Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Carl Jung, Religion and the Search for Meaning

The final instalment in Mark Vernon’s series of short articles on Carl Jung has now been published. It’s titled “Religion and the Search for Meaning.” 

Here are some excerpts from it:

“…In 1959, two years before his death, Jung was interviewed for the BBC television programme Face to Face. The presenter, John Freeman, asked the elderly sage if he now believed in God. "Now?" Jung replied, paused and smiled. "Difficult to answer. I know. I don't need to believe, I know." 

What did he mean? Perhaps several things. 

He had spent much of the second half of his life exploring what it is to live during a period of spiritual crisis. It is manifest in the widespread search for meaning – a peculiar characteristic of the modern age… 

"A secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being," he wrote; “an unrest that yearns for the divine…”

…The sense of threat – real and imagined – that Jung witnessed during his lifetime has not lessened. Ecologists such as James Lovelock now predict that the planet itself has turned against us. Or think of the war games that power an online gaming industry worth £45bn and counting. Why do so many spend so much indulging murderous fantasies? 

…But if the world has rejected God, those who remain religious are, in part, to blame. 

They have suffered a loss of confidence too, Jung suggests. The powerful, fearful experience of the numinous that speaks of the mystery of life has been traded in for a variety of substitutes that no longer speak to the depths of our humanity or serve our spiritual yearning…” 

You can read the full article here. You’ll find all 8 instalments and more on Jung in my original post about Vernon’s series. The series provided a useful introduction to some of the key themes that make up the Jung corpus. If you know little about Jung, Vernon's series is a good place to start.

 

A Philosophical Investigation into the Art of Terence Malick

I’ve still to see it reach our shores, but the excited reviews of The Tree of Life by friends who have seen it reached me many weeks ago. It was a delight therefore to hear The Philosophers Zone featuring an investigation into Malick’s work. 

Here’s the show’s blurb: 

“Terrence Malick is, perhaps, unique: a film director who is well-trained in philosophy and who has published an English translation of a book by the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger. But should we see his movies as philosophical statements? In particular, what are we to make of his latest, The Tree of Life, which is set in Texas in the fifties but also takes us back to the creation of the world and the age of the dinosaurs? Metaphysics or pretension? This week, a philosophical investigation of Malick's work.”

You’ll find the broadcast and podcast here.

 

Stanley Hauerwas on Rowan Williams and the Ordinary Realities of Damaged Times

Reading this recent post by blogging-friend Jason Goroncy coincided nicely with my continued reading of Stanley Hauerwas. In The State of the University, “Appendix C” (pp. 209-213) Hauerwas offers a tribute to Rowan Williams in a substantial little paper titled “Ordinary Time: A Tribute to Rowan Williams”. 

As an aside it was interesting to see that Hauerwas’ preface to his 2004 book Performing the Faith appreciatively acknowledges Rowan and Jane Williams who (along with other (Anglican) friends of Hauerwas give him “…some intimation of what it might be like to live our lives as Christians. We live in dark times, but God gives us friends who make it possible to see through the darkness. Thank God for friends like these.” 

Having previously drawn attention to Hauerwas’ “tribute” on this site in 2006, it was a delight to re-read it again. 

Here are some excerpts that, several years after my first read, particularly resonated with me: 

“…The anthropologist David Scott has described our time as damaged… 

…According to Scott, "inerasable residues from the past stick to the hinges of the temporality we have come to rely on to secure our way, and consequently time is not quite as yielding as we have grown to expect it to be"… 

…In a damaged time we might expect—or at least hope— the church would be a beacon of hope, but instead we find ourselves consumed by debates about sexual conduct… 

…If we live in a damaged time we fear the church is part of the wreckage… 

…Yet I believe that living in damaged times and in a damaged church is where God would have us be. "The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are" is Rowan Williams’ way to remind us that the time we have been given, our confusing and damaged time, is all the time we need to attend patiently to what seems to be the intractable and contingent problems that beset us. The name for that time, a name that has always been at the heart of Williams’ work, is ordinary time. Animating Williams' work and ministry has been the conviction that through cross and resurrection we have been given the time, in a world that believes it has no time, to participate patiently in the conversation necessary for the discovery that we swim in the sea of God's love… 

…By calling attention to sheer gratuity of speech Williams is trying to help us recognize the miraculous character of ordinary time. For to live well in ordinary time is no easy achievement because we are tempted to the dramatic in the desperate attempt to make our lives significant if not heroic… 

