A Prayer for Sunday

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

- St. Ignatius of Loyola

(P.S. Sorry to have been AWOL for the past few days; we had a conference in my department and I was commenting on a paper. I’ve got some things queued up to go out soon, though – and also some exciting blog-related news about to come down the wire.)

Filed under: religion

The Body World and The Machine

by JL Wall

[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up.  For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]

I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and ads for it were plastered all over the city – there was one night in particular that I couldn’t get away from them (I think I was waiting on a bus) and I couldn’t bear to look at them – not because I thought it was gross, or dirty, or anything like that, but because, even though these were the bodies of “donors,” I felt it was disrespectful to them to ogle the dead body. I’ve always felt those taboos particularly strongly (and, contra Van Hagens, I don’t see anything wrong with that). Anyway, at risk of repeating what’s already been said, we now have this:

A new exhibition featuring preserved dead bodies having sex opened in Berlin on Thursday with critics saying a maverick German anatomist dubbed “Doctor Death” has gone too far this time.

The couple, part of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition “The Cycle of Life”, is the “low point in his tastelessness”, Michael Braun, culture expert from the conservative CDU party, told AFP.

Von Hagens said his copulating couples show the sexual act in “bracing clarity”.

The exhibits, of four “consenting donors”, are in a separate room accessible only to over-16s.

But it is, in a sense, the inevitable extreme if there’s an insistence on dividing the body and the soul, the worldly and the spiritual, and declaring the former base and unworthy and the latter alone sacred or noble. If we are prisoners in our bodies, why not conquer and imprison the prison itself, to free ourselves, as one might say the name of an incubus to defeat it?

The religious case against it is easier—to point out the role of creature and Creator, to remind one that such subjugation of the body is, in fact, to forget that, in the words of Rabbi Heschel, man “is the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced”: that the body and the soul are essential to state of being human.

A more secular case is harder, especially for me; I’ve been raised to think that there are just certain things one doesn’t do: that the taboos are there for a reason; that even if there is nothing behind them, they are good for the order and structure and survival of society? That this “liberation” from the bodily prison, the so-called subjugation of the guards is actually the subjugation of the human body to the fruits of human technology—only reinforcing Wendell Berry’s dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical, and that it is a dangerous symptom of the growing dependence on that which cannot be sustained inevitably? That, in other words, we would liberate ourselves from one prison into another? (Are these even truly “secular” anymore?)

I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a good non-religious case against what I’d term the body’s desecration; but any argument against it must be founded on the belief that there is something unique in mankind. The moment a human being is literally “just another animal,” anything is permitted.

Filed under: morality, religion, science/tech

Leonard Cohen’s Song of Songs

by JL Wall

Last night, I saw Leonard Cohen perform at the Chicago Theatre. Those brave gracious few who took the time to read what I had to say at phaidimoi logoi may already be familiar with my affinity for the man’s work – and my insistence that he’s not just singing about love and sex, even when he’s singing about love and sex.

I used to phrase it (at least to myself) that he was a little like John Donne: when he’s talking about romance, he’s talking about G-d; when he’s talking about G-d, he’s talking about romance. But it struck me in the middle of a song last night—and I forget which song, other than that it wasn’t “Hallelujah” because that song came in the second half of the show—that yes, it’s like Donne, and that line of Faulkner about Keats (“He’s talking about a girl.” “Well, he had to talk about something.”), but, more importantly to the purpose, it’s like the Song of Songs: the relationship between the human and the divine—the striving for each other—embodied in the imagery of a human romance.

This isn’t a quality found throughout Cohen’s work. His earlier writing has an arrogance to it—and is itself aware of (and not entirely comfortable with, I think) that arrogance. But something changes about mid-career—he becomes more reverent about the world, one might say—and it’s most prominent on Various Positions. Cohen himself described “If It Be Your Will” as “more a prayer than a song” than stemmed from “dark times” which eventually led him into that retreat from the world into Zen and “a rigorous study of religion.”

