power

Beyoncé and the Bigger Question

February 5, 2013 by Bo Sanders 30 Comments

It is with great interest that I have read the blowback over the Beyoncé SuperBowl Half-Time Show. I have read several interesting articles – both in support and in criticism – of the spectacle.

I get why people want to talk about her outfit, her moves, and her assembled cast of all females – about modesty, sexuality, and female empowerment. I get why those are conversation points.

What is becoming a trend, however, is that I have little interest in that conversation – not until we have a more significant conversation first.

I think that it is time I lay all my cards on the table.

While I was in seminary, my mentor Randy Woodley, showed me how to look at bigger systems and structures than I was used to. I have continued down that road and during my time at Claremont have been in dialogue with a school of thought called ‘Critical Theory’.

Critical Theory has taught me to ask 3 initial questions in order to examine an issue:

Is there a pattern visible?
Is there something behind the main thing?
Is there any issue of power differential?

The Critical part is that we are going beyond the initial perceptions, the popular approach and the cultural conversation. The Theory part is that we are going to see if we might offer an explanation about the deeper issue.

SO let’s ask our 3 questions about the SuperBowl Half-Time hullaballoo.

Is there a pattern visible?

I would argue that there is. I noticed it just before kickoff – during the Nation Anthem to be specific. Alecia Keys was introduced, Jennifer Hudson had just sang with the kids from Sandy Hook … and I knew that Beyoncé was the halftime show.

I thought to myself:

“It’s odd that the only 3 black women involved in this TV spectacular are all singers.”

I noticed that CBS didn’t even have a black female sideline reporter like Pam Oliver (on FOX) for its NFL broadcasts. I watched the rest of the festivities – including all the military stuff – and was struck by the noticeable lack of black women associated with the event. Walter Payton’s daughter presented Jason Witten with the NFL Man of the Year award … but that was about it. None of the coaches or commentators … not even many of the commercials involved black women. This seemed significant since so many of the on-screen TV personalities, coaches and players are black.

Is there something behind the main thing?

It is easy to see the answer to this one. The answer is consumerism. While the game itself is ‘the main event’ the commercial aspect of the SuperBowl has become at-least or almost as big. Commercials this year sold for a reported 4 million dollars a piece. Like the controversy we covered yesterday in the ‘So God Made a Farmer’, commercialism-capitalism-consumerism is the unspoken thing.

It might be hard to see in a short blog post like this but Beyoncé isn’t the telling controversy. The more telling one was the criticism of Alicia Keys’ soulful rendition of the national anthem. People criticized her not just for sitting at a piano (!) but for altering the tried and true version of the song.

In CT when something is assumed – even if unstated – as a dominant form, it is called hegemony. It is a type of power or influence that may or may not be overtly communicated. If one were to look at just the first half of the SuperBowl broadcast, it might be possible to say that the major narrative when it comes black women is twofold:

you can sing – we like that.
but make sure you do it our way. Don’t do anything too much or too … you know… that’s not why you are here.

Is there any issue of power differential?

This is the one that we never get around to talking about. Maybe it’s because we don’t know how to or don’t have frameworks for it. There is a question that needs to be asked though: who decided that Jennifer Hudson, Alecia Keys and Beyoncé would sing? What did that committee look like? Who are in those seats of power?

Did the group that decided who would sing look like Jennifer Hudson, Alecia Keys, and Beyoncé?

I don’t know, I’m asking an honest question. It’s the tough question that no one wants to ask. Who has the resources? Who has the influence? Who makes the decisions? Who sits in the seats of power?

Now you can see why I am not interested in talking about whether Beyoncé should have had more clothes on, should have gyrated less or is a model for taking back one’s physicality in the face of generations of oppression and marginalization.

Those are all secondary conversations.

The primary conversation is about what place black women hold in our culture.

