Man" thing is young men reacting against the very idea this author is trying to pigeonhole them into, that there is one definition of being a man, that society has a tendency to determine a man's worth by his paycheck and material goods than by his heart, his personality, his inner self. Maybe they're in the process of throwing off the old patriarchal shackles that imprisoned/imprisons and hurt them as much as it did/does us and creating a new definition of manhood. The world has changed, women have changed, but men are still pushed into these old, archaic roles. Maybe it's time for new definitions.

(Also, quite honestly, there really seems like a whole "The guy I want to marry refuses to marry me and only wants to play Wii all the time! How can I make him into what I want?" thing going on. Jeez, life's too short to try to remake a guy into what you want to marry. Here's a hint -- don't go out with that guy. Or, if you do and you love him, love all of him. Encourage him to do what he really wants to do, what will really make him happy. That'll help make him the real man that he is inside. And get real, women who have this kind of contempt for men have always considered them to be nothing more than children anyway: "He can't survive a day without me, look he can't dress himself, he'd be nothing if I weren't behind me." This "Child-Man" thing is just saying it out loud in the worst, snarkiest way.)

I think society is what needs to grow up, and not these guys. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a nice steady job, but if your guy has one and he's a good companion to you, who gives a damn if he PlayStations and drinks beer in his free time? Hell, so would I if I had the game system. Scoot over, guys, give me the Wii-mote. I'll join you.

Faith in things unseen, but not in things staring you in the face

2008-01-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

So yesterday at church, the worship-leader gave a little mini-sermon about how if we just went all totalitarian on humanity's ass, we could save ourselves from global warming. I'm sure he didn't mean it this way, I'm sure he meant well, but among the litany of solutions to climate change he recited were requiring that everyone have a hybrid car, no one be allowed to have more than two children, reducing square footage of homes, and ending the practice of attending your favorite sporting events, since HDTV will make it more enjoyable --and realistic -- to watch on TV than attend anyway.

Even though I agree with most of those ideas, I found myself raising an eyebrow at the strident call for enforcement. Heck, I purposefully didn't have kids so that you can. But outside of the fact that there's no money yet to pay for any programs to make changes (establishment of light rail, increasing waterway commercial use, more help on making hybrid cars and renewable-energy affordable for everyone) and that we'd have to start yesterday to even have a prayer of making a dent, I also know that this being Oklahoma, which is probably still a Democratic state because we're all stubborn like donkeys, people round these parts don't cotton to anyone telling them what to do.

But therein lies the fine line, between forcing people and inspiring them. (As one of my seminary pals says, "I like to grab people by the short hairs and tell them that if they'd stop struggling and just follow along, it'll hurt less.") The trick is making people want to do something, or make them they came up with the idea themselves. There's also the problem dealing with perceived vs. real risk, specifically that we under-react to long-term or risks or risks that are slow to threaten us, while we over-react to immediate ones. The trick is to make people view the far-off as a now.

Quite honestly, who better than organized religion, most of which specialize in eschatological anticipation (the Abrahamic ones, anyway), to get the world off its collective butt to face climate change head on? They're pretty good at turning dispair into hope, at getting people to think about intangibles. Also, there (should be) no conflict of interest and they're multinational.

I know many organized religions are already starting to take this issue on, but how do we ramp it up? What do we focus on, how does the message get out there? What else/more/other should religion be doing to deal with climate change?

Peace, be still

2008-01-27T15:18:00.000-08:00

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

I actually roused myself to get to church today, and I'm glad I did for SuperPastor gave a very well-crafted sermon from this passage, and being the smart guy that he is, asked the question that I had always asked when I read this: To whom was Jesus speaking? Of course, both religious and secular fundamentalists use this passage to point out the power (or not) that Jesus had (or couldn't possibly have) over the weather. But SuperPastor made a very good point: Even though Jesus was looking at the waves, he was probably talking to the disciples, and because they're Mark's disciples they're pretty clueless. As he was revving up to make his point, I could just see the scene: Guys in a boat, a little rain falls, a little wind picks up, and in their minds it gets rainier and windier and terrible because it's not the weather that's scaring them, but the journey itself. (And the sea, after all, it's a symbol of chaos and the depths of the subconsciousness, don't you know.) What's scaring them is, as they say, all in their heads.

And SuperPastor hit this point and hit it well, that we are afraid of the chaotic seas within and without, and that Jesus isn't talking to the waves but to us. Peace, be still. There is nothing to fear, no hay nada que temer.

I found this sermon rather relevant because it's been a rather fear-filled week for me, mostly in my imagination but also in a few real-world moments. When I realized that our beloved dog, Buster, was not going to ever get better and in fact was probably slipping away from us, I could not concentrate and had to remind myself at several points before we took him to the vet that there was no point in obsessing about Buster until the moment came. I worried about doing well in the worship service I was helping to lead. I worried about doing well when school starts. I worry nearly every day that I may lose my job. I worry about money. It never ends. I worry that if I do well people will (as they have in the past and sometimes do in the present) make me a target of envy or scorn, or if I do poorly they will (as they have in the past and sometimes do in the present) bully or discard my worth. The things that are only ephemeral worries, I do nothing but grow insular, grow cold to the world around me, by letting them plague me. The things that are true threats, I do nothing but make myself incapable of dealing with them.

So Peace, Be Still, is a good thing to keep in mind.

SuperPastor listed several things along these lines that "Peace, Be Still" is good advice for. But it occurred to me that this is one of the things where the personal and the social do not meet. Yes, many of our fears are in our heads. But what about the ones that aren't? Most of us are very lucky, and our fears are not as terrible as we imagine. But the less agency you have over your own life, the more real-world your fears are. An abused wife fears for her life and that of her children. An person oppressed because of race or ethnicity or orientation fears rejection and violence at the hands of those around them. Those who are not U.S. citizens or are children of immigrants have many reasons to be afraid, whether they're here legally or not, in an environment where you're expected to prove your status if you have the wrong name, the wrong look, the wrong language.

I think the message of Peace, Be Still is meant for those of us who have a tenuous control over our lives, so that we might do what we may to have solidarity with our sisters and brothers who need it. And Peace, Be Still, is given to those in peril so that they can find shelter, solace, family in the family that God through Jesus calls us to be.

Things to do ...

2008-01-26T15:02:00.000-08:00

... before you make your worship-leader debut.

Make sure you've had enough to drink so you're not all dry-mouthed before it's your turn to lead the congregation in prayer or read from scripture.
But don't drink too much water so you don't really need to make a pit stop in the middle of the service.
Practice your reading and make sure you can pronounce all the weird names Dr. Luke has inserted into his stirring tale of the Adventures of Paul the Evangelizing Tent-Maker.
If wearing a skirt, make sure the elastic in your foundation apparel isn't preparing to snap mid-reading.
If it does, casually shift position to keep them from making their debut in front of the congregation along with you.
Try to pretend like you've sung that hymn before. Be thankful for various "Elvis sings Gospel" K-Tel albums that were advertised on TV on Saturday afternoons, which helped inform your Catholic upbringing.

