I just finished RM (online at http://alfrednorthwhitehead.wwwhubs.com/ritm1.htm ), and the conclusion could have been used by Polkinghome in his talk

ANW Alert!

“It is thus passing with a slowness, inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity.

The present type of order in the world has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remain the inexhaustible realm of abstract forms, and creativity, with its shifting character every determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.”

It’s like deja vu!

In RM he asserts that God’s role is to sustain and increase worth/value in reality. I think this is why in PR he swung to the theistic pole of his former agnostic indefiniteness.

At about 37 min, Polkinghome says something like ‘people ask why should we think this is how it will be, but it’s really a question of ‘what kind of world do you think this is?’

This resonates with what I am rediscovering in Alfie’s RM where he insists religion requires a metaphysics, and that religion is world-loyalty.

I am in Baton Rouge and can absolutely confirm that that was a common interaction down south.

“The actual world, the world of experiencing, and of thinking, and of physical activity, is a community of many diverse entities; and these entities contribute to, or derogate from, the common value of the total community. At the same time, these actual entities are, for themselves, their own value, individual and separable. They add to the common stock and yet they suffer alone. The world is a scene of solitariness in community.

2) Recently reading through the NT I realized that the phrase “you all” is through out Paul’s writing and most likely that is where the phrase comes from in the South. As we know, there is a little church every 1/4 mile there…

Just sayin’…

“So to-day it is not France which goes to heaven, but individual Frenchmen; and it is not China which attains nirvana, but Chinamen.

I recommend you guys join me. You will find so many of Alfie’d golden nuggets like “The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind are scenes of solitariness.” I think ANW applauds the what he sees as religion evolving from the social to the individual.

The OP here may be seeing religion in a reverse manner from Alfie.

Why I phrased things the way I did in the post is to highlight how Obama had already come to a conclusion that changed his practice but was slow playing saying it out loud. I definitely don’t think anyone who is actually thinking things through or of a different conclusion should go along with him. It is nice though to see any politician be honest about their actual convictions – even when I don’t agree with them.

I ask this with absolute respect and with hope for a genuine answer (in other words, I am not leading somewhere with this question – I really would like to know your thoughts):

what, if anything, prevents you from endorsing “open” marriage or polygamy?

I find that if we adopt a hermeneutic that precludes the traditional basis for establishing heterosexual marriage, we also preclude the basis for establish monogamous marriage, but I am honestly open to hearing arguments to the contrary. Thus, the question.

Thanks,
Ben

If I might split the difference with you (and you might well say that I’m not allowed), I’d say that SETTING OUT to be “the next Benedict” would be great folly: that’s a designation for later generations to confer. In the meantime, I’m inclined to teach in ways that I’d want students to remember and to live in ways that neighbors might want to emulate. I do so not because I feel entitled or even likely to become such a memory-nexus but because such a proleptic (do I use that term right?) view of my own actions means that I’m more likely to take the everyday seriously.

In that rhetorical mode, I can get behind Macintyre’s project. But I’m also more given to “doing the same thing over and over” (to misquote, more than likely, your citation of Hauerwas in a TNT session) than you seem to be.

Or are you saying that we are totally wrong in our individualistic ways and we need to “repent” and go back to the way it used to be, although part of your point is that we will never be able to do that (mostly)? If so, to me that means that God will never be able to get through to us “enlightened” souls until society and culture gives up on any thoughts of individualism.

For that reason, I can easily enough imagine someone’s becoming a Benedict of sorts, one more community-organizer in his own day who becomes a shining light in generations to come. But I’m a traditionalist that way.

That is why I think MacIntyre’s expectation is never to be fulfilled. It would probably not be ONE person and it would certainly be so different than Benedict that we wouldn’t recognize it as such.

p.s. I love riffing with you -Bo

But I’ll admit that the “our age is pluralistic, and the medievals were monolithic” riff is one that’s quite likely to make my head explode every time I hear it.

- Lastly, I get what MacIntyre is up to and I am not surprised that you like it My point is that the individualism that IS our operating system (program language) is not critique but assumed and that gives it an unquestioned hold on the mind that might want to address it. We need outside voices … but the hegemonic nature of the Western mind and thus Christian tradition is not too accommodating for such a witness.

I’m not trying to be fatalistic, it just seems to me that this is the way it is going to be in my lifetime and thus is my environment in which to engage. My only point is that we should not pretend the Bible was written in this same program language. It wasn’t. So there is an inherent falseness about the whole thing creating an intrinsic gap that needs to be bridged.

I sense in your OP a fatalism that doesn’t fit well with my own sense that political and pedagogical change are not only horizons but responsibilities for human beings, especially those called to the Christian way of being human. I’ve read Macintyre’s After Virtue once or twice, of course, and I see his call not to despair that the monasteries are gone but to remain “waiting, not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict” (263).

Now I’m about to make too much of a book-ending aphorism. Ready? I’d argue that holding out the horizon of a very-different Benedict means that very-difference must at least be possibility of imagining differently. I won’t speak for “the church” across the whole blasted continent, but I do hold that, among the small circles of people who call me fellow-worshiper and other small circles of people who call me teacher, there must be some place where we can wait faithfully rather than idly.

Other than that, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I really like Macintyre’s diagnosis of things in AV and in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and I tend to think that the “Hauerwas lives in a silo” saw gets his actual work entirely wrong. But then again, I’m never sure whether I’ve become enough of a nonviolent made man to be a real Hauerwasian Mafioso.