It is a much bigger conversation with much deeper consequences than if Beyonce’s hips and wardrobe were appropriate for a Half-Time show.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, media, news, post-something, thinking Tagged With: ad, Alecia Keys, Beyonce, black, book, books, controversy, critical, dance, half time, Jennifer Hudson, national anthem, Pam Oliver, power, race, racism, racist, roles, sex, sexual, show, sing, Super Bowl, theory, TV, Women

Todd Akin, Abortion, Rape, and Power

August 21, 2012 by Stephen Keating 14 Comments

As you have probably heard, Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri recently made some dangerous and hateful remarks about rape. You can read his comments here. What could possibly cause a man (sigh) to say that “legitimate rape” does not lead to pregnancy? Ostensibly, he was trying to make a point about the ethics of abortion. However, something deeper is going on here.

A short detour into my own experience: Growing up I was taught that, while conservative economic policies were obviously biblically based, the most important political issue was abortion. A candidate’s stance as “pro-life” trumped all other political issues. Anything bad that happened in America was probably God’s judgment for our “culture of death” that allowed abortion to continue. I remember attending rallies where I would hold a sign with blue letters that read “Abortion Kills Children.” “This is genocide! It’s as simple as A.B.C.” As cars passed, I peered around my sign and into their windows, hoping that the message would penetrate the women driving by. The distrust of women was deeply ingrained.

In college, other conservative beliefs started to fall away, but this one was persistent. One time a buddy and I were driving by a rally like the ones I had attended as a boy.

A Priest was holding the same blue sign and we stopped and argued with him. We told him “of course abortion is wrong, but your tactics are all wrong! Shaming women isn’t going to help.” At some point I realized that the shame was not a poor tactic, easily discardable, with which to reach the goal of reduced abortions; it is a core aspect of the ethics of “pro-life.”

Shame is a means of maintaining control, which brings us back to the topic at hand. Why would Akin imply that if a woman gets pregnant from a rape that it wasn’t a “legitimate rape?” Because his his belief system ordains that the power to define rape should be in the hands of men. In other words, it’s all about power. His latest statement arguing that women lie about being raped, makes this crystal clear. But these are not consciously held beliefs and no matter what people like Jon Stewart say, Akin doesn’t “secretly hate women.” Having grown up in the pro-life movement, I can assure you that telling someone that they hate women only solidifies their previously held beliefs, further insulating them from ever having to confront the consequences of those beliefs.

As Adam Kotsko points out, there is an underlying logic:

if we view [conservative ideologies] in terms of strategy, they all make perfect sense. Taken together, they serve to blame the victims, assert that the powerful are powerful for moral reasons, and then claim that the role of government is to endorse and reinforce the morally-discovered power structure rather than futilely try to disrupt it. The arguments might clash on a superficial level, but their effects are perfectly coherent and rational once the goal is granted.

I hardly need to point to the Jewish prophetic tradition’s scathing critique of this type of thinking (if you need a refresher, read A Theology of Liberation). The powerful do not want to give up their power and certainly don’t want to think about the consequences of their power. And as long as we keep arguing at the level of consciously held beliefs, rape will keep getting legitimated and the oppressed will keep losing.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, news, politics, public policy Tagged With: ethics, liberation theology, politics, power, pro-life

Mitt Romney started in the middle

August 2, 2012 by Bo Sanders 5 Comments

Republican (presumptive) nominee Mitt Romney got in some hot water this week in a visit to Israel. He told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who suggested his comments were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East.

“And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the “hand of providence.” He said similar disparity exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.

There has been a lot of analysis about Palestinian ‘culture’ as well as economic, military, and other realities that have contributed to discrepancy that is so evident between Israel and Palestine.

I want to focus on a slightly different aspect of the story. Mitt Romney started in the middle and you just can’t do that. In a previous post entitled “Bullies, Bananas and the Bible” I stated:

You can’t verbalize the way things are – which is a result of the way things have been – as proof that this is how it should always be.

Creation ‘expert’ Ray Comfort famously made a fool of himself by producing a video with Kirk Cameron where he praised the glories of the (modern) banana as evidence of God’s grand design and love for human beings. You can watch the video here – it is a hoot. There is only one problem. Comfort was highlighting many of the adaptations and ‘improvements’ that were results of human modification through deliberate cultivation.