Don't ask if I've discovered any of this from personal experience. Them that know don't tell and yaddayadda.

Obituary

2008-01-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

Our dog, Buster, died yesterday.

In his 17 years of life -- at least 2 if not 3 years past the usual sell-by date for a dog his size (the chart on the wall at the vet's office said he was 96 in human years) -- Buster achieved the highest honor a dog could: He was a good dog. Most dogs, if they're loved by their people, manage this achievement, and Buster was no exception, earning that honor at least on a daily basis, so much so that it became a second name: Buster's-a-good-dog-yes-he-is! Among his good-dog achievements:

He protected the house against would-be intruders, scaring them off with a thundering bark that sounded much more vicious than his actual nature. Which is a good thing, because we're fairly certain that if said would-be intruders had actually entered the house, Buster would have employed another good-dog trait, which was ...
He was a cordial host to houseguests. Buster knew that to properly greet welcomed guests demanded a tail-wagging hello, a sniff of the hand or foot, and to hang back and casually wait for pettings and good-boy noises, which usually followed.
He would fly off the bed or couch or pillow, wherever he happened to be, to enthusiastically greet us when we came in, no matter how long or short we'd been gone.
He loved his cats and exercised them daily by playing rambuctiously with them.
He guarded the lawn from squirrels. Among his limited but impressive vocabulary was the phrase, "Buster, get the squirrel!"
He was a good companion in happy and sad moments.
He walked on the curb instead of the street or the grass whenever he went out for a walk.
He cleaned the floors from any food items that happened to be dropped there during preparation.
He ensured the washing of bedding by rubbing his nose in blankets and sheets enthusiastically. He had an itchy face, you see, and enjoy scratches and rubbings.
He was a rare breed, a Dandie Dinmont Terrier, who always attracted the attention and questions of "What kind of dog is that?" whenever he went into the public.

Buster was found at a 7-11 when he was 3 by a past family member, and lived with various members of the family before coming to live with us. He came into our life in 1999, about the time that we decided to become a family ourselves. In the last couple of years, Buster began to slow down. We chalked it up to age and were more gentle with him, demanding less energy as he seemed to demand less time and attention from us. It worked, because our lives had become busier, and we always tried to eke out time to spend with him.

But in the last year or so, Buster changed. He slept more, stopped playing, shied away from pettings and hugs. He wandered aimlessly around the house. He demanded to go out constantly, yet never seemed to remember what he had gone out for. He forgot his name. He began to have accidents right after we took him out, sometimes right in front of us. And he stopped eating. In the past, if he didn't like his food, we'd bring the cat in and put her next to his bowl, and he'd run over and gobble it up just so she didn't get it, even if he hated it. Not so anymore. He even lost interest in human food. We did some research and found out that he likely was suffering from Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, essentially Doggie Alzheimer's. And even though there are drugs now that might help him, he's 96 in human years and ...

We took Buster to the vet yesterday, on one of his good days, where he actually stood still for us to pet him for a little while before we went. She is a fabulous vet who asked Buster, "Are we going to heaven today?" and explained to us that his brain cells just weren't touching anymore. And so. Buster died yesterday at the age of 17, surrounded by his family and a vet who loved him, too. Because you couldn't know Buster without loving him.

I am taking Buster's death rather hard, even though I know it was a good decision. We've been crying off and on all day yesterday and still today. Buster is no longer in the house. He did not wake me up this morning by walking across the hardwood floor, his toenails clicking like a Keith Moon drum rant as he raced into the kitchen for breakfast. He is not sitting next to me while I type this. He will not greet me when I come home. There's a Dandie-shaped hole in the universe today, in the universe that is my heart.

I find myself wishing that I could look in the Bible or some comforting holy text for something that would help. But aside from some passages about God's good creation or God seeing the sparrow fall, there really isn't anything that speaks specifically to this. After all, dogs get a fairly bum rap in the scriptures. Get as allegorical as you want, but when you get down to it, they're documents trapped in their own time and space, which did not look at dogs as members of the family they way we did. Most religions view that, in fact, all dogs do not go to heaven, though they do recognize how important pets are to us, but I would have to say that that's one of many things organized religion is wrong about, yet another example of how human-centric rather than God-centric we make our religion and our religion makes us. If all of creation is good, and if heaven is the place of ultimate goodness, why wouldn't a pet that is of the good creation be in heaven?

Of course, I also run into the problem that I'm as agnostic about heaven as I am about God; lacking personal experience, I do not, cannot and probably will never know for certain that there is either a God or heaven. However, I highly suspect and hope that they exist, so I return to the more accurate definition of pisteou, and I trust that they're there. In the great roulette table of life, I placed my bet on Probably. Which is magenta, by the way. I hope that there is a heaven, a Matheson-like Summerland where all that makes me happy is laid out like a buffet before me, and Buster is there because I'm part of his happyness buffet, too. And in fact, we're already there, because that's how eternity works, and all that keeps us from knowing eternity is time.

But that's just a hope, and doesn't help me much in daily life here on earth. The only evidence that there is of God outside of personal experience is love. Let's dispense with all the bullshit on whether it's agape or philo or eros (leave it to the damn ancient Greeks to make Love a trinitarian concept, too) and just go with Love. Love's a tricky thing, a nasty continuum you travel along that will take you to blessed heights and crippling suffering, sometimes all at once. Love demands sacrifice and sometimes makes it easy, but more often than not it demands the sacrifice that will lead you to suffer the most for the good of that which you love. I had thought that Buster was just getting old, that he just needed more care, more time, more attention, and I was willing to sacrifice whatever I needed to in order to make him happy and comfortable. But in the end, the sacrifice I had to make to make him happy and comfortable was what hurt me the most.

I'm not a big fan of the crucifixion narratives, as 12 years of Catholic Lenten practices should scare that out of anyone (I was a terribly sensitive child, and Passion Plays will do a number on you when you're sensitive). People (melgibson, cough!) seem to like them, and focus on that bizarrely medieval theology of substitution atonement, that Jesus suffering on the cross was what cleaned our sinful slates and made us right enough to go to heaven. Whatever. Honestly, I don't think that the crucifixion was only about Jesus and what he suffered, and making it so removes the most important part, the love. Not the love God so had for the world that he sent his son to suffer and die stuff, but the love that a peasant quasi-teacher had for the least of those around him. The love that led him to defy the society around him that had become an I-me-mine world, to stand up and say, "It's all of us or none of us," even knowing that such steps surely would lead to his death. The love of a God who sees every sparrow in God's good creation fall who surely was there at that death. And, the part that gets left out, the love in the people who witnessed the death, who suffered because not only did Jesus love them, but they loved Jesus, too. I always feel like they get left out, that they're the co-starring players in this paschal drama. It is not just the love that God had for the world, but also the love that the world had for God and each other and this guy named Yeshua. A mobius strip, going from one end to another, never singular, always in relationship, a continuum that brings you to blessed highs and crippling suffering.