…Williams argues that we cannot and should not try to make our lives more authentic by dramatic gestures. Rather we must learn to engage in everyday tasks as common as learning to speak the truth and, perhaps even more demanding, to hear the truth through the time consuming work of conversation… 

…The art of ordinary living, according to Williams, requires that we learn to live without fear of the complexity of everyday life. To learn to live with the complexity of everyday life means the church cannot fear having the conflicts necessary for peace. Moreover if the church is capable of such conflict the church cannot help but be deeply threatening to the world's systems of power based as they are on the fear of the other…” 

Hauerwas notes that Williams, on returning to Britain from several months in South Africa, realized that that meant being in “a context [contra South Africa] in which the central questions were not clear nor did one know what kind of “resistance” was possible or constructive”. Sadly it’s a realization that still resonates, and is equally true of the experience of living in a context like New Zealand. I suspect the realization lies near the heart of the difficulty many people have with understanding what it might mean to be a contrast community performing the faith in such a way that that “performance” is deeply missional and transformation in culture. 

Hauerwas continues: 

“…Williams confesses that he longs for a Church more true to itself. Such a church would be one more determined to oppose war, a church capable of offering hospitality to resident aliens who may be gay, a church that can challenge the economic practices that perpetuate poverty. Williams believes his desire for such a church is Godly yet he believes he: 

‘…Must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me--because what God asks of me is not to live in the future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than were we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. Living in the truth involves the same sober attention to what is there--to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see--with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in the kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended…’ (Christ on Trial, pp. 85-86.) 

… Yet it is my conviction that Archbishop Williams' understanding of the time in which we must live as Christians, of how we must live in the world as we find it, shares much with what I learned first from John Howard Yoder… 

… Yoder observes to "rule the world" in fellowship with the Lamb "will sometimes mean humbly building a grassroots culture, with Jeremiah. Sometimes (as with Joseph and Daniel) it will mean helping the pagan king solve one problem at a time. Sometimes (again with Daniel and his friends) it will mean disobeying the King's imperative of idolatry, refusing to be bamboozled by the claims made for the Emperor's new robe or his fiery furnace." We are able so to live in the time "where we are" because we believe to so live is the shape of the work of Christ… 

…We have an Archbishop who exemplifies what it means to live patiently in time by refusing to let us isolate ourselves from one another. The name we give to that refusal is "communion"…” 

If you haven’t got a copy of the book, you can find a PDF of the May 2006 paper here.    

 

Stanley Hauerwas Reflects on Seminaries

I recently had the delight of reading several essays and shorter reflections in Stanley Hauerwas’ very engaging and stimulating The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Blackwell: 2007). 

One Hauerwas’ short reflections: an address to mark the Centennial of Bethany Theological Seminary took me back to some recent discussions I was involved in around the subject of the types of clergy required for a significantly changed socio-cultural and missional context. Here are some excerpts from the talk: 

He begins, “Seminaries are in trouble. Seminaries are in trouble because churches in America [insert “New Zealand” if you wish] are in trouble… 

…Seminaries [as distinct from theological schools in universities] are allegedly for training people for the ministry of Jesus Christ. However, given the ambiguous character of the modern ministry, it is unclear what it means to train people not only to survive but also to flourish in the ministry. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the alleged gulf that is said to exist  between the more academic courses in seminaries and those courses called practical or ministerial. The former are too often derided by those in the ministry as of little use for preparing people for the actual challenges of the ministry. Thus the slogan is heard far too often: “They (meaning the congregation) do not care what you know. They want to know that you care.” 

As a result there has developed a deep anti-intellectual culture among students who come to seminaries…”

“Few developments”, Hauerwas argues, “could be more disastrous for the church than acquiescence to the demand to “dumb down” the curriculum to make seminaries more responsive to pastoral care. The challenges confronting the church in a consumer society demand more not less formation in the intellectual skills the church calls theology… 

…Contributing to this problem is the lack of preparation students bring to their work in the seminary… Moreover, the best and the brightest are not necessarily going into ministry. The ministry is not exactly a status profession. The problem with many of our students, however, is not that they are ill prepared but that they are just lazy. They have felt “called” to ministry because they often like “to work with people” but it has never occurred to them that the work they are to do with people in the name of Jesus Christ mean more than being a nice person…” 

He goes on to talk about St. Augustine and writes that it is his “…contention that anyone serving in ministry today who lacks the resources that Augustine provides risks abandoning their congregation to the omnivorous desires of the market…” 

Stanley Hauerwas - The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God pp. 206-207.