But back to the Song of Songs. Songs on Various Positions that are ostensibly about human romance begin to make more sense. In “Dance Me to the End of Love,” the addressed is leading the dance, and the one playing the music itself—and the title is rephrased as a request to “Show me slowly what I only / know the limits of”: with the wedding imagery, it feels strikingly like the songs of the Kabbalat Shabbat service. “If It Be Your Will” is undeniably a prayer (undeniably beautiful and deserves a lengthy essay of its own. The Shekhinah can be found in “Night Comes On” (or else I’m very, very guilty of the sin of over-reading). “Coming Back to You”: it’s bizarre as just a love song; add in a dash of t’shuvah, and it makes more sense: why is he looking for his former lover “in everyone”? How can the act of coming back occur while he’s alone in his room? And the fourth verse: this ideal lover has many loves, why is the beloved “choos[ing] the precious few” and why the need (and willingness!) for all of them to leave and move beyond pride and themselves?

(In relation to that last question, David Goldman at the First Things “Spengler” blog: “God’s love is what is terrifying, for it consumes the individual ego and annihilates the human sense of self.” – which is, he says, channeling the late Rabbi Soloveitchik, why the lovers elude each other – and must– in the Song of Songs.)

And “Hallelujah.” Writing for the Trib, Greg Kot completely misses the point:

The song about sex, temptation, adultery and religion spirals even further inward and becomes a meditation on the meaning — or perhaps the meaninglessness — of life. The shout of devotion morphs into an ecstatic cry and then a defeated moan. The interjection that means “Praise ye the Lord” turns hollow. In the end, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

“Maybe there’s a God above/And all I ever learned from love/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.”

What’s wrong here is that this isn’t the final verse. It’s simply not the emotionally and spiritual moment at which the song ends. While he himself is perfectly willing to shuffle the order of the verses, Cohen – in every version I’ve heard (and thanks to Youtube, this is many) – ends with the declaration: “And even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!” It all goes wrong, but he’s still proclaiming Hallelujah!, despite it. Defeated, nihilist moan it is not.  Rather, like the proclamations of love in the Song of Songs, it is the declaration of a spurned lover, still in search of the beloved.

It isn’t just about G-d, and by no means are all his writings. (Ignoring the other sides and aspects of his lyrics is also to cheapen them.) But to secularize his work can be to lose the depth and beauty of the words themselves.

Filed under: media/culture, religion

A Prayer for Sunday

Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures and to meditate upon them day and night. We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need, that we in turn may put its precepts into practice.

Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So we ask that the words of Scripture may be not just signs on a page, but channels of grace into our hearts.

- Origen (ca. 185-254)

Filed under: religion

Reductio ad Historiam

How would history have judged a man who could have saved thousands of American lives but chose instead to adhere to some misplaced and misguided sense of idealism? – Michael Goldfarb

I’m sure that there are others who could do a better job of this than I, but for the time being how about: likely by way of the same morally repugnant rubric through which “history” “judges” as courageous and heroic a man who ordered the slaughter of thousands of innocent Japanese? Which is to say, only by ignoring those judgments which mark as “a crime against God and man” any act of war “directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants”, or as a crime of war the “attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended”. Such judgments, however, have no purchase on the verdict of History, which moves undaunted toward the exculpation of the victors with the sort of disregard for elementary principles “idealism” that appeals to such empty abstractions are invariably intended to effect.

If the basic standards of ius in bello governing conduct toward civilians and prisoners of war do not apply to us, then they do not apply to anyone – and this is true no matter the cramp such standards may put on our desired modes of operation, or the corrective they may be to our typically congratulatory self-assessments. Sometimes it’s only by overturning the myths of our past nobility that we can face up to the sins of the present.

Addendum: Sorry, but while I’m on the subject:

I have not fully formed my thoughts on torture, yet. I think I am against it but with this one exception: if I have a choice between saving say, 5 million lives in a nuke-contaminated Chicago or being able to say, “but at least we didn’t waterboard that guy,” I am inclined to think I would go for torture. The 5 million might still die, it’s true, but at least I won’t have to answer for standing idly by and watching it so that my morals might remain intact. I will take the chance that my moral failing in that instance will simply join my other moral failings in life, and then God and I will work that stuff out.

Actually, you have to work out your moral failing, in either case, don’t you? If you torture, you have to work it out. If you allow millions to die because you’re “too good” to torture, that’s another moral failing you have to work out. And what is the moral failing? Not trusting that God will help you work that out.