This is very deep for an obituary for my dog, but the old saying is true, If my dog isn't in heaven, then it ain't heaven. Buster was a good dog. We loved our dog, and we know that to the best of his ability, he loved us, too. Love is Love.

And wherever you've gone and wherever we might go
It don't seem fair, you seemed to like it here...
Your light's reflected now, reflected from afar
We were but stones. Your light made us stars

A brief foray into politics ...

2008-01-21T07:52:00.001-08:00

Chuck Norris says McCain is too old

NAVASOTA, TEXAS -- Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president. "I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president
would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," Norris said. At 67, he is four years younger than McCain, who will be 72 in August.

Wow, that's totally not funny. I don't get it ... But then, "Contrary to popular belief, America is not a democracy, it is a Chucktatorship" is not really funny either ... although "There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live" explains Huckabee's thoughts on intelligent design ...

Walk a Mile in My Shoes

2008-01-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

Recently, NPR's This American Life did a piece on the misunderstandings that arise when ignorant Americans attempt to engage with the Muslim world, especially when that world is in our world. Which it is.

Shouting Across the Divide - This American Life

“A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire."

Pay special attention to Act I, "One of These Things is Not Like the Other" for a very very clear example of why we keep religion out of school. And, for those keeping score, the gotdang candy cane does NOT symbolize how Jesus' blood saves all believers. It's also a very clear example of what little monsters children are, especially if their parents are big monsters-in-the-closet. Closet monsters are people who hide their monsterness -- bigotry, superiority, self-righteousness that excludes anyone who isn't like them -- behind the thin plywood door of well-meaning, well-bred bullshit. When I was a kid, I got harassed every December 7 because I had the audacity to be Japanese. Which, by the way, sucked because it was my mom's birthday. So imagine, if you will, 12 years of playground bullying and desperate explanations on how I and my family were NOT the enemy in a war that had ended 30 years before but somehow was still being fought in the minds of those around me. And afterward, cake and presents and hugs for my Japanese mom. September 11 is the new Pearl Harbor Day, in which American Muslim kids across the country get to go through what I went through, except there's still a war going on. Which means that 50 years from now, their kids will still be fighting that battle on the playgrounds.

I'm going to go all theological on you and point this out: When the lawyer asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied with the story of the Good Samaritan. The point of that story was this: You do not have neighbors until you become a neighbor yourself. The neighbor to the wounded man was the one who treated him with mercy. So. Who are our neighbors? It's not up to those who are different in our communities to prove that they're "harmless" or "worthy" to be our neighbors. God calls us to treat those around us with mercy and love, to build a community, to neighbor to others. It starts with us. If you have kids, teach them this lesson well. Come September 11 and December 7, hope that they'll be be good neighbors.

Follow the link ...

2008-01-14T14:56:00.001-08:00

Is God our cosmic bellhop or our king?

I have to admit, I don't care for "king," but this is the first time the word has been made palatable to me, as far as Christian vocabulary goes.

Discuss ...

Dear God ...

2008-01-14T13:57:00.001-08:00

I've been tapped to write a prayer for an upcoming special service, and I'm rather freaked out about it.

I'm not a prayer. Rather, I'm not a pray-er. I don't pray. Growing up Catholic under the guidance of a converted-from-Buddhism parent who more enthusiastic than precise, I never got the knack of extemporaneous praying. All our prayers were contained in the handy-dandy little prayerbook Fr. Whatsisname had given to us upon First Communion. I can Hail Mary and Act of Contrition with the best of them, but that's recitation at worst and meditation at best. I personally gave up praying when I realized that I was either asking for shit, or thanking God for shit in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with admiration. As Shug Avery says, "More than anything God love admiration. ... I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it."

Recently, while on an educational trip with some classmates from seminary, I was asked to pray before we set out on our journey one morning. No way, I said. We had a very very wild driver, and the last thing I wanted to do was be the one who said the prayer that didn't bless us properly enough to get us home in one piece. Not that that's how prayer works, but that was in my head. I don't believe in voodoo, either, but I'll be respectful to the voodoo mistress, lest I wake up turned into a bat or something some morning. Probably the closest I've gotten to actually worded prayer was the other day when we came out of the mall to find that one of our tires had gone flat. We got the car all jacked up and the spare was ready, but the tire would not come off the car. I made a small appeal to the tire-changing kami, but you know, there are a million million kami, and it's quite possible I got my divinity wires crossed and sent my appeal to the wrong one, maybe the "I want to walk around in Wal-Mart for four hours" kami. Which is what we ended up doing.

Anyway, I've been asked to take part in this service and to write a prayer based on a passage in Acts. I take the business of prayer very seriously and am trying to create something authentic. I'm grasping the concept that there is a structure to a good prayer, some imagery and careful choice of words, much like poetry or headline writing. Doing a Google search on "how to write a prayer" has been of NO help ("You just talk to God, that's a prayer." Yes, well, I know, but public prayer is equal parts theater and theology. It's the theater part that's got me stymied.). This being my first, I haven't gotten the knack yet, and I'm borrowing, splicing and crafting together pieces of prayers that I like, and hopefully it'll turn out.

By the way, I just read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, the best book I've read in ages. Coming from a Dust Bowl state, I've always been really interested in Dust Bowl history but could never find a good book about it. Most of the books I've ever been able to find are children's books, and why IS that? I'd like to make this assigned reading to anyone who thinks that human-caused climate change is a hoax. Which, ironically, are a lot of people who live in Dust Bowl areas.

Morning at the Homeless ministry: a haiku

2008-01-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

Convoy of hybrids
delivers meals, compassion.
Christian love on wheels.

Survey says

2008-01-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

From BeliefNet:
Survey: 'Unchurched' Americans say Church is 'Full of Hypocrites'

OK, no great shocker there. Maybe a "Wait, if you're not there, how do you know?" query. Although I was "unchurched" for 15 years for that very reason. That, and a preference for sleeping in after working until 1 a.m. on Saturday nights. Yes, working, not partying.

But then we hit this graf:

Researchers, affiliated with the Southern Baptists' LifeWay Christian Resources, defined "unchurched" as Christians who haven't attended church in six months as well as non-Christians such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

... and we go "Huh?" If your religious tradition doesn't actually have a church, can you really be unchurched? Could perhaps they choose a better word for non-Christians so they don't actually fulfill the unchurched view of Christians being 'judgmental and hypocritical'? Un-templed? Non-churched? Simply lapsed? Nonpracticing?

Sometimes I "attend" UCC services in Second Life, but I haven't in about a month, so if I keep that up will my avatar be virtually unchurched in five months?

