Caloric Consumption Going Down

Obesity remains one of the gravest public health challenges facing our nation and the world.  Among other things, it places huge demands on our health care system.  So, it comes as good news that according to research done at the University of North Carolina (reported here), "while per capita intake of sugary, calorically sweetened drinks remains high in children and adults, the amounts they are drinking on a daily basis has decreased significantly. Among children ages 2 to 18 years, daily intake totals of calorically sweetened beverages dropped from 616.2 ml/day in 2003 to 460 ml/day in 2010. Among adults, the reduction also was significant, dropping from 536.4 ml/day in 2003 to 441 ml/day in 2010."

Soft drinks are still being consumed at an alarming rate in the U.S., but the trend away from sugary soft drinks is important and, evidently, being encouraged by the beverage industry itself.  This is not to say that the industry has suddenly become a knight in white armor when it comes to the fight against obesity, but at least it is beginning to show some concern for the impact its products are having on our well-being.  We can only hope that the public is becoming more aware of the need to cut back on sugary drinks and, thus, also creating a demand for sugar free products.  Obviously, there is still a long way to go, but it is encouraging that the trend is headed in the right direction.  Amen.

Be Ready to Explain

In the Laughing Bird Paraphrase, I Peter 3:12-16 reads, "It is unlikely that anyone will be out to get you because of your enthusiasm for doing what is good. But even if some do set out to make you suffer for doing the right thing, you are still on a winner. Don’t be afraid of them, and don’t let them get you down. Stand your ground, and give your allegiance and obedience to Christ before all others. Be ready to explain yourself to everybody who questions why you live with such confidence. Don’t be pushy or aggressive, but never hesitate to give them a quiet and respectful answer. Keep your nose clean so that if things turn nasty, and somebody starts misrepresenting your commitment to doing what is right as followers of Christ, your record will speak for itself. If you have made sure that the mud won’t stick to you, those who throw it will end up wearing it themselves." (emphasis added)

The charge made against mainline churches is that we are too liberal and do not "really" believe.  We have a weak faith—obviously, because we're liberals.  The consequence is that our churches are losing members.  One important issue in a much more complex scenario is that too few members of mainline churches take the advice of the above passage to heart.  We aren't ready to explain our faith.  Most members haven't really thought it through, read a bit of theology, or done some serious Bible study & reflection.  Most aren't interested in "such stuff."  Mainline churches are often very good about service, the doing part of faith, but as good as they are at sharing their faith through deeds, just so weak are they at sharing their faith through personal witness at appropriate times and in appropriate ways.

In the mainline, we need to get over the attitude that "talk is cheap," and we need to reverse the one that holds, "more do and less talk."  In fact, what we too often need is less almost frenetic "do" and more reflection and study—more "talk".  More time spent in Bible study.  More time spent in prayer & meditation.  More time spent in adult study groups learning how to share our faith.  Amen.

What is & what should be "the news"

Today, and it breaks my heart to say it, finding a homeless person who has died of cold, is not news. Today, the news is scandals, that is news, but the many children who don't have food - that's not news. This is grave. We can't rest easy while things are this way.

Pope Francis I,

Address given in St. Peter's Square,

May 18, 2013

Culture of Encounter

The pope speaking on May 22nd

Source: Vatican Radio

In a papal address (summarized and quoted here) delivered on Wednesday, May 22, 2013, Pope Francis I made the following statement,

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.” (emphasis added)

On first reading, many media commentators assumed that the pope was asserting the possibility that atheists can be saved without having to become Christians let alone Catholics.  More circumspect readings generally agree that he was not making such a blanket statement.  And the next day, Thursday the 23rd, a Vatican spokesman clarified the pope's position on salvation by saying that anyone who is aware of the Catholic Church and doesn't become a Catholic “cannot be saved” if they “refuse to enter her or remain in her.” (Quoted here)

What is worth noting in his speech, however, is the pope's concept of creating a "culture of encounter" between peoples of faiths and no faith.  He seems to be suggesting that we have the drive to do good created in us as part of our God-given natures.  We should nurture that drive in each other and use it as a point of contact for mutual understanding—for dialogue, that is.  It is not clear what his ultimate goal is in encouraging a culture of encounter grounded in good works.  The Thursday clarification would suggest that he still desires the incorporation of the whole of humanity into "the Church," which apparently means the Catholic Church.  The hope is that he is encouraging something else, which is a culture of pluralism based on understanding growing out of dialogue with each other.  Dialogue in this sense is more than discussions.  It is a process of listening, learning, and reflection leading to reductions in conflict and a growth in peace.

If Pope Francis' goal is to develop a "culture of encounter" as a subtle form of Catholic evangelism, he will fail.  It will become evident over time that his real agenda is aggrandizement rather than dialogue.  If, however, he seeks such a culture as a way to embrace pluralism to the end that ours might be a less conflicted, more peaceful world, he could well play an important role in fostering a more dialogical international atmosphere.  Time will tell.