Maybe when you don’t have an idea that you and God can work out your moral failings, you have a tougher time dealing with them? I don’t know. But “who saves a life saves the world, entire” may come into play here. I don’t want to kill the guy I’m torturing. But I want to save 5 million lives.

(This from a prominent Catholic blogger, mind you.) So far as I can make it out, the “reasoning” – such as it is – goes like so:

1. People who refuse to violate inviolable moral principles are really being selfish, by keeping themselves all pure just so that they can brag about it; so
2. It’s okay to violate inviolable moral principles; and furthermore
3. Even not violating an inviolable moral principle is a moral failing, both because of (1) above and also because
4. Really trusting God means trusting that he won’t hold you to account for violating inviolable moral principles; so
5. Torture away, the Church’s categorical proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding; since after all
6. The best way to “form your thoughts” on moral matters is just to ignore the relevant Christian doctrines and agree instead with your Republican friends.
   

Which, in short, is how we end up with this. Casuistry would be too kind, really.

Filed under: morality, religion, torture, war

Plantitarian Thoughts

by JL Wall

Rod Dreher wants to hear the stories of vegetarians. Well, dear readers, I’m one of them and haven’t eaten meat in either almost two years, or almost sixteen months, depending on how you want to count it. (I’ll come back to that later.)

I don’t, however, have a strong ethical objection to eating meat; at least not like I did when I first stopped. You see, I’d been a “vegetarian sympathizer” for some time, and then I found myself involved in a college charity fundraiser that involved selling hotdogs. So to help out/support the cause, I was (in addition to grilling and serving and cashiering and impersonating the hot dog guys who work at Wrigley Field), I was also eating hot dogs – and only hot dogs – for lunch and dinner for a week. I knew, of course, that a plate or silverware or oven could be made “fleschig” (the kosher designation of, essentially, “meaty-ness” as opposed to “milkhig,” or “dairy-fied”), but up until then I didn’t realize that one could feel fleschig, and that the feeling is disgusting (and, unlike grill smoke, long showers are not a solution). So, more or less, I couldn’t stand the sight of meat for a week. And then it somehow stretched out into another week. Then, I realized, I had no reason to start eating meat again.

Back to that odd distinction from the first paragraph: “meat” so far only designates what comes from mammals and birds, not fish. That happened eight months or so later. The reason, of course, is that kashrus doesn’t treat fish like other meats: you can mix it with dairy. (And it tastes better than other meats. Have I mentioned that I didn’t really like red meat to begin with – until I stopped eating it and started fantasizing about filets.) So fish isn’t meat, right?

But I don’t have an ethical objection any more, right? Well, you see, the matter is that resuming eating meat would involve making a value-judgment about rightness of eating meat, which I never actually did when I gave it up (I just kind of stumbled into it, like studying Classics and blogging – do you sense a pattern here?). So I don’t have an ethical objection to eating meat because I haven’t been able to decide whether there is one – but resuming eating meat in the meantime would be, essentially, the judgment in itself. So I’m stuck.

Even then, there are pragmatic reasons for me: it’s certainly healthier (at least when compared to the American norm) to reduce intake of meat (and, in a family with a history of heart disease, the traditional hunk-of-read-meat I grew up with for dinner each night was probably not the best of ideas in the long run). And there’s the problem of ethical treatment of animals, and sustainable livestock habits. (Doing both at once isn’t as easy as it sounds: see here, and be sure to read the comments.)

There’s still one more reason I haven’t mentioned. Way back when I still ate meaty things, I’d essentially stopped eating any meat except fish that came from outside my own home’s kitchen. I could trust that my mother was keeping the meat and the dairy straight for me, but that steakhouse my brother loves so much? Yeah, I doubt it. And, honestly, there are times in secular Jewish society when it’s less awkward not to eat something because you’re a vegetarian than because you kinda-sorta-try to keep kosher (confession: my dishes, and my kitchen surfaces, are technically not kosher, and I still haven’t reached the point where I give too much thought to them – but it isn’t as big a concern when I’m not eating meat off of them).