 

Religion and Paradoxes: It isn’t Black or White!

“Great religion is full of paradoxes. A paradox is something that appears to be contradictory, but if seen from another angle or with a different mind, is not a contradiction at all but a deep truth. We Catholics love paradoxes: Jesus is fully human and yet fully divine. Mary is a virgin and yet mother. The Eucharist is bread and Jesus at the same time. God is three and one at the same time. These are logical contradictions and cannot be processed with a dualistic mind. To deal with spirituality, you need different software, which I call contemplation or nondual consciousness. Paul simply called it understanding spiritual things spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:6-16).

Once we stopped teaching the contemplative mind, we set up the Western world for rationalism and secularism. We lost our unique access point, our "new mind" and alternative consciousness. We told Christians to keep believing these doctrines, which we always paradoxes, but we no longer gave them the proper software with which to understand them. Is it any surprise that atheism emerged primarily in the Christian West?”

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation. 

Via Mike Todd in the great city of Vancouver. Thanks Mike. Have been enjoying your regular Rohr posts. 

 

Jason Clark, Others, and the Church in the Present Tense

Today, David Fitch’s review of Church in the Present Tense: A Candid Look at What’s Emerging. Here’s how David begins his review:

“The emerging church frustrates me. Perhaps this is my problem because I am expecting it be something it was never intended to be. Nonetheless, the emerging church frustrates me because, over the past ten years, it asked so many important questions, fermented so many good conversations, yet seems to have produced so little on the ground, i.e. churches, activist work for God’s mission in Christ Jesus.  Good friends (in Emergent land) tell me to look at all the emerging church has done to promote a conversation that stirs people for action in their already respective places of ministry and social justice. I, a grouchy Neo-Anabaptist, argue that all we’ve done is stir the pot, and then blended in with existing structures.

I want to see communities of Christ birthed (we don’t have to call them churches if your stomach can’t handle that) where true justice can be planted and infest neighborhoods. I want to see places of resistance called into being where individuals together can witness against the consumerist and pornographic excesses of American culture gone badly. Forgive me for sounding like an anarchist but this is what I think matters.  

Perhaps the emerging church is supposed to be a conversation and that’s it. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to ask what has become of the emerging church and why? Ten years ago, it was defined by the organizing force of Emergent Village, a website and organization that ran conferences and local cohort groups. Today, it appears to be one all-inclusive massive conversation. I KNOW A LOT OF GOOD HAS COME FROM THIS PLACE BUT I WANT MORE (sorry for shouting).  So, again, I think it is fair to ask why more has not come from the Emergent that looked so promising 10 years ago…” 

Read the full review here. Jonny Baker reflected on the book back in March (here). Appended to Jonny's post is a comment by friend Jason Clark, who contributed a couple of chapters, and is currently worked on his PhD. 

 

Review: Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality

The Englewood Review recently featured Stephen Lawson reviewing Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality Viggo Mortensen and Andreas Osterund Nielsen, editors. Paperback: Eerdmans, 2010. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

“…The next section provides the most extended and perhaps most important exchange in the book. Stanley Hauerwas and Friedrich Graf both articulate visions for how the church should situate herself in the world given her disestablishment in late/post modernity. The editors fittingly summarize this exchange and are worth quoting here at length,

How will the mission of God contextualize in the Western world in (post)postcolonial and multireligious times? One important and inevitable choice will be between a particularistic ecclesiology like that of Stanley Hauerwas and protestant liberalism as presented in the volume by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf. … Either Christianity can seek to be appreciated as a sensitive contributor to peaceful, liberal societies or establish the church as an alternative, pacifist public. Mission can accordingly be grounded in the universality of individualized humanity (theologically: in creation) or the particularity of the catholic church (theologically: in Christology) (4).