I'm soaking up some of my Intro to Theology texts before school begins at the end of the month, and they stress that the importance of Christian life is found in community, so being "churched" does seem to be a fairly important deal. However, I think I've accomplished the same deep fellowship at the bar over cheese fries and coin $2.50 pitchers, and I wonder where the "church" part comes in. A modern take, if you will, on the meal in Emmaus, as there's a starchy main course and plenty of realization that the stranger in front of you might be the gal with the answers. So was I in church when I was unchurched?

What, then, is church? Church is never the building, as pretty as we make them, and it cannot be just the 11-to-noon-on-Sundays hour, which is still a fairly segregated hour. Do we take church with us or do we leave it behind to be picked up later? Is it the declaration of your religious affiliation that is church? The friends you make and family you create who share that burning need to orient themselves and the world to a new vision of how things really are or should be? Or is it just the world, as imperfect as it is, and all the lives you touch as you go through, trying to love a lot and harm as little as you can?

Are there walls, or just places where the light leaks in? Is it divided by time, or can the words on a page written millenia ago that let a reader commune with an author be one of the bridges that transcend the clock?

So I guess my original question is, is being "unchurched" a relavant state or just a judgment call?

Highway to Heaven

2008-01-07T08:44:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine clued me to this story the other day:

Texas ministry sees I-35 as holy highway

Some believe I-35 might be shorthand that links the interstate to Isaiah 35:8 of the Bible: "And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass over it, and fools shall not err therein."

... So ... basically, the road to heaven is constantly under construction and features the occasional porn shop and casino in border areas. Got it.

This, by the way, is as clear as I can figure to be an example of eisegesis that I've ever been able to find.

If you're a fan of NPR, head on over to the Diane Rehm Show to listen to this morning's discussion about the debate between teaching evolution and creationism. The show was prompted by the statement last week by the National Academy of Sciences that urged the teaching of evolution as a basic bedrock foundation of scientific principle, rather than teaching creationism/intelligent design instead or offering up both evolution and creationism and letting the kiddos decide between the two.

Firstly, kudos for the Academy for calling this what it is, creationism, and not intelligent design. I often joke about how NOT-intelligent the design of the world is (Have you seen that March of the Penguins movie? I used to like penguins until I saw it; now I think those are the creatures most horrifically enslaved to an inefficient genetic compulsion I've ever seen. Granted, it's kept them going for all these thousands of years, but man, yikes. When and if their climate changes, they're all screwed, them and the poor polar bears. Yes, we lament only the cute and cuddly seeming), but a recent viewing of a NOVA documentary on the Dover, Pa., case really gave me a good view of how intelligent design is an evolution (pun intended) of creationism with a shiny new gloss.

What I found most interesting about the creationism supporter on the Diane Rehm show was his insistence that his arguments weren't based in the Bible, but he took issue with how "materialism" (not the Brittney Spears-worshipping kind, but the kind that's based in the material of the world, he says) removes the ultimate purpose from human existence. Which, really, isn't a religious issue at all, but a worldview issue. Actually, that kind of anthrocentric worldview to me sounds vaguely like human-worship; that is, it says that we're so very important that we were created for some special purpose, and any idea that says we're just here through random chance reduces us to nothing more special an aemoeba. Which is impossible because humans are too important to be the same as aemoeba.

I rather find the concept of human existence in the world -- and hell, aemoeba existence, too -- as a product of random mutation rather awesome (not in the same vein as "these earrings are awesome!" but "That f-5 tornado bearing down on my house strikes awe in my heart"), moreso than that of some creator who has designed us for some purpose. Out of all the billions upon billions squared possibilities in the universe, there you are, just you, a unique person. Sit back for a second an appreciate that as a miracle, one that's reduced to the mundane by the fact that there are 6 billion and counting miracles walking the earth.

Admittedly, that sounds a bit like human worshipping, too, but with a different focus, one on being rather than goal, purpose or ultimate accomplishment. Very much like how the concept of God's grace was described to me, that we receive it not because of anything we do or even believe or join, but because we are.

Comic book scribe extraordinaire Alan Moore said it better than I did more than 20 years ago in his Watchmen series, about when the whole creationism mess was first rearing its ugly head:

Doctor Manhattan: Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless
generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so
specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

Laurie Juspeczyk: But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!

Dr. Manhattan: Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

Prospero Año Nuevo

2007-12-29T14:54:00.000-08:00

I'm posting this early, but I'm not sure if I'll log back in between now and Tuesday. My New Year's plans are pretty dull; I'm working on New Year's Eve night, and I'm been working a pretty tough stretch since the day after Xmas, so I may welcome the new year by sleeping in. Basic family traditions apply: clean house and noodle dinner, greeting the new year at sunrise ... well, I can do that from bed this year, I'm just too pooped.

I found this song, "My Dear Acquaintance (Happy New Year)" by Regina Spektor on iTunes today and decided to share it. It's a lovely sentiment coupled with some interesting sound. It's a free download on iTunes, so try it and enjoy it for your New Year's fest.

My dear acquaintance, it's so good to know you
For strength of your hand
That is loving and giving
And a happy new year
With love overflowing
With joy in our hearts
For the blessed new year

Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer
For us all who are gathered here
And a happy new year to all that is living
To all that is gentle, kind, and forgiving
Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer
My dear acquaintance, a happy new year

All of those who are hither and yonder
With love in our hearts
We grow fonder and fonder
Hail to those who we hold so dear
And hail to those who are gathered here
And a happy new year to all that is living
To all that is gentle, young, and forgiving
Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer
My dear acquaintance, a happy new year
Happy new year

Blog alert

2007-12-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

Movement Vision Lab's blog focus for the week is Faith and Spirituality. Go check it out.

The definition of "Christian"

2007-12-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

One of the sites I regularly check in on is ReligiousTolerance.org, a thoughtful, ecumenical clearinghouse about world religion. The group that maintains the site is based in Canada, is made up of lay people of various faith traditions, and as inclusive as you could ever get. Although you can find whatever information you're seeking on religion, from abortion debates to Christmas wars, you'll also find a plethora of musings, ramblings and essays, mostly reader-donated, on almost every topic, on all sides of the political/religious spectrum.

