Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Hope in a Secular Age

More information about the book, and Newheiser can be found in the post following this one.

David Newheiser: Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith

I valued very much a recently aired conversation with David Newheiser, who is a Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University (ACU) in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. The conversation was titled: Politics and the Sacred and featured on the ABC show The Philosophers Zone (here).

His research addresses ethical and political questions in light of classic Christian thought and contemporary continental philosophy. He specializes in apophatic traditions of Christian thought and in Jacques Derrida's relation to religion.

His first book, title above (forthcoming, and I’m not exactly sure when, but maybe Nov. 2020 for the print edition, from Cambridge University Press), defends a hope that acknowledges its vulnerability but presses forward nonetheless. Where critics claim that hope pacifies political resistance by providing false comfort, I argue that it nourishes a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo. Drawing upon premodern negative theology and postmodern philosophy, I show that an uncertain hope is necessary to sustain commitment of any kind: interpersonal, political, or religious.

I’m looking forward to reading a copy of his book when it’s published. Meantime, you can find a list of his journal essays here, downloadable via Academia.

Bill Viola in Conversation

A fascinating conversation (published January 19th 2019) with one of my artistic hero's, Bill Viola. Its Easter Sunday as I type this, and I've felt myself drawn to Viola's video installations.

Martin Laird OSA: Silence Upon an Ocean of Light

Sheila Pritchard offers a few thoughts on Martin Laird’s wonderful trilogy of books about the contemplative life: Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation (OUP, 2006); A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation (OUP, 2011), and most recently, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation (OUP, 2019).

I’ve purchased each book as they’ve been published, but I must confess I’m still only halfway through Into the Silent Land, not because its not a wonderful book, but because of where I’m at, and what’s most alive or needful for me at particular times in my life. In other words, I have a strong tendency to read where I “itch”. I try and read my longing, desire and hope, which is why having a richly diverse reference library, has always been important to me.

That said, I want to strongly commend each of Laird’s books to you. They’re destined to be classics; books you’ll return to, and read again and again, in whole or in part.

Martin Laird is an Augustinian priest (hence the acronym OSA following his name) and Associate Professor of early Christian studies at Villanova University. 

You’ll find a great (online) 8 min, 29 sec section of a PBS programme (from Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine) featuring Laird here (circa, 2011). “…Love brings us into union with God, not knowledge…”

Most recently, you can listen to this 2-part conversation with Laird with the team from the podcast Encountering Silence, which I highly recommend – both these two episodes, but also the podcast more generally. Part 1 of the Laird conversation (aired 14^th March 2019), Part 2 of the Laird conversation (aired 19^th March 2019), and the final part here.

 

Encountering Silence

Regular listening for me over the last six-months has been Encountering Silence which “explores the beauty and importance of silence from many angles, not just the religious/spiritual/mystical, but also reflecting on the psychology of silence, silence and the arts, silence and politics, silence and education… the list goes on. For a topic that we often don’t devote a lot of time and energy to, silence certainly has an important (if quiet!) role in all our lives.”

You’ll get to listen to the likes of Parker J. Palmer, Sr. Margaret Mary Funk, Paul Quenon OCSO, Judith Valente, Brother Elias Marechal OCSO, Richard Rohr OFM, Jim Forest, and a wide range of others.

You’ll find a list of episodes here. Highly recommended.

Three Conversations with Parker J. Palmer

Today, three outstanding conversations – featuring Parker J. Palmer – from the REBOOT podcast

#14 – Shadow and Leadership – with Parker J. Palmer (2015)

Episode Description

Who are you? What do you believe to be true?  What do you bring consciously to the world? And, even more interesting, what do you bring unconsciously to your work, your organization, your relationships? How does that which you have either denied about yourself, or feel uncomfortable about, shape your life, either positively or negatively?   What lies in this unseen shadow?  And why is it important for you to explore?

The work of today’s guest shows up in just about everything we do here at Reboot so we are thrilled to have one of our key teachers, Parker Palmer, join Jerry for a discussion on a very important and powerful topic: Shadow and Leadership

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#42 – Building Relational Trust – with Parker Palmer (2016)

Episode Description

Parker Palmer is a man whose teachings mean so much to us and our work at Reboot, so it’s wonderful to welcome him back to the podcast for a new conversation with Jerry.  Jerry invited Parker back to explore some important questions: 

• What is the role of community in responding to a toxic environment?
• How do I respond when my leader hasn’t done their work and is leading from that place of shadow?
• What does it mean when a leader is using organization to resolve unconscious issues?

As is always the case when Parker and Jerry get together, this is a conversation packed full of deep lessons on leadership, the shadow, the importance of relational trust, and the incredible power present in community. This episode will leave you with new, profound questions and answers about yourself, your role in your organization, and the power you hold, but may not yet accept. 