Hauerwas takes the opportunity in his essay not only to offer a vision distinct from Graf, but also to respond to the criticisms of Nate Kerr. In his book, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission, Kerr critiques Hauerwas for (among other things) “ontologizing” the church with language such as “church as polis.” This amounts, according to Kerr, to the devaluing of the missionary and apocalyptic character of Christianity. The church’s job is not to be something, but to participate in something ― the missio Dei. Hauerwas here responds by asserting that the church doesn’t do mission, but rather is mission. To this end, he begins the essay with a epigraph from John Howard Yoder, “The new Christian community in which the walls are broken down not by human idealism or democratic legalism but by the work of Christ is not only a vehicle of the gospel or only a fruit of the gospel; it is the good news. It is not merely the agent of mission or the constituency of a mission agency. This is the mission” (53).

With typical Hauerwasian rhetorical flare, he dismisses any attempt to discuss the mission of the church in universalizing or abstracted realms (“the church can at once be everywhere only is she is somewhere”) which does not win him friends in protestant liberalism, and insists on equating mission with concrete embodiments of ecclesial practices which does not endear him to those (like Kerr) who argue for a dispossessed church caught in a greater movement. Kerr (who does not write in this book), Hauerwas, and Graf all represent different ways for the church to conceive of her identity and practice her vocation. This is exactly the kind of reflection that the church in a post-Christendom world needs to be doing. They should all be carefully read…” 

Read the full review here.

 

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing About My Work, and the Medium is the Massage

The 21^st July 2011 marks 100 years since the birth of Marshall McLuhan. 

Two interesting radio shows on ABC Radio National have been well worth a listen this week.  Both interact with McLuhan, the celebrated social and media theorist. Here’s the blurb for both shows and links to the downloadable podcasts: 

“Marshall McLuhan was a committed Christian. How did he come to his faith and did it influence his ideas? And has his work any meaning for the Church today?” 

You’ll find the radio programme here. 

“Since the 1960s, McLuhan famously avoided taking what he called a 'moralistic' stance on the goodness or badness of electric media. But close readers of his major writings are in for a surprise. What emerges is distinctively conservative: tribalistic, stringently moralistic and opposed to the liberal, modernist, individualist age of modernity. This week, The Philosopher's Zone investigates McLuhan the right-wing moralist.” 

You’ll find the radio programme here. 

For an entree to McLuhan you may appreciate Canadian Douglas Coupland’s (author of Generation X and other great novels) 2010 publication: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!...

 

“Making Peoples”: An Interview with Prof. James Belich

Historian, New Zealander Professor James Belich has been appointed the Beit Professor of Commonwealth, Imperial and Global history at Oxford University. In a recent radio interview he talked about his life, influences and what he hopes to achieve in the future. It was also a fascinating conversation around the importance of history, how we do history, and why we should do history. His insights into the history of New Zealand and our stories were also really interesting. Indeed, the content of the interview introduces some of the important themes he wonderfully develops and unpacks in two of his relatively recent books: Making Peoples (1996) and Paradise Reforged (2001). 

Let me say too, that you don’t have to be an historian or to have a real passion for history in order to get real value out of listening to the interview. It took me to some interesting places, and gave me some interesting insights into what it means to be a New Zealander. Belich is a fabulous story-teller, he turns history into stories - ones that one is drawn into. A real gift for those of us naturally inclined to history - especially if our experiences of history at school etc were ruined us because of the dryness and a lack of passion. 

The interview can be found on the Radio New Zealand website here (scroll down). Its duration is 49′31″.

 

Rowan Williams: God’s Boxer…?

Today, a shortish interview with Rowan Williams – nothing particularly new, but a few little insights. Something to read with your morning coffee in hand… 

Here’s an excerpt 

“…So for me it was a great privilege to be able to question him properly, this time by strolling down Miss Havisham's draughty corridors all the way to his vast study in Lambeth Palace. It's hard to believe that such an enormous room can be overwhelmed by files, papers, candles and icons, but it is. If the archbishop's echoing, cavernous mind sometimes seems to resemble this room, then that's because he's …prodigiously learned … 

…The archbishop is clearly resigned to the inevitability of being misrepresented ("Did you know the editorial would excite the press?" "I had a shrewd suspicion." "Are you now immune to it?" "Not entirely, but I'm inured to it"), but on occasions, I suggest, it happens because he lifts the knife, then fails to plunge it in. When he observes that economic relations as they are currently played out threaten people's sense of what life is and what reality means, surely what he's really saying is that capitalism damages people. To my surprise, he agrees. Does he therefore think economic relations should be ordered in a different way? "Yes." So is it fair to say, then, that he's anti-free market capitalism? "Yes," he says and roars with laughter. "Don't you feel better for my having said it?"…” 

You can read the rest here.