New Review at Rom Phra Khun Reviews

There is a new book review not posted on Rom Phra Khun Reviews (here).  It is of David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

Church Decline North of the Border

Religious Affiliation in Canada 2011

Source: Globe and Mail

Organized religion is generally in decline throughout most of the English-language speaking world, though evidently least so in the American South.  One of the most recent indications of this decline is contained in the data collected by the Canadian 2011 National Household Survey and reported in a recent Religious News Service article entitled, "Canadians turning away from organized religion."  The article states, "Observers noted that among the survey’s most striking findings is that one in four Canadians, or 7.8 million people, reported they had no religious affiliation at all. That was up sharply from 16.5 percent from the 2001 census, and 12 percent in 1991."  Islam continues to be the fastest growing religion in Canada.

Canadian officials have been quick to point out that the 2011 survey was voluntary and so may not reflect current trends in a reliable way, but at the same time the general turn away from organized religion has already been documented in Canada.  These figures reflect a known trend although the change from 2001 to 2011 may or may not be as sharp as they suggest.

So much has been written on this subject that all we really need to say here is, first, that the decline in organized religion does not seem to point to a decline in religious sensibilities as such.  Even in quiet and conservative places like Lowville, NY, it is not unusual to have friends who are openly religious but attend no church.  Second, this decline is being seen more and more in some ecclesiastical circles as offering an exciting opportunity to discover new, less institutional ways to be the church.

Like Beavers, We Build

Yesterday, I attended a meeting of over 100 individuals focused on the subject of homelessness in Lewis County, New York.  The great majority of those attending work either in government agencies or in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and as I listened to speaker after speaker rattle off an array of acronyms and refer to arcane corners of federal and state legal codes, I realized that what I was participating in was not just a meeting.  Laid out before me was a culture—for me, a foreign culture that has invented its own language.  At points, I required a translator!  The keynote speaker drew an unusually large audience not because of his eloquence but because of his knowledge of this culture.  Over lunch members of this housing and homelessness culture exchanged business cards and engaged in some important discussions that strengthened the networks of the culture of those involved in housing and homelessness in the North country of New York.

Walk into a school, any school, and we walk into a culture.  The First Presbyterian Church of Lowville, New York, is most definitely a culture of its own.  Businesses are cultures.  Industries.  Branches of government.  Crime syndicates.  Prisons.  You name it.  It is a culture.

Beavers can't help themselves.  They build damns and lodges.  We build cultures—or, better, we create cultures.  And this drive to create them is built deeply within us.  We need and use culture to protect ourselves, put food on the table, obtain shelter and clothing, and fulfill our most basic human drives.  The so-called "tribal instinct" is an instinct to live together in communities that can exist only as integrated cultures that share a language, values, behaviors, skills, religion, and habits.  We don't just eat.  We create cuisines.  We go to Italian or Thai restaurants, savor particular Chinese or French dishes.

Sociologist speak of the "social construction of reality," a sociological doctrine that holds that we humans construct our own realities at every level.  I saw and participated in one such social construction of reality yesterday.  Central to it was the social construction of a culture to mediate its reality (the "reality" being all of the laws, agencies, and institutions dedicated to addressing issues of housing and homelessness).  Building cultures is what we do.  We can't help ourselves anymore than the beavers out on Beaver Lake can't help but build damns and lodges.  It's what we do.

The Bible: Picking & Choosing

If we affirm that the Bible is a human document through which the Holy Spirit speaks with particular clarity and if we reject the notion that it contains the literal words of God, we are left with an important task.  We must discern God's Word to us in the words of the Bible.  In the year of our Lord 2013 and by the grace of God, some parts of scripture speak to us with that particular clarity.  Others, however, we must carefully pack away for a future time when they might speak to another generation in a way they do not to ours.

Take, for example, the passage in James 1:2-8, which states, "[5] If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. [6] But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; [7, 8] for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord." (NRSV)

One can imagine how important this advice concerning doubt might have been to large segments of the early church, but it is advice that is much less helpful today.  In the Age of Science, doubt is necessarily a good thing.  We learn through doubt.  We discard worn out ideologies through doubt.  We keep "the powers-that-be" in bounds through our doubts.  Doubt is a useful tool in many different situations and circumstances.

In an age that encourages doubt, we can see the spiritual value of doubt.  It is a motivation for discovering a deeper faith.  It keeps us from turning even our most cherished beliefs and practices into idols, something religious people are especially prone to do.  Doubt keeps us humble because it reminds us that we are not God.  We do not have all the answers.  Doubt, indeed, is the very foundation of our faith.  Without it, faith as trust is not possible.  Those who are certain their beliefs are true by definition do not live in faith, for faith means trusting in spite of uncertainty—and doubt.