“The effort to help a leader look at themselves in the mirror and see their own shadow at work is likely to result in punitive action sooner or later.” – Parker Palmer

“The question is how to build (in an organization) the kind of community that creates more resilience in these personal encounters, especially of the tough kind.” – Parker Palmer

“Good leaders are aware of two things: 1) whether they know it or not, they do have a shadow. 2) They need to build a trustworthy network of relationships where people can tell them the truth.” – Parker Palmer

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#86 – How Have You Lived Your Life? – With Parker J. Palmer (2018)

Episode Description

Aging, the continuous passage of time, is a journey upon which we must all embark. As life unfolds before us, we may be naturally drawn towards a state of inquiry in attempt to discern the purpose and meaning in our soul. For many leaders, the draw can be to gaze upon external outcomes as a manifestation of our life’s meaning, allowing our worthiness to be derived from our relationship between mean and end. But what if we were to allow ourselves to abandon the question, “Does my life have meaning?” and instead consider, “How have I lived?”

In this episode, Jerry is joined by speaker, activist, and friend of the Reboot Podcast, Parker J. Palmer, author of the On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. Over the course of their conversation, Jerry and Parker contemplate the insights they’ve gained in the process of aging, the power of living life with kindness and gratitude, and the importance of remaining open to being human together.

Finally, Sheila Pritchard offers some thoughts on Palmer's most recent book, which still sits on my bookshelf, unread. 

John Philip Newell – The Spirit, the Earth and the Soul

I’ve read and listened to John Phillip Newell a little over the years. I haven’t read his book The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings (pub. 2014), but the concept and framework out of which he writes fascinates me. I think of radical reorientation; new seeing; Ken Wilber’s principal of “include and transcend” (cf. his Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Pub 2006. Or, more accessible, The Integral Vision. Pub. 2007); deeper discernment; mysticism (thinking here of a remark by Karl Rahner SJ: “…“the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.” (The Christian of the Future (1965). See also this very helpful Harvey D. Egan SJ essay, or Egan’s excellent book Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life). As I listened I thought too of philosopher Richard Kearney’s notion of “Anatheism” – returning to God after God. I thought too of the practice of midwifery and midwifery as a metaphor. So much was evoked as I listened.

“…Christianity in the West is collapsing. Poet, peacemaker and scholar John Philip Newell believes we can either deny it’s happening, try to shore up the foundations of the old thing, or we can radically reorientate our vision and ask what new thing is trying to be born. So we ask John Philip what this new thing is that is trying to emerge from deep within us and from deep within the collective soul of Christianity…”

You can listen to the Nomad conversation with Newell here. The conversation itself starts 5mins in. 

Excerpt from Rebirthing God:

One sign of rebirthing, not only within the Christian household but also in the lives of many in the Western world today who do not identify with any particular religious tradition, is a reconnecting with spiritual practice. In the last two decades there has been an enormous burst of interest in yoga and other practices from the East, based on ancient teachings and disciplines that combine physical rigor with spiritual awareness. Likewise, we have seen a resurgence of labyrinth building in our church and public parks, and a reclaiming of other simple contemplative tools that speak of the desire to recover practices from the past to promote the rebirthing of spiritual well-being today.

One of the stations of the Iona pilgrimage is the Hermit’s Cell. It sits at the heart of the island. No more than a circular ruin of stones, it is the remains of an ancient Celtic beehive hut. Legend has it that Columba and his brothers would retreat there in turn for periods of solitude and prayer as a balance to their life together in community. The Hermit’s Cell stands as a sign of the relationship between contemplation and action, silence and expression, solitude and relationship.

On pilgrimage to the Hermit’s Cell I was once asked how many monks used to live here – a question that reveals the disorientation among many moderns in approaching the ancient practices of solitude and stillness. An interesting feature of the Iona Hermit’s Cell is its location. It is hidden amid hills in the interior of the island, so people often get lost trying to find it. They become disoriented. Similarly, so much of our culture, including our religious inheritance, has felt lost when it comes to spiritual practice. But we are in the midst of a reawakening.

One of the things that we remember on pilgrimage as we approach the Hermit’s Cell in silence together is that reclaiming the relationship between stillness and action, or between solitude and relationship, is part of the desire to come back into relationship with the wisdom of nature’s rhythms. The earth knows its patterns of night followed by day, of winter barrenness succeeded by spring energy and summer fruiting, of long periods of infolding and dormancy followed by seasons of unfolding and the expression of seed-force.

We know that if we do not give ourselves over to the darkness and dreaming of nighttime, entering its intimate invitation to sleep and rest, we will be only half-awake to the demands and creativity of the day. Yet at other levels we forget the natural patterns that we are part of. Or we pretend that we can be deeply engaged and productive while pushing ourselves and others in ways that are antithetical to the essential rhythms of earth’s cycles and seasons…”

~ The Rebirthing of God: Christianity's Struggle for New Beginnings. Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2014.