Which brings me to Agriprocessors. In and around Chicago, I was finally living somewhere with regular access to kosher meat. The dining hall with the kosher station happened to be right next to where I was living – and, for assorted complicated reasons, all the food had to be made to-order, so it was far and away the best on campus. What this means is: by the end of the year, the only time I was eating meat that hadn’t been kosher from start to finish (as opposed to the supermarket meat at home which was treated more or less kosherly once purchased, for my sake) was when I ordered Chinese take-out. I’d grown so used to it, I wasn’t (and wouldn’t be) comfortable eating meat that hadn’t come from a kosher butcher/slaughterhouse.

But Agriprocessors might follow the laws well enough to get certified, but how they treat their animals, the land nearby, and their employees, is despicable. It’s big agribusiness with beards and kipot. But the worst part is that the rabbis who were in charge of granting certification didn’t care: to say anything, to report it, to try to stop it. Which is to say: I don’t trust that a kosher certification on my meat would mean it meats my standards of the type of meat I should be eating, which limits quite drastically my potential options.

So if I were to give it all up, and eat meat again, I’d still be faced with a question: short of whatever I kill myself, what meat can I eat?

In the end, despite my mother constantly offering rather large bribes to my friends if they can get me to eat meat again, it’s just easier not to.

You, however, are free to go on your happy carnivorous ways without any complaint from me. Well, just try to give factory farming as little of your money as is humanly possible, and we’ll call it a day.

Filed under: food, morality, religion

Christians, Conservatives, and Torture

Rod pronounces the Pew Forum’s finding that Christians – and Catholic, Evangelical, and frequently churchgoing ones in particular – are more supportive of torture than non-Christians to be “shocking”, but of course it’s not that at all. There are plenty of data showing that Christians’ attitudes toward abortion, contraception, and the rest don’t differ very significantly from those of the rest of society; the real factor, of course, lies in political affiliations, and I have little doubt that most of the relevant findings can be explained in terms of the fact that frequently churchgoing Catholics and Evangelicals are especially likely to identify as Republicans.

“What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?!” asks Rod. Perhaps it’s had something to do with there being a moral obligation to support the GOP in the face of the Democratic menace.

Update: Razib’s got the data. He concludes:

Politics & religion matter [in] shaping opinions. But to me it looks like religion has a much stronger independent effect on abortion than the death penalty. If I had to bet, I think torture would be more like death penalty.

Filed under: morality, politics, religion, torture

Better Late Than Never

… and better unambiguous in commitment to principle than willing to entertain that moral weakness that so often masquerades as nuance. First Things associate editor Russell Saltzman has got an absolutely first-rate essay up on the Imago Dei and torture as “mental murder”.

Filed under: morality, religion, torture

“Straight Shooting”

I have many dear friends, colleagues, and acquaintances closely associated with First Things and am generally inclined against public spats with magazines that were highly influential in my intellectual development, but come now: the staff blog finally gets around to breaking the silence on the torture interrogation memos, and what we get is the EPPC’s Keith Pavlischek, first with an approving link to an astoundingly-titled Marty Peretz post and a subsequent attempt to use talk of war crimes as a reductio of … well, of talk of war crimes; followed up by another post that leads with a request to “[l]eave aside … the moral and legal debate”, then uncritically parrots David Ignatius on how the fear of being prosecuted for beating the shit out of detainees might lead CIA agents to be careful before they, you know, beat the shit out of detainees.

To be clear: so far at least, at the main blog of religious conservatives’ intellectual journal of record, torture is “torture”, the Reagan-signed UN Declaration thereon is an annoyance at worst, Dennis Blair’s remark that America’s actions have “hurt our image around the world” in ways that have “outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security” counts as a case of you-know-what, and the description of this from Porter Goss:

The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate.

… is what gives my post its title. As I put it in the comments, I am SO glad that these people are the ones serving as the face of the religious right. First things first, indeed.

(H/T: Reader Boz.)

Filed under: morality, politics, religion, torture

A Prayer for Sunday

O how sweet, Lord, is your Spirit!

That you may manifest your sweetness to your sons,
may you fill up with all good things
those hungering for the sweet bread come down from heaven,
bestowing abundant riches upon the weak.

Filed under: religion