The advice the author of the Book of James gave his (or her?) readers in ancient times is not good advice for us.  We are called to use doubt as a tool in our search for wisdom.  We are called to ask in spite of and in the midst of our doubts.  For us our questions are the path on which we walk toward faith, and we simply do not accept the rigid boundaries imposed on us by the concept of "being double-minded."  We are of one mind in which doubt and faith are yin and yang, intertwined, and inter-dependent.  James' views on doubt were undoubtedly right once and undoubtedly will be right again.  They are just not right for us right now.

Or...in some circumstances...maybe they are right right now.  In the end, it depends on whether the Spirit speaks through James' advice with that "particular clarity" that is the province of the Spirit.  In the Age of Doubt, we do well to doubt  even our doubting from time to time—lest doubt itself become an idol.

God is a Choice We Can Make

In a piece entitled, "Biblical Scholarship and the Right to Know," biblical scholar Bart Ehrman describes his personal journey from a fundamentalist Christian faith through liberal Christianity to a humanistic faith.   He concludes,

"I ended up leaving Christianity and becoming an agnostic not because of my scholarship but because I simply couldn’t understand how there could be a good and powerful God who’s in control of this world given all the pain and misery in it. We live in a world in which a child starves to death every five seconds, a world where almost 300 people die every hour of malaria. We live in a world ravaged by earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and drought and famine and epidemics, and I just got to a point where my previous solutions no longer made sense."

One does not argue with a person who thoughtfully and in good conscience comes to the conclusion that evil is so prevalent in our world that believing in a loving God makes no sense.  Rather than believe that such a God could tolerate evil, Ehrman chooses not to believe.  This is a faith choice, and it is one others make.  It deserves respect.

It is not, however, the only choice thoughtful persons of good conscience make.  Faith in a loving God is also a choice.  It requires only a shift in perspective and in the set of questions we ask.  If, that is, there is no God at all, then how did life come to be on Earth against astronomical odds—and not just "be" but evolve in amazing and intricate ways?  If there be no loving God, then how does one account for the good that so often accompanies evil?  And for each child that starves, how many experience a nurturing love that is so much more than a biological mechanism for preserving the species?  This is not to make little of the suffering but to understand that there is much more to life than suffering even in the midst of suffering.  Ehrman is entirely correct in his assessment of our world, but it is a world also "ravaged" by vast amounts of good, small and large, which surely rivals the evil we see in the world and in many quiet corners of the planet outweighs it.

We have to choose.  Listening to a heart struck by awe at the grandeur of the universe and the beauty of  a lake, struck by the kindness of another, inspired by the story of a Galilean carpenter or an Indian prince, and inspired by the Spirit—listening to a heart touched by these things is another choice.  It makes sense, too.  No choice should be made lightly, and those who still pursue goodness and truth whatever their choice should be respected.  We choose best when we understand that whatever choice we make is a matter of faith and there are real choices we can make.  Amen.

The Bible Gap

It is one of the realities of contemporary mainline church life that most theologically trained mainline pastors accept modern critical biblical scholarship and that most members of mainline churches don't have a clue what that means.  There is, then, a wide gap between the biblical understanding of many clergy and many in the pews.  When some mainline folks are introduced to contemporary biblical scholarship, some feel threatened and others liberated.  And on being told that critical approaches to the Bible are centuries old, a not uncommon reaction is, "Why are only hearing about this now?"

One's first inclination is to blame pastors for being timid, hypocritical, and even two-faced.  In the pulpit, they communicate a kind of "soft" literalism that doesn't overtly challenge literal readings of the Bible.  Closer to the mark, however, is the situation that most pastors face most of the time.  Mainline church goers, as a rule, are not all that interested in the Bible.  In most churches, Bible study groups are small and usually limited to the "same old faces," most of whom are among the more conservative members of the church.  Those members who might be most receptive to modern scholarship are also the ones who are least interested in hearing about it.  Mainline churches, furthermore, tend to emphasize doing over talking.  Committed members want to serve the world, and they consider Christian service to be the heart of their faith.  They don't have much patience with "just sitting around and talking."  Other members, again probably more conservative, want to emphasize personal spirituality, which means prayer groups more than study groups.  They are interested in the Bible primarily as a devotional aide, which is not the place for introducing critical approaches to scripture.  Beyond these constituencies in mainline churches is the 50-60% or more of the congregation that sits mostly on the fringes of church life.  Few if any of them are interested in the Bible at all.

This is not to say that mainline pastors can't share critical approaches to scripture with members of the churches they serve.  But, there are conditions required for them to do so successfully.  They themselves have to be willing, able, and committed to exposing their congregation to modern biblical scholarship.  There has to be an important segment of the congregation they serve that wants to know more about the Bible and is willing to listen to non-literal approaches to scripture.  And there needs to be a shared perception that a mature 21st century faith implies a knowledge of scripture that is both critical and faithful.  Such a perception sees literalism as an obstacle to faithful readings of scripture and is committed to using biblical scholarship as an antidote to literalism.  My sense is that there are only a minority of mainline churches today where these conditions exist.  Perhaps mainline pastors can sometimes be faulted for not working to create them.  Perhaps.