This the problem starting in the middle. You can’t just walk into the way things are, assume the status quo and then make a case for it. *

This is not an isolated school of thought. I was camping in a national park with a long time friend who lives in and loves his ‘red’ state. We were hiking out and enjoying the beauty when he began to tell me about how ridiculous the environmentalists are and how stupid it is to put all these regulations on industry – we are handcuffing these innovators who create jobs for people. His evidence was to point to the trees around us and say “look at all of this amazing space – what are they so worried about? I don’t see why we need to have all these regulations and get so upset at industry.”

I pointed out that if somebody 100 years earlier had not had the foresight to preserve this land, the timber industry would own all this land and would have harvested all these trees. It would look nothing like it did and we would not be walking or hiking there. He had literally never thought about that.

It would be like walking into a grocery store, seeing a steak wrapped in saran wrap on a Styrofoam platter and beginning to articulate how perfectly the steak was designed for your grill – how the saran wrap crumples in your hand for ease of disposal in the waste basket – how the steak is the same dimensions in thickness from side to side for consistent grilling. Clearly God designed this steak to go on your grill and for your enjoyment!!

This is the danger of starting in the middle.

John Piper’s conservative view of God is the same as Comforts view of the banana and my buddy’s view of the national park: completely ignorant and disconnected from the narrative & trajectory that lead to it.

Which leads us back to Romney: this is a consequence of privilege. I would love to ascribe it to some classicist view of god or an a-historical understanding of theology. It might be from those two things as well, but it is a consequence of privilege and the blind spot that results from it.

If you don’t account for socialization in things like gender – and instead argue for original design … if you don’t give validity to things like constructions and conditioning then you look at how society has been you will mis-attribute it to some other factor. We do it with everything from sexuality and gender to culture and race.

If one ignores systemic oppression and historic injustice and starts in the middle, then one can conclude that it is this group’s culture or collective disposition that gives them the advantage resulting in the conditions that we see today.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, media, news, politics, thinking Tagged With: blind spot, Culture, economic, gaff, history, Israel, Military, Mitt Romney, Palestine, power, privilege, race, reality, religion

Who Believes in Miracles? Prayer and the Practice of God’s Presence

July 11, 2012 by Bo Sanders 30 Comments

I know at least three people who believe in miracles: Marjorie Suchocki, Bruce Epperly and I do. I have written several times about holding onto the miraculous (as well as dealing with demons and skirting ‘Satan’) - both as Bible reading Christians and as ministers in the 21st century – even after we have excused ourselves from the super-natural worldview of centuries past. Bruce Epperly (who’s final session at EVTC will be released soon) looks to Marjorei Suchoki for some helpful language about prayer and the nature of God’s power. (Suchoki is perhaps most famous for many books including one on prayer: In God’s Presence and eschatology: The End of Evil).

What follows is a summary of a section from Epperly’s book Process for the Perplexed p. 58-60. I found it so helpful and so encouraging that I wanted to put it up here (reformatted as a blog of course). All the words are Epperly’s or Suchocki’s except those in italics.

Suchocki describes the intimacy of God and world necessary to the faithful practice of prayer.

If God’s power works through presence, and if God’s presence is an ‘omnipresence’, then one could say both that there is no center to the universe and that everything in the universe is center to all else … we can say that all things are center, for if all things are in the presence of God, then it is God who centers them. The earth, then, is indeed privileged and we do have a privileged history, for all are presenced and centered in God. Prayer in such a universe makes eminent sense – for God is always present.

From this perspective, God is, as a mystic once said, “the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

This allows us to affirm the wisdom of my mother’s kitchen magnet motto, “prayer changes things”. Suchocki understands prayer as “our oppeness, to the God who pervades the Universe and therefore ourselves, and therefore that prayer is also God’s openess to us. In such a case, prayer is not only for our sakes but also for God’s sake.” In a relational universe, prayer is essential to God’s work in our world and “the effectiveness of God’s work with the world.”

Prayer is intimately connected with God’s vision for each moment of our lives. God’s initial aim, or vision for our lives moment by moment, is grounded in God’s awareness of our joys, sorrows, needs, and loves.