Cosmic Imagining, Civic Pondering

Maria Popova is the creator and editor of one of my regular visits, Brain Pickings. Natalie Batalha is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the project scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission. Together they join Krista Tippett for an unfolding conversation that is joyous, dynamic, and unexpectedly vulnerable — rich with cosmic imagining, civic pondering, and even some fresh definitions of the soul. I was surprised how much I enjoyed listening in.  

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript, but I have to say that in a similar way to listening to poetry, rather than reading it on the page, this conversation is richer for being heard.

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TIPPETT: You are both two people who are not religious in a traditional sense; 21st-century people. Maria, you said that you were atheist, and Natalie, that spirituality is something that you — it’s complex. And honestly — you’ve said we don’t have a definition. I think there are as many definitions as there are lives in a room, and that it’s never static. So it’s all, always, evolving.

And yet, both of you ponder and use the language of the soul. And I find that fascinating, and I just want to talk about what that is. What are we talking about? Maria, you actually spoke — you did a commencement address, was it last year?

POPOVA:I think, two years ago.

TIPPETT: At Penn, your alma mater, Annenberg School at Penn, and it was — the soul was the heart of it. What do you — here’s some language from that: “I mean ‘the soul’ simply as shorthand for the seismic core of personhood from which our beliefs, our values, and our actions radiate.” And you’ve also said that “The people most whole and most alive are always those unafraid and unashamed of the soul.” So what is that?

POPOVA: There are certain words that have been vacated of meaning by overuse and misuse. And we have the choice of either relinquishing them altogether or trying to reclaim them in some way. And “soul” is one of those words. I chose to go with trying to imbue it with the meaning that I live with in relation to it. It is, of course, related to the notion of the self. Now, I do not believe in a solid self, as I don’t believe in a soul that outlives the rest of the constellation of being, the physical being that is us. But, at the same time, it is where we spring from. The “us”-ness of us is rooted in this very complex interplay of values, beliefs, ideas, friends, places we’ve been, smells we’ve remembered. And it’s impossible to be a person without that. And because of that, it’s impossible to be a decent person without tending to it the way you would tend to a garden that you want to bloom beautifully.

TIPPETT: Maria, here’s something else you said in that speech, just extending that — you said, “Cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.”

POPOVA: I do think that cynicism is — it’s easy to judge it harshly, but really, it’s a defense mechanism, a maladaptive defense mechanism when we feel bereft of hope. And to live with hope in times that reward cynicism and, in many ways, call for cynicism, I think, is a tremendous act of courage and resistance…”

You’ll find the podcast here.

Travelling Companions: Anne Lamott / Jack Kornfield / & Mari Andrew

I was on the road last night and had downloaded three episodes of Sam Lamott’s How To Human podcast. I hadn’t heard of it until last week, but any conversation featuring Anne Lamott, or Jack Kornfield, or Brené Brown, is, in my experience, a conversation well worth listening to, and I wasn’t disappointed, listening, as I drove to:

Anne Lamott (23/11/17) – Creation: Starting and Doing (podcast here)

Jack Kornfield (26/02/18) – Inner Peace: Honoring Your Cargo (podcast here)

And

Mari Andrew (27/03/18) – Are We There Yet (podcast here)

I highly recommend these three. Have a listen via the webpage or however you’d normally listen to podcasts, and then, as I’ll be doing, have a listen to the others.

 

Alfred Hitchcock, Hannah Arendt, and Margaret Wheatley in Conversation

I guess many of us are trying to make sense of these political and cultural times we live; we’re trying to understand how to become more fully human; how to be gospel-shaped; and how to respond in ways which are humanizing and life-giving. Certainly I’m trying to understand these things, and more besides, especially when so much is corrosive with respect to all that’s important to me. Today I want to juxtapose a few resources that have funded my thinking of late. This follows on from yesterday's post, which primarily brought Patrick J. Dineen and James K A. Smith into conversation, with a little input from Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre.

I want to add to that conversation Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window, a conversation about Hannah Arendt, and a conversation with Margaret Wheatley (who interestingly mentions Arendt in passing), and in particular Wheatley's focus on clear seeing, the importance of thinking, the critical need to act, and the importance, as she sees it, of "Islands of Sanity" (I’d have used the expression “Islands of humanity” committed to humanizing practices!

For me, some of the juxtapositions are:

• The importance of thinking in the midst of contemporary reality, i.e. not abstractly and at a distance.
• The importance of resourcing deep thinking and conversation (in this particular case, for me: Arendt, Roxburgh, Dineen, Smith, Alfred Hitchcock, and Margaret Wheatley; or: written texts, audio, and visual - all juxtaposed)
• The importance of moving from being a mere "observer" (passive watching) to active engagement and doing.
• The importance of nurturing hope (communities of hope)
• Imagining "Islands of Sanity" through the lenses of mission and nu-monasticism (local, Jesus-embodying, Spirit-empowered, enacting communities). Allowing the gospel to shape and form us as “missional outposts”.