I visited yesterday and an essay caught my eye: People who disagree with our definition of "Christian." An excerpt from the site:

Common negative comments we have received about our definition of Christian:

	You have no academic qualifications to make definitions: Ours is a multi-faith group consisting of an Agnostic, Atheist, Christian, Wiccan and Zen Buddhist. None have a theological degree or diploma from a Bible college. We consider this an asset, because such an education would bias us in favor of one wing of Christianity, and against other wings. We look upon ourselves as reporters, not theologians. We feel that we have done a competent job in collecting a broad range of definitions created by others.
	Why not use the Bible's definition of "Christian?" The Bible is not clear on what a Christian is. Its text is ambiguous. If it were clear, then there would be a single, universally accepted definition in use among all Christian denominations. We have collected over 40 conflicting definitions.
	Why not use God's definition of "Christian?" We could have the theists in our group attempt to pray to God to determine his definition. But we conducted a pilot study on assessing the will of God through prayer and found that it seems to be hopeless. Again, if people could assess the will of God through prayer, then there would be a single universally accepted definition of "Christian" among all Christian denominations. If prayer worked in this way, there would have been no schisms in Christendom over theology.
	Your definition is wrong because it includes denomination XXXXX which is not Christian: This is one of the most common types of Emails that we receive, where "XXXXX" is most commonly Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah's Witnesses, United Church, and Progressive Christianity. The problem here is that if you went to a member of one of these groups, you would probably find that they regard themselves as Christians -- perhaps the only true Christians. They might well regard the letter writer as a non-Christian, sub-Christian. or quasi-Christian.
	If you are getting lots of Emails about your definition of "Christian" perhaps you are wrong: As we indicated above, we have over 40 definitions of "Christian" in this section. They are all different. There is no right definition. So one can expect that no matter what definition we choose, most of our site visitors will disagree with it.
	"Christian" means something; your definition doesn't mean anything: The term means a lot of different things to different people. There is no universally accepted definition. There is probably no definition that the majority of people who consider themselves to be Christians would accept.
	You are arrogant to suggest that your definition is authoritative: We do not consider that our definition is authoritative. We merely consider it to be one of many available definitions -- the one that we chose for our web site.

Coupled with the fact that I just read a chapter in one of my theology books for the upcoming semester (Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes by Serena Jones and Paul Lakeland, editors) about Church, this essay made me ponder how "church" and "Christian" are defined, and whether we can actually have a unifying definition. Certainly, in the denomination to which I currently belong, there is no hard and fast definition for either, no dogma, no doctrine. Our pastor, during the last collection drive, gave a rather stirring sermon about how he considered our church to be a "Micah 6" church, i.e. 6:8 -- "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God." Like a mobius strip, the action informs the faith that informs the action that informs the faith and so on. It's all very blurry and unformed, but then it's better that way, lest we forget any part of that prophetic trifecta. In any case, there are people in the congregation who believe in the classical themes of salvation and individual grace, and there are heathens like me who are there for the wine shots. No, seriously, there are heathens like me who would prefer to put the classical theologies on hold for the time being until all the harm they've created are righted. So what unites us as church? What makes us Christian?

ReligiousTolerance.org defines Christian thusly:
We define "Christian" as including any individual or group who devoutly, thoughtfully, seriously, and prayerfully regards themselves to be Christian.

and I would have to say, I can go along with that. As a hapa (and if you don't know what that term means, go here. See, you learned something!) I'm all about self-identification, especially when other people are trying to decide your identity for you. Even though I often teeter on the brink of declaring that Jesus was a nice mythic figure, someone akin to "that guy," you know, the one that everyone seems to know but no one has ever met (Jesus as Ferris Bueller? "My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Jesus cast out demons at 31 Flavors last night.") In the end, historical Jesus studies and what they can and can't prove (which is a lot) aside, what makes me a Christian isn't my belief in Jesus or Christ or Jesus Christ, but my trust and faith in both the gospel that he preached and the legacy of that gospel that was left behind after his death. That essentially boils down to love of God and love of neighbor. So yea, I guess I would devoutly, thoughtfully, seriously and prayerfully consider myself a Christian. Your defintion may differ, and that's perfectly OK. Just try to use your own words when you come up with your definition.

As for what makes up Church, I'll leave you with the definition I came up with for my theological reflection from my BorderLinks trip, when in October, me and eight other seminarians went to the Méxican-U.S. border to learn about immigration:

Everyone we met on the border, from migrants to those in solidarity with them, had compassion for someone else as they crossed boundaries. They suffer with one another and trust in that act to enact a vision of a new life, or a new “kin-dom.” And in their acts, Jesus is there.

These groups doing the work that is inspired by the message of, the blessing by and trust in Jesus are the church, regardless of denomination, creed or belief. The church cannot be limited by walls or denominational ties any more than God or Christ can be limited by labels. To be church is to be inspired by compassion and lovingkindness to move away from structures of power and privilege, and into the heart of those who cry for justice. Churches must humble themselves to cross boundaries, especially the ones separating them from other groups who work for the good of others. Above all, it must follow the message and example of both Jesus and the apostle Paul, who preached the good news of radical inclusiveness to all who had once been excluded or cast away. It must be guided by the love in which it may trust as it comes to new understandings of itself and the world around it.

The church is a powerful force in the world, and the only one, I believe, that is able to walk across borders in order to effect changes that will bring about peace for everyone. What denomination or shape that church takes is not nearly as important as the relationship between everyone within it, on all sides of the ever-changing, ever-crossed borders. The work we saw being done in Tucson and México was done between different peoples of varying faith traditions –– and no faith tradition at all. To follow the words of Jesus in Matt 25:40, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” does not require a structure or even a dogma, but only open hearts and willing hands. A church that is willing to sacrifice as much as women or men risking their lives in the desert or their dignities in cities where they are a stranger is one that can follow Jesus’ call.

Best Xmas gift ever ...

2007-12-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

Jesus Deluxe Action Figure:
I can't display it though, I think the cat might have too much fun with the loaves and fishes ...

The quest for perfect holiday gravy

2007-12-24T14:12:00.001-08:00

I am a vegetarian ... kind of. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I don't eat meat. No piggy, no cow, no sheep -- just no mammals in general. The only meat(s) that I eat is the occasional chicken nugget -- because by the time the chicken has been made into a nugget or strip it's practically not a chicken anymore (chik'n?) -- and fish, because fish is good for you. Mostly, I'm just too lazy to go entirely vegetarian. I live in a very meat-happy state, and if I didn't allow fish and a little chicken into my diet every now and then, I'd never get to eat out.

The holidays can be a bit tough for me because we spend it with family, who are all big meat eaters. Which is fine, of course. Even though someone shreds of meat get into almost everything, even the vegetables -- because that's the way we do things here round these parts -- I can eat around it. I make a really tasty vegetarian cornbread dressing and load up on the veggies.

But I have to admit, I'm a fan of gravy. I looooove gravy. So I've been on the prowl for a perfect vegetarian gravy recipe. I've tried about five different recipes and I keep coming up with the same damn problem -- lumps. Little dots of flour all through the bowl. Ugh. I usually use this great finely sifted flour called Wondra, which is nigh impossible to get lumps with, but I can't seem to find it anymore. So I've been using regular flour and I get lumps. Argh.

Finally, after finding a very tasty but very lump-inducing recipe, wondering what the hell I was doing wrong, I sat down and hunted down cooking tips on ye olde Internet to find out how to make lumpless gravy.

The secret -- roux. You mix the flour with the grease/oil first, before you add the liquid. And I knew that, because that's the way I always made gravy before I went vegetarian. All the vegetarian recipes add the flour last, which results in lumps. Silly vegetarians.

Merry Xmas again!

