FrJody.com

Musings of an Anglican/Episcopal Priest

Update

Just a note to say there was a catastrophic failure with my site and I lost my content, which I’m trying to restore from various sources. It’s going to take me a while.

Thoughts on War

Years ago I recall an article by the interim Dean at The School of Theology at Sewanee, where I did my MDiv, Dr. Allan M. Parrent, where he argued that the default moral position of many within the Episcopal Church (and elsewhere in the old mainline) had become a sort of default unreflective pacifism. He contrasted this with the thoughtful position of Christian non-violence as upheld by the traditional peace churches. Largely, it could be seen that these knee jerk positions were developed in a reactionary way beginning in the 1960s over against the perception of a rah-rah patriotism in more conservative denominations that seemed to forget, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, that a lesser or necessary evil taken up, is still an evil.

At any rate, all of this means that a situation like that in Ukraine challenges our ethical reflections, even as the still developing news of atrocities offends our moral imaginations. In that vein, I commend this piece written a few days ago (before the news of the war crimes in Bucha) by my Bishop, regarding the context for the Christian Just War tradition’s reflections on the use of force, and, essentially, the primacy and importance of judgement and discernment, particularly between the guilty and the innocent in contexts where no law can be easily assumed or enforced.

And, of course, I’ve been thinking, during this time, about a particular lecture by a former ethics professor who once challenged us as future priests to be prepared to challenge parishioners engaged in immoral businesses, such as being tobacco farmers or working at Boeing and making bombers. At the time I was irritated that his moral imagination only seemed to reach toward the farmers and not the corporate executives (read some Wendell Berry!), considering that my grandparents had been Tobacco farmers. But the war in Ukraine raises questions about the manufacture of weaponry.  What if Lockhead/Raytheon hadn’t developed and manufactured Javelins?  Flooding markets with weapons–whether handguns or weapons of war–for the interests of profit and not recognizing that indiscriminate sale and greater accessibility increases violence and death is one thing–but what of the need for weapons of war when a plow (or tractor or combine in the case of Ukraine) is threatened by a tank?

In rendering these extraordinary judgments, Christians should not forget what is true about our ordinary judgments: we are not God, and our judgments are not perfect. Whatever judgment we render is not final judgment, which is reserved for God. We trust in divine providence, approaching judgment in humility and with prayer. “In enacting judgment we are not invited to assume the all-seeing view of God. … We have a specific civic human duty laid upon us, which is to distinguish innocence and guilt as far as is given us in the conduct of human affairs. … To lose the will to discriminate is to lose the will to do justice” (47).

Christian thinking about war, in what has come to be called “the just war tradition,” is properly considered under the heading of the love of neighbor. O’Donovan points out that even in a defensive war, where a nation has been attacked, Christians look less to a claim of absolute right to defend themselves, and more to the call to love the neighbor. This commitment also involves the neighbor who is the enemy. “In the context of war we find in its sharpest and most paradoxical form the thought that love can sometimes smite, and even slay” (9).

Source: War – Covenant

In The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, I argue that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong. Our era is far from mythless, belief in spirits continues to be widespread, vitalized nature has been a persistent philosophical counter-current, and even attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Hence, I contend that the whole notion of “modernity” as rupture that undergirds a host of disciplines is itself a myth.

The Myth of Disenchantment: An Introduction by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm

In honor of Veterans Day

Veterans Day 07

I want to say a special thank-you to all the veterans in my family–my Dad and my uncle Verlin. I also want to say thanks to my Mom, who works in a VA hospital and cares for vets day in and day out.

Now is also a good time to remember our service men and women who serve and protect our nation at home and abroad.

From the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

I went to a book reading a few months ago and someone quoted this selection from the letters of J.R.R. Tolkein. It is from a letter he wrote to his son Christopher during the latters service in the RAF in South Africa. I ordered a copy of the book so that I could read the rest of the letter(s) as well. I thought this was particularly poignant and as applicable today as it was during World War Two, perhaps more so.

Your service is, of course, as anybody with any intelligence and ears and eyes knows, a very bad one, living on the repute of a few gallant men, and you are probably in a particularly bad corner of it. But all Big Things planned in a big way feel like that to the toad under the harrow, though on a general view the do function and do their job. An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side… Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them. You are inside a very great story!“The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien” (J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter), p78

From the Vicar’s desk #3

It’s amazing how time flies. I sound like an old man, I know, but it’s true! Time passes quickly, especially at this time of year. It seems like only yesterday that Anna and I came to visit with you all on June 10th, and already we’ve been together for four months. And you haven’t ran me off! Amazing!

Seriously though, it seems strange to say that I’ve been among you now for four months. And it has been a great four months; I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, as I hope you have. And as quickly as these first four months have passed, I’m sure the next four will seem to go by even faster. We are coming up on that time of the year where the pace starts to pick up for the holidays, where the calendar drips with ink from all the events and many of us begin to find it difficult to even breathe because of the numerous activities and preparations.