God knows us better than we know ourselves and seeks to provide possibilities that join our lives with the lives of others in a way that bring beaty and healing to the world. God inspires us to prayer for others as weel as to act on their behalf. Surely this is an insightful way to interpret Romans 8:26-28

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And gone who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

God moves within our lives, inviting us to reflect God’s vision of Shalom and healing in our relationship with others, whether a child diagnosed with cancer, the survivors of the Haiti earthquake, or a friend who is in the process of discerning her future vocation.

As Suchocki affirms, “prayer is God’s invitation to us to be willing partners integrate dance that brings a world into being that reflects something of God’s character.” Accordingly, our prayers make a difference in terms of the intensity and effectiveness of God’s healing and reconciling work in the world.

While the intensity and form of divine guidance and activity in the present moment our lives shaped–and either enhanced or limited–by our past history, decisions, values, and the quality of spiritual devotion, our attentiveness to God in the present opens us to new costs bursts of spiritual energy.

Further, in an interdependent universe our prayers are an example of what quantum physicists describe as non-local causation: they create a positive field of energy around those for whom we pray, enabling them to be more open to God in a ruling God to be more creative and effective in shaping their life situation.

Process encourages people to be realistic, yet hopeful, in prayer for extraordinary life changes. Indeed, spiritual realism embraces both the concrete and the possible, regular causality and naturalistic leaps of energy. As Suchocki notes, “prayer creates a channel in the world through which God can unleash God’s will towards well-being.” Because each moment is unique, “miraculous” releases of energy that change ourselves can occur; but there are no guarantees, except God’s loving presence, in every life situation.

We see the occurrence of events described as “miraculous” not as violations of the laws of nature, but of intensification’s of God’s healing energy as a result of the interplay of God’s visionary power and energy, our prayers, and the conditions of those for whom you pray.

Romans 8:28 can be translated this way “ in all things God works for good for those who love God” as a representative of the holistic, relational, non-coercive, and multifactorial nature of divine activity.

I find this greatly encouraging and inspiring. We get to do this wonderful thing of partnering in prayer while no longer being required to subscribe to an antiquated metaphysic or pre-modern worldview.

Let us pray.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, demons, Epperly, God, healing, jesus, miracles, power, prayer, Process, Romans 8, sickness, Suchocki

A Most Interesting Reading of Moses at Meribah (Numbers 20)

April 11, 2012 by Bo Sanders 7 Comments

Recently I stumbled on what might be the most interesting reading of Moses at Mirebah I have seen. It comes from the book Emergency Politics by Bonnie Honig (also on Kindle). In it, she is engaging the theology of Franz Rosenzweig – a contemporary and rival to the German (later Nazi) Carl Schmitt who famously said “” Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

In Numbers chpt 20, Miriam passes away. She had been a prophetess for the people and had challenged Moses’ authority on occasion. Immediately after her passing (this will become important) the people realize that there is no water and press Moses and Aaron for solutions. Moses and Aaron step away from the people to seek God and receive instruction to “take the staff and speak to the rock – it will pour out water before their eyes”.

Moses, as you may remember, doesn’t follow instructions to the ‘T’. He ad libs a little bit. He does indeed gather the people but then he veers from the plan. He chastises the people and then strikes the rock. Two things happen:

water does indeed come out
God is displeased with Moses and will not let him enter the land that is promised.

I have preached this passage many times and have read lots of treatments. I am intrigued by this passage and have always been unsettled by one detail in the story, which I have never been able to resolve:

why does the Lord tell Moses to take the staff if he is just going to speak to the rock? Why even mention the staff?

Here is where Honig and Rosenzweig bring a unique reading. The staff represent something magical like sorcery – or the miraculous for the early 20th century. This is a political theology and what is at stake in the suspension of law in emergency conditions. Can a sovereign power suspend law in the same way that God suspends the laws of physics in order to preform miracles? Leaders, being empowered by God, the thinking goes, could suspend ‘normal’ activity if they determined an exceptional circumstance.