Christmas virgins

2007-12-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

I finally saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin last night, on the USA Network's director's cut version, which features the most intelligent use of censoring I've ever seen. Anyway, this movie was WONDERFUL! I didn't see it initially because the ads kind of turned me off. I figured it would be full of poopy humor and sex jokes and mean silliness like when Steve Carrell gets his chest waxed. OK, so it had a lot of sex jokes, but it was hiLARious, especially the scene where Steve Carrell gets his chest waxed. We couldn't stop laughing. So, great movie. We also saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend, and it was awful, I loved it. There's a scene with the Beatles in India that was worth the 5 bucks we paid at the early cinema. Again, hilarious.

I'm finally comfortable with wishing people a Merry Christmas, something I've been holding off on until about two or three days ago. I just can't say "Merry Christmas" on the day after Thanksgiving. You know why -- it ain't Christmas! I'll start saying "Have a happy holiday" around the middle of December, especially if I don't know if I'll see someone by Christmas. Happy Holidays or Season's Greetings covers everything, not just Christmas, and since there are lots of holidays and holy days in December, I'm happy about saying it. But "Merry Christmas" -- it's not Christmas until it's Christmas. That's just me. So, Merry Christmas! I'm gonna go cook now.

Theology in the news

2007-12-19T07:08:00.000-08:00

A few items of theological interest in las noticias caught my eye in the past few days. The theology in some cases is very bad; one is very good.

Huckabee's Christmas ad: Yes, Mike, we get it. You're a Christian, and, just like Mitt Romney, you want Christians to vote for you. You're a warrior in the *cough* War on Christmas (Ain't it nice that when there's a real war(s) going on that you'd pick the one that doesn't have any risk or casualties?). And while it seems like a nice message and all ("Let's forget about politics and just have a MerryChristmas with your loved ones"), it'd be nicer if you weren't pimping Baby Jesus for campaign purposes. But hey, you must know what you're doing, you've got a theology degree ... oh wait, you don't! Yes, I know, you've got a B.A. in biblical studies; I've got a B.A. in religious studies, myself, but I wouldn't call that a theology degree. But I got my sheepskin at a secular university and you got yours at a Baptist university, so I'll grant that maybe you're closer to it that I am. We didn't get to study much theology at CrimsonU (well, I did, but it was independent work). But surely as an ordained Baptist minister you've got a seminary degree ... oh wait, you were only in seminary 1 year? Well, seminary's tough. I've just finished my first year, and it's kicking my butt on a daily basis.

More Christmas warriors: So the OKC city manager sent out a memo reminding city workers not to publicly display religious decor during the holidays, to ensure that there would be no church-state crossover problems. And wouldn't you know it, two workers decided that their First Amendment right to religious expression was being oppressed, and they're suing the city. Yet another case of people confusing public square with government, and confusing a privilege with a right. Let's clear it up: you can do whatever you want in non-government public space, especially if you own it. You can decorate the snot out of your office, if you own your office. You can put a big-ass lighted cross on the side of your skyscraper that can be seen for miles and miles, if you own the skyscraper. You can even wish your customers "Merry Christmas" if it's your store. But if you work for someone else, your office is not your office; thus you can't surf for porn on your work computer, and you really shouldn't send e-mails to your co-workers about how bad your boss' B.O. is. There are lots of things that you can't do at work that you can do at home, in your car and put on your person if it meets your dress code. The government has these rules even moreso, because it's not just guarding the integrity of the office space, but the whole damn country. And it has these rules to protect your religious rights (and anyone who's ever looked at the reason why we have an establishment code would understand this: Aren't we all glad that we don't have to be Anglicans? Aren't we all glad that no one forces us to go to a specific, government-approved church? Don't you want it to stay that way? Then stop being a dick.). A loss of the privilege of getting to put your Baby Jesus creche on your computer monitor is not the same thing as having your rights trampled on. The reason why we work so well is that we give a little to get a little. So give a little.

Evolutionary theology: I stumbled across this article on Salon and it just blew me away. And, of course, it's the comments from the so-called progressive atheists who really ended up pissing me off. Sam Harris' book The End of Faith was one of the factors that made me turn away from stepping over the line to become an atheist, simply because I didn't want to be that much of a smug jerk. Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens all take the worst, most hateful and most closed-minded theologies and hold them up as examples of the true faith, and they write off examples like Oscar Romero, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Mother Theresa (well, Hitchens wrote an article about her loss of faith with the glee of a bully pulling the wings off flies) and so many more. Theologian John Haught's new book, God and the New Atheism, takes on these guys and takes them to the mat. His basic theme: Theology is not static, and we cannot keep relying on 1,000-2,000-year-old ideas of how the world works to frame how we see our world. Theology is faith seeking understanding, and that understanding is grounded in the real world. As that understanding continues to change and, yes, evolve, so must our theology. And of course it does! Like I said when I was snarking on Huckabee, seminary is hard. It'd be a crapload easier without theology, without having to think about the things we think about, which because we're all crazy about religion tends to be about religion. But there's theologies upon theologies upon theologies, all crafted as people try to understand why the world is as it is. I'm hoping maybe to create one myself. Anyone who thinks that we all have one theology and it's all based on Aristotle hasn't been keeping up with the trends.

I'm not exactly sure that I agree with Haught's position that science will never achieve ultimate meaningful answers -- like Ghosthunters before they started believing their own press and started calling all the weird shit they encountered "ghosts" instead of "unexplained phenomenon," I honestly believe that the things we don't understand are not understood because we don't have the science yet, but someday we will -- but I do agree with him that a statement like this is a faith principle, not a scientific one. And, like the good nontheist, quasi-apatheist that I am, I'm good with waiting to see if I'm right or wrong. That's a faith statement, too, that someday I might get an answer. Anyway, I'm glad to see someone taking on the atheist blowhards, who are just as bad as the fundamentalists and, judging from the comments attached to the article, are all over the damn place.

(What I'm listening to as I blog: Aterciopelados' Oye

James Lipton tea bag

2007-12-17T13:56:00.000-08:00

I used to be a big fan of Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio, until James Lipton interviewed Jennifer Lopez, and then I just lost all affection for that program (Is J.Lo talented? Yes. At what? I'm sure I have no idea). Actually, I used to be a big fan of Bravo until it became the Project Runway and Law and Order: CI channel. Anyway, I'm killing time until I can escape for home, so here's my attempt at the Bernard Pivot questionaire.

(Oh, and I ACED my First Testament class. Woo-hoo!)

What is your favorite word?
Currently, it's splagchnizomai, which is a Greek verb that means "I am moved in my guts, ie. I have compassion." Apparently the Greeks used to think that the bowels were the center of compassion. But isn't that a great word? It sounds exactly like what it is, like a bowl of cold spaghetti that you'd use in a Halloween horror house; it also sounds like what being moved to compassion is -- your guts are rearranged, and then so is your head.