It is a blessed irony that just as our lives become more busy and our society thrusts event upon event on us, the Christian year actually comes to a point of preparation, a time of reflection. I know that we’re just past Halloween and All Saints (which we will be celebrating this Sunday), but before we know it the first weekend in December will be upon us, and with it the season of Advent and the beginning of a new Christian year. So I want to encourage you to prepare for Advent, to prepare for this time of preparation, by taking the time to slow down a bit, by refusing to get caught up in the pressure and stress that can make this season so difficult. Instead, consider this Sunday’s celebration of All Saints, and the coming Thanksgiving holiday, a time to remember what is important in your life, to think about old friends and family and to consider the ways in which you’ve been blessed. After all, isn’t that what the spirit of the season is supposed to be all about?

This Sunday during the sermon time I will be talking about the fact that the Church is a community of contradiction, and why that is a good thing and a blessing. Christians are a people of contradictions, and one of the ways we exhibit this most visibly, when we are at our best, is in refusing to get caught up in the hustle and bustle and the angst surrounding it and instead refocusing on the reason we call this whole time of year the “holy-day season.”

The understanding of Christians as a peculiar people and the Church as a commiunity of contradiction–that is, a community that contradicts many of the assumptions of the broader society–comes from the fact that we as Christians share in a story and self-understanding that is far different from the one we see and hear everyday in the broader society. To help us refocus on the fantastic and awesome nature of this story, of who we are as Christians and why we are here (and why it matters), I have planned a series of four sermons for Advent entitled “The Truth That God Imagines.”

I encourage you to invite your friends to church during this time because I think the topics covered in this series will be of great interest to non-Christians and non-Churchgoers (not always synonymous, as many of you know) as well as our community at St. Francis. One of the points of this series is to put the celebration of Christmas in context and I pray it will be beneficial to all who attend.

imagination

I believe we are entering a time of renewal at St. Francis, and I encourage all of you to redouble your prayers for our church family. I also want to thank you all for everything you do to make this a faithful and loving community. Recently I was reading about the great missionary and evangelist to India, E. Stanley Jones who, it is said, never refered to himself as a Christian, but only a “Christian-in-the-making.” I thank God that he has brought us together so that we can discern what it means to follow Jesus in our daily lives as chaotic as they can be, and to be a faithful congregation in the midst of a Church that is often equally chaotic.

Your servant in Christ,
Jody+

The Christian Vision Project: Powering down

I thought this was a good example of the benefits and dangers of missions and things like micro-lending. Whenever cultural patterns change there are those–with or without reason–who will react negatively. This also illustrates something interesting regarding development. As much as we may decry child-labor in the west, we do so out of our own experiences of the industrial revolution, and without some form of aid from more industrialized nations to allow them to leap-frog certain levels of development, it’s no surrprise that child labor is a problem in other parts of the world. We only have to look at periods of our own history to see why. As one of my college professors put it, he doubted that any of us in the class room–no matter how capitalist–if transported back in time to the height of the industrial revolution, could resist the pull of socialism in the face of such abuse.

Nine years ago, World Vision staff discovered pervasive bonded child labor in the district of Gudiyatham in India: parents indenturing their children to moneylenders, in payment of debts as small as $20. The children rolled cigarettes, tanned hides, or made matches without freedom to go to school—and with little prospect of ever repaying loans made at ruinous interest rates.

Today, according to World Vision’s extensive house-to-house surveys, child labor in the Gudiyatham district has been reduced by more than 80 percent. Children out of school can be counted in the dozens, rather than the hundreds.

Jayakumar Christian oversees this and other projects that serve the poor. One would think that all Indians would welcome such efforts. Not quite.

{read it all}

From the dusty historian: Knights Templar Exonerated by Vatican

Templar SealAt least that’s what is being claimed about a book set to be released this week by the Vatican’s secret archives. Processus contra Templarios is based on a text called the Chinon Parchment which, according to the BBC had been incorrectly filed; it contains the record of the investigation into the charges of heresy surrounding the Templars before their dissolution. Check it out:

The Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages.

The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed.

The document is a record of the heresy hearings of the Templars before Pope Clement V in the 14th Century.

The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely.

Prof Barbara Frale, who stumbled across the parchment by mistake, says that it lays bare the rituals and ceremonies over which the Templars were accused of heresy.

{read it all}

The Vatican library is closed for renovations at the moment, and I’m not sure how one would go about getting the book, but what a great one to practice one’s rusty Latin skills on! If anybody knows where I can order a copy, let me know.

UPDATE: scratch that, I just found out how many of these are to be printed and what they will cost.  I guess I’ll have to visit it at a library somewhere:

Only 799 copies of the 300-page volume, “Processus Contra Templarios,”—Latin for “Trial against the Templars”—are for sale, said Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican’s secret archives. Each will cost $8,377, the publisher said Friday.

An 800th copy will go to Pope Benedict XVI, said Barbara Frale, the researcher who found the long-overlooked parchment tucked away in the archives in 2001.

{read the rest}

« Older posts

© 2024 FrJody.com

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