In Honig and Rosenzweig’s hermeneutic the dispersed empowerment of the people (multitude) is the location for God’s will and is intended to be home to the will/voice of the Lord. But, as we know, this responsibility had been too overwhelming and was resisted by the people in selecting Moses as a king type who would speak to God for/instead of them (Exodus 20:19). This was an abdication by the people of what the Lord had desired for them as a people – to be prophets all.

This resistance is reinforced when the voice of the people rises in the absence of water, and Moses (along with his brother Aaron) turn away from the ‘stiff necked people’ and receive instruction to speak to the rock. Moses then, probably importing the top-down authoritarianism of his Egyptian upbringing, disobeys the command to speak and instead, chastises the people and strikes the rock with his staff in an act of magical sorcery. God, though it produces water, reprimands this act, and Moses is disallowed from entering the promised-land with the people.

This event is placed within the historical context, earlier in the passage, where Miriam passed away and immediately the people realized that they had no water and held a council against Moses and Aaron. Miriam’s name alludes to water and she was the sister who placed Moses in the Nile’s water when he was an infant. She had been the only one to challenge Moses’ authoritarian ways and she provided, as a prophetess, a check to Moses’ power. Without her, this reading states, Moses proved he will give the people … “not authentic prophecy, but sorcery.” In not recognizing the predictive prophecy of the people (and Miriam), Moses loses his leadership of the people.

Honig utilizes Rosenzweig’s two types of prayer – one that spontaneously arises in a situational moment, and another that is used by the community and creates an openness or receptivity – to analyze the judicial deliberation surrounding the Bush v. Gore presidential ruling. By imagining that the people could have risen up in expectation of a serious effort to count valuable democratic votes instead of waiting for a Schmittian top-down rule from the authorities. The sovereign power might have been within the people prepared for and receptive to the sign instead of what came from above it – a rupture from beyond them. This expectation is foreshadowed within the Mosaic tradition that one day all of the people would be prophets (like Miriam).

Honig asks if this metaphorical reading (which it expressly is) is a good model for democratic politics and a comparison of the “state of legal exception to the divine rule of god”. The people, she says, when bound together can give to themselves the powers of state and can again decide to suspend them when, as a multitude, they are oriented and receptive (having been prepared) to the consequences of such action and what they point toward as a sign.

This, in the end, is the problem with magical thinking! We abdicate our power as the people – to be receptive to and bring forward the voice and will of God – in favor of looking to magically empowered leaders to suspend the rules that govern due to exceptional (or emergency) circumstances and hand down solution (metaphorically) through sorcery.

It makes sense then why the Lord even mentions the staff if Moses is ultimately to speak to the rock. It is a metaphor (symbol) of concentrated power that is present but to be resisted in lue of the prophetic possibility of speaking. In that speaking, which is to be located in the people (multitude) prepared by prayer, that a sign is revealed that points to a greater reality. We never hear that voice if a receptive people continually abdicate that potential to exceptional leaders who are expected to provide magical results.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, politics, speaking, thinking Tagged With: Bible, Bonnie Honig, book, books, Carl Schmitt, church, democracy, democratic, emergency, empower, Franz Rosenzweig, God, jesus, law, magic, magical, multitude, political, politics, power, prophecy, sorcery, the people

Making Sense of Miracles

December 19, 2011 by Bo Sanders 32 Comments

In his book Process Theology: a basic introduction , C. Robert Mesle says:

“the miracle of birth” is a wise phrase, pointing us toward a healthy theology of miracles. Birth is not supernatural. It involves no intervention violating natural processes. We know a tremendous amount about reproduction and may one day be able to create life in laboratories. Yet for all that, we still feel, and speak of, the miracle of birth…

Miracles become problems when we think of them as demonstrating divine power to intervene in the world however God wishes. The problems are not merely scientific, but also theological and moral. Nothing challenges the goodness of God or the justice of the universe more than the stark randomness of such alleged “miracles”.

That is an interesting way to think about the subject, but I want to make an important distinction between supernatural and miraculous. The Miraculous can be seen several ways – as something that surprises us, outside our expectations; as something that is amazing; like the miracle of birth, something that is statistically improbable , like landing a Airplane on the Hudson River; or religiously as something that only divine help could account for. There are several reasons why I think that this topic is SO important:

I can not tell you how often someone says something about how God directed them to take a specific road or a route that avoided an accident.