I also like el amortiguidor, which is Spanish for "shock absorber." With the word amor in there you'd think it was something about love, but it's not. Still, isn't that what love is, a shock absorber?

What is your least favorite word?
Saved. Because as a word in this environment, it's pretty much lost all its soteriological currency. Am I saved? Are you saved? Are you saved right? I don't know, and I bet you really don't know either, that's why you're asking.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Flow, as is described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that feeling of being completely in the zone, on the ball, totally present in the moment, all of which lead to utter excellence. I love the rare occasions when I'm there, and I love even more witnessing other people who are in flow. I don't even have to like what you're doing or creating or saying, but when you're flowing, you're perfect and I love being near you.

What turns you off?
Perceived victimhood. I guess that's Mitt Romney, at the moment.

What is your favorite curse word?
There's so many to choose from, and I choose from them all the time. I can't say that I really have a favorite, although I do seem to be quite partial to fuckinggoddammit. I'd really like to learn how to curse in Chinese, just because I think it would sound so cool.

What sound or noise do you love?
Any Latin rhythm. Salsa, reggae, afro-carribean, vallenato, bachata, rock en espanol, you name it, I love it.

What sound or noise do you hate?
Jennifer Lopez saying, "You know what I mean?" which she did about 8,000 times on the Inside the Actors Studio that broke my fandom's back. No, seriously, the sound I hate the most is self-righteous smugness. You know how Bush does when he leans on the podium and tries to put the smack down on a reporter asking a good question? That.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Dream job would be rock star, but seeing as that I'm a terrible singer and can't read music (too much math) and am terribly shy in front of audiences, that'll probably never happen. But profession that I would like to attempt and am attempting to get there is religion scholar.

What profession would you not like to do?
Paris Hilton's press agent. Coyote. Drug dealer. Politician. Copy chief.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
Take another crack at it. Try to remember what you learned the last time.

The angel was cleaning out his closets when the call came

2007-12-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

So begins Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore, one of my absolute favorite books in el mundo entero. I'm a reader, I love stories, and since setting off on this religious studies journey I've come to really love religious stories, especially Jesus ones. In my opinion, four gospels just aren't enough. Ireneaus was simply wrong when he said we only needed four, because that was the right number (ah, four, one of the magic numbers (almost every number is magic, if you're into numerology) which stands for completion and structure: four cardinal directions, four walls to make a house, four seasons, etc.). We need more gospels, more more more. I like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where the child Jesus makes little birds out of clay, gets in trouble for working on the Sabbath, then turns them alive so they fly away and hide the evidence. Of course, he also curses a playmate and strikes that kid's parents blind. Oh, those wacky sons of God.

We need more gospels because the more alternatives we have to the story of Christianity, the more we might be able to see that it didn't just fall out of the sky in a singular interpretation that was just waiting for Martin Luther to articulate. Christianity had a messy, fractured beginning, with tons of different views of who Jesus was and what his message and life and identity were. We have a tendency to forget that, because we've got the one book that we call the Second Testament (because really, what's new about it? Let superscessionism be damned!) and we read all the works in it together and try to fit them into one seamless work where everything agrees.
Sorry, but it doesn't. Markan priority aside, these gospels are four distinct visions of who Jesus was to each particular group that lived in different times and places. Same overall idea, of course: son of God (whatever that might mean, because THAT has different definitions depending on who/where/when you are), salvation/justification/rectification/redemption of sins, raised from the corpses (literally, that's what is says in the Greek, "raised from the dead ones," to really punch home the visual image of Jesus hanging out in a cemetary and then he wasn't! how cool!) But some very different details, and no, that's not where the devil is but where you really get into the fun stuff. Pieces of the story get rearranged, shuffled about, reinterpreted, restated, remade; new things are added, other things are deleted, and yet we still end up with four very distinct but very complementary stories (and that's what they are, stories. Does that mean they're not true? Anyone who would ask that question obviously isn't a real reader and has never read a true story, which often don't contain an iota of fact). What you get down to is, the idea of Jesus is too big to fit into one box ... I mean gospel. So he's definately too big to fit into four.

So, why am I getting into this today? Well, it being Advent and all, we were talking about Jesus' baptism. (What? Really? Why? Wouldn't that make more sense at Easter? Yes, I know, I don't make the lectionary.) And the pastor gave this lovely sermon about John and brought up the question of why John had to baptize Jesus. After all, Jesus is God and doesn't have any sins from which to be redeemed, so why the baptism?

As a sporadic writer of fan fiction, I began to have this lovely imagining of a Jesus who was struggling with something (with what? with the whole being the redeemer/son of God thing? with something more mundane and earthly, like the loss of a spouse or child? with chronic halitosis? who knows?) and showed up at the river looking for something else (like what? guidance? a change in his life? a new message? confirmation that this knowledge he has that he's someone more special than anything is true?). He gets immersed in chaos (that's the water), suspends his life (holds his breath, this is what this is), and comes out into the world, takes a big deep breath of life and gets that something. Depending on which gospel you read, he heard God speak or everyone heard God speak. Christopher Moore has everyone except Jesus hearing it, because he was under water, you see, and you really can't hear things when your ears are stopped with water. And, depending on which gospel you read, John did or didn't baptise Jesus (they've got to show it, because it probably happened, but Luke's gospel is parTICularly vague).

But then there's the question: John, who's been imprisoned, sends out a message to ask Jesus, "Are you the one, the messiah, or should we look for another guy?" This was the focus of the pastor's sermon, and quite honestly more important theologically than the why of Jesus' baptism. What this question means, for John and Jesus and for us particularly, is that we doubt. Wow, human beings doubt! Stop the presses! No, seriously, that's the thing. We who doubt must live with that tension of whether or not what we trust might turn out to fail us in the end. That the star we've hitched our wagon to will fall and leave a dinosaur-killing crater under the Yucatan penninsula. We doubt and are not sure that the cat Schroedinger may or may not be killing right now is or isn't alive or dead. Are you the one, or shall we look for another? Well, Jesus says, does it matter? Look around, there's things going on that are good. Blind are seeing, lame are walking. Relax, man, and roll with it, you'll be happier. He never says, "Yep, here's my card, 'Jesus the Christ, son of God, messiah.'" He says, essentially, "Them that tell don't know, and them that know don't tell."
But that's just Matthew's story. There are three others in the book, and lots others. Go read them. Live with that tension, and make your bet with those Aces and Eights. And go read Lamb.

You've got a lot of growing up to do, buddy.

2007-12-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

So I missed the Mitt Romney "Ich bin ein Mormon" speech this morning in favor of going to the local caffeine dispensary to get an americano and a cookie, and to study for my First Testament final. I've been hearing a lot about Romney and his religion, but really not so much that I want to really go out and research it to find out what I really think about it. I'm already doing that with Christianity, thank you very much, and I'm still years and years away from being able to tell you what I really think about it.

The thing I've been hearing most about Romney is comparisons to John F. Kennedy, who was, for those who are counting, the U.S's first (and so far only) Catholic president. I took a religion & politics class last summer where we examined the role of religion in the public square and how it's evolved over time (Want a fun read? Pick up a copy of Law and Theology: Cases and Readings by Martin H. Belsky and Joseph Bessler-Northcutt, which was one of the most expensive books I've bought yet for seminary and completely worth it. Everything you ever wanted to know about civil religion is right there in one handy-dandy, faux-leather-bound volume), and we read Kennedy's speech. You can read the speech here, but here's a excerpt:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew -- or a Quaker -- or a Unitarian -- or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim -- but tomorrow it may be you -- until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated as equal -- where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice -- where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind -- and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, both the lay and the pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
... If this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

I've very tempted at this point to fall back on the old Lloyd Bentsen chestnut of "You are no Jack Kennedy," but I'll try not to. Because, clearly, Romney really ISN'T having a Kennedy moment, because this isn't Jack Kennedy's world. What Kennedy was fighting 40 years ago was an entrenched anti-Catholic bigotry, and in his speech he sought to overcome that bias by appealing to Americans' loftier values, hooking into the "civil religion" of American values which hold dear on our best days: fair and honest dealings with one another, and love and regard of one another as Americans.

Yes, Romney is fighting a bias against his religion, (and Walter Shapiro on Salon nails it when he muses that it would be ironic that in a campaign featuring a woman, a Latino and an African American that it's a straight white male who's getting discriminated against over religion), but this speech (find it here) is not Kennedy's speech. Kennedy was addressing the American public. His speech was an assurance that his religion (or anyone else's for that matter) as a corporate power would not overtake the highest office of the land. He was, he assured his listeners, not a Catholic candidate, but a candidate to happened to be Catholic. Note that this is not a question of Kennedy's personal faith, morals or how well he understands the theology he professes.

Romney, however, is only answering the question about his personal faith, and it's keyed to one specific group, conservative evangelicals, and only them. He certainly wasn't talking to me, because I noticed that mainline social-justice seeking freethinker was absent from his list of religious attributes that he loves. He is not addressing what influence the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will have over his office, but what his personal faith, morals and beliefs are. This speech is nothing more than an assurance to a small but influential segment of the voting public that his personal religion is no threat to them, that the wall of church and state has been tampered with in order to keep them out, and he would restore their place in the order. Rather than appealing to our better natures as Americans as family, Romney is appealing to our worst natures as competitive, suspicious perceived-victimized groups who want our own ways. This speech, laden with the kind of vocabulary that you'll understand if you go to the right kind of churches, is supposed to let the right kind of voter know that ol' Mitt is on his side against the evil secularists and the Islamisists.

In his day, Kennedy took Americans to task for seeking to exclude members of its own nation, much as Paul confronted Cephas when he led the Judeans to exclude the gentiles from the fellowship table in Antioch (Gal 2:11-14). Rather than emulating JFK and chastising the hard right-wing for their own biases that would judge a candidate on his religious doctrine rather the content of his religious character and praxis, rather than asking them to examine what is in them that seeks to exclude those they believe are Others, Romney chooses this moment in time to reassure Christians that his beliefs are no threat to them, and asks them to let him into their elite group so that he can exclude others right along with them.

I was expecting better. Granted, all I know about Mormonism I learned from South Park, but I hear through the scholarly grapevine that that one South Park episode summed up the history and beliefs of the LDS church better than almost anything else in pop culture. And, it really makes a point for real inclusivity and love of family, not just the one you're born into but the entire world.

Gary: Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don't care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that's stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be my friend back. You've got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls. [Turns around and walks off. All four boys just look at him in wonder, even Cartman.]
Cartman: Damn, that kid is cool, huh?

work musings

2007-12-03T14:14:00.001-08:00

It's an odd thing, to be a part-time worker for the company whose coporate ladder you were so industrously working to climb for so many years. After half a decade realizing that I had no desire to move above the position I was at, I went back to school part time, got a degree, then entered seminary and cut back to part-time hours. Usually a minimum of 20 hours a week, maximum of 32, but still pretty exhausting when you're taking 13 hours.
The hard thing about working when it's not your main priority making it the priority when you're in the office. I spent a week researching and writing a paper in the library, and at the end of it I was exhausted and wishing I could find a way for someone to pay me to do that all the time.

Not for the first time I've been thinking that i need to find a new job, or to bite the financial aid bullet and get a loan to supplement a barrista income, which is the kind of job with the kind of hours I'd be looking at if I left this one. Note that I still have at least eight years of schooling left. Help, but I just don' t know what to do.

Anyway, after a long meeting about targeted marketing, I was wondering about the stark individualization of society, and how that might play a part in the fracturing of community. When we all read the same newspaper, watched the same TV news programs, were we a community? Or was it all part of that good-ol-days illusion, in which only some of us priviliged ones were community, and we blissfully ignored those who weren't? And can we create community when our personal needs are so catered to, when we ignore the call to show love by bending to the needs of those around us?

I think i'll go home and watch the evening news, instead of hunting and picking for news online, and see if it makes a difference.

Beware of Son of HB 1804

2007-12-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

As most Oklahomans should be aware, the state Legislature last session passed House Bill 1804, a bill that created what are called the most restrictive laws against people who are undocumented in the country. This measure makes it illegal "transport, harbor and conceal" undocumented people from "detection" and denies driver's licenses and publid aid to anyone who isn't in Oklahoma legally.

The author of the bill, state Rep. Randy Terrill, R-Moore, is planning "the son of HB 1804," in which U.S. citizenship is denied to children born in Oklahoma of undocumented parents getting rid of, "birthright citizenship" (then explain yours, Mr. Terrill, for did you not get your citizenship through your birth in the U.S.? Shall Oklahoma challenge the U.S. Constitution?). It also will deny taxpayer-funded prenatal care to pregnant women who are not documented, and creates "transparency in our public school systems."

Thankfully, HB 1804 is not receiving the support it once did, now that it's being fully enacted. Now that people are seeing its real human (and economic, sadly, this IS what gets people's attention) costs. And after all, now when you go to the DMV to renew your licence, you'll have to prove that you're a documented resident. People who never ever had to worry about having to prove their legal status are getting a little fed up with have to deal with a small slice of this bureaucratic and civil rights nightmare.

And some of the legislators who voted for HB 1804 are calling for more humanitarian, common-sensical changes. Folks, not only do we have to work to sweep out HB 1804, we also need to stop the Son of HB 1804 from getting its birthright citzenship in this state. Call, write, pester Rep. Terrill. Be courteous, but be firm.

Here's how to find him:
Capitol Address:
2300 Lincoln Blvd. Room 407
Oklahoma City, OK 73105
(405) 557-7346

District Address:
612 S. W. 12th Street
Moore, OK 73160

Email: randyterrill@okhouse.gov
Find story on HB 1804 at NewsOK here.
Cross-posted at Border Reflections.