Did god tell everyone and they just were not listening?
Did god only tell those whom love god?
Does god monitor all traffic patters and why would god be so concerned with getting you home on time but so unconcerned with children being abused and people going hungry?

People often get defensive and say “In a worship service I saw/experienced _____. Are you trying to tell me that did not happen?” No. I absolutely believe you that it happened. What I am saying is that maybe the explanation provided in the worship service was not the whole story of why the phenomenon happened (people being slain in the spirit, etc).

I want to be clear about something: I believe in prophetic words. I have told people things that I could not have known in my own power – including twice that I have described pictures that hang in their homes, homes that I had never been to.

I absolutely believe that the Lord could ‘lead’ you to call someone who needs a call ‘at that exact moment”.

So keep that in mind when I say that we need to revisit our frameworks around the miraculous and we definitely need to abandon the whole ‘super’ natural worldview. It does not hold together under even the slightest examination in the 21st century.

I have seen people who were headed toward knee surgery, back surgery, chemo therapy and legal blindness avoid those outcomes miraculously – and I think that prayer had something to do with that. When we are open (mind and spirit) to the presence of a greater possibility – it makes sense that the cells in our body would have a receptivity to those functions and processes that bring health and life. If we believe that there is a God, and that this God has something to do with creating our bodies, and this God’s spirit is present in the world, then it makes sense that our bodies created by this God would response to an openness to the presence of this God. That is why I can believe in and pray for healing. But it is not supernatural – it is the most natural thing in the world.

So let me put forward a simple proposal: Holy Spirit presence in the world makes God’s power both transcendent (a different conversation) and immanent. God is present with us and at work among us.* If I am talking to someone and this Spirit is at work in both of us , then naturally if I am open and receptive, then it is possible that God would lead me in that conversation. It might take the form of questions or suggestions – but I would go as far as to suggest that maybe the Lord is not absent from any conversation.

This would impact things like prayer for sickness and an openness for healing and restoration. For Christ’s followers, the miraculous is a natural part of the world. We have errored greatly to conceded the ‘normal’ to nature and a scientific explanation and then superstitiously hang on to everything else and blindly cling to it as ‘super’natural. As the kids say “Epic Fail”

Just don’t talk to me about why hurricanes hit certain cities (weather patters are not changed because one super-holy pastor had a lot of faith). And don’t tell me that tornados or earthquakes hit certain towns because of certain sins. Or the President W or X is being corrupted by demon Z. That is all ridiculous.

Rejecting the ‘super’natural but holding onto the miraculous allows us to update in accordance with our contemporary collected knowledge while holding open the possibility that, as people of faith, there is more going on in the world than just what we can see. It allows us to be rid of superstition and untenable contradictions while providing a platform for amazing things to happen in the world.

We have to let go of the ‘super’ natural and all its inherent baggage in order to preserve the potential of the miraculous in the world. The bottom line is that there is no such thing as the supernatural – but the Christian story is a miraculous one. It is foolish to continue to concede the language to a supernatural interpretation and attempted explanations.

* p. 117 in chapter entitled ‘Miracles’.

** (IF you are interested in my take on Elizabeth Johnson’s trinity challenge of “God beyond us, God within us, and God around us” you can listen to my sermon on the subject here.)

I will be leading a breakout session at the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation called “Pentecost for Process” - sign up and join the conversation!

Filed Under: bible stuff, engaging, latest, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, Elizabeth Johnson, God, healing, Holy Spirit, jesus, miracle, Pentecost, power, prayer, Process, Robert Mesle, trinity

Claremont School of Theology

Beyoncé and the Bigger Question

Todd Akin, Abortion, Rape, and Power

Mitt Romney started in the middle

Who Believes in Miracles? Prayer and the Practice of God’s Presence

A Most Interesting Reading of Moses at Meribah (Numbers 20)

Making Sense of Miracles

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