[This week, The Seedbed is proud to participate in a blog tour of Jennifer Woodruff Tait's newly-published book, The Poisoned Chalice: Eucharistic Grape Juice and Common Sense Realism in Victorian Methodism (University of Alabama Press). Facebook fan page for the book is here. Make sure to check out these other stops on the blog tour:

Full Disclosure: Jennifer Woodruff Tait has been a friend of mine since 2001. I also got a free copy of the book as part of the tour. But it is, also, very good, and I am certain I would think so if I didn't know her and had bought my own copy. (Actually as it happens, I did buy my own electronic copy because I left the free copy somewhere while traveling... but I digress.) Anyway: point is, she's great, she's a friend, but the book is great too. And now on to the actual post.]

I have Anabaptist in-laws, as I may have mentioned once or twice here. They don’t have any form of plain or distinctive dress — no cape dresses, no coffee filter hats or doilies or anything, although my husband’s mother and his paternal aunts did wear headcoverings as girls, and my father-in-law remembers the first time he parted his hair on the side and came down the stairs wondering if there would be repercussions. But although distinctive dress is not part of their lives anymore, abstinence from alcohol is less of a distant memory. My parents-in-law still do not drink alcohol. My husband’s sisters have wine only on occasion, and my husband went to a dry college (no dancing, eiher) and has never consumed alcohol to the point of intoxication. (Although he does drink beer, which I hadn’t realized was more controversial than wine until I happened to mention it in passing to one of my sisters-in-law – who is a lovely person, mind you – and she said “Phil drinks BEER?” with the sort of disturbed, italicized inflection that you might use to say… oh, I don’t know… “Phil eats his TOENAILS?” Which, incidentally, he doesn’t.)

None of this is galling to me, although I find it strange and interesting. What has been a little goat-getting, though, is the use of grape juice in communion. Or, no: not just the USE of grape juice in communion, because who cares? But the PRINCIPLED use of grape juice in communion. I mean – as I’ve asked Phil countless times – WHY? Wine is in the Bible. Jews used wine. The first Christians used wine. There wasn’t unfermented grape juice back then. It simply WAS WINE, people.

(Of course, I say this as someone whose father did public relations for a beer company, who got a merit scholarship funded by the national distillers union, and whose parents’ oenophilia to this day might possibly keep a few small California vintners in business. Incidentally, Jen, if you wanted this post to have the sober (ha! I slay myself!) air of a book review in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal: um, sorry?)

But still! For a movement where “approximating the actions of Jesus as closely as possible” is the whole raison d’etre, I could not fathom how this glaring exception got a pass.

Jennifer Woodruff Tait isn’t writing about Mennonites. (Confidential to JWT: Next book? Pretty please?) But she is – as you can probably tell from the title – writing about the use of grape juice in communion by Methodists. And as it turns out, there’s a great deal more theological rationale than I ever considered. As Edwin points out in yesterday’s stop on the tour, this is one of the real strengths of the book: she takes seriously the theological rationale, rather than deciding (as has evidently often been argued) that they all must have been manipulated by, or unreflective about, the surrounding culture.

Not that culture played no role in forming the theological rationale. One of the really fun sections of the book – and there are a lot – comes early when she talks about how much alcohol people consumed in the 19th century. WOW. IT WAS A LOT, YOU GUYS. I mean, people were really drunk, often; and this led to antisocial behavior sometimes, as it does. And then you get people who are sick of the antisocial behavior and want to reform things. Temperance movements, if I understand correctly, married a desire to modulate or eliminate antisocial behavior, with the late-19th and early-20th century love of HYGIENE! and SCIENCE! and CLEANLINESS!

All right, so that was the context: but what was the specifically theological rationale for grape juice in communion? Again, this is really not a time period I’m comfortable with, so you should read the book yourself to hear from an expert. But the idea seems to have been that part of what “we” (good Christians) should be about is seeing things rightly and truthfully. And you can’t do that if you’re not thinking clearly. And what does alcohol do, if not muddle your ability to see things clearly — as in, actually use your senses properly and form truthful ideas based on those sense-impressions? (Alcohol, but also romanticism, emotionalism, superstition, etc.) But surely (the thinking goes), God wills that we see things correctly and reasonably… therefore eucharistic wine can’t possibly require these sense-impairing properties. And out of this comes the two-wine theory: the idea that pure wine is wine in which there is no alcohol, because such wine does not interfere with the use of sense and reason.

(Evidently they also really, really, really liked water. So clean! Washes away the dirt! Let’s sing a hymn about it! Of course Christianity already had the baptism ritual, so that was covered.)

Anyway: there’s a lot more there, but this post is already in danger of becoming tl;dr – worthy. Let me say just two things: First, although this is a scholarly book, I could imagine giving it to my (intelligent, well-read, nonspecialist) father-in-law and having an interesting conversation based on it. So, you know, three cheers for clear academic writing!

Second: I’d like to think that any book I read changes me, a little but. But honestly, this one did more than most. Because it caused me to realize that the “Duh-you-guys-it’s-wine-in-the-Bible” eyerolling move is not only very overdone, but also very class-freighted and, well, snobby. And not even creatively snobby. It’s a product of its time and social location at least as much as eucharistic grape juice is. So: that’s not a comfortable thing to realize, but it’s probably important.

It’ll be interesting to see what the other posts say. Meanwhile, I don’t know if Jen will be able to hang out in the comments, but either way: any questions?

The Seedbed is very honored to welcome Derek Penwell, senior pastor of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Louisville, Kentucky and lecturer at the University of Louisville in Religious Studies and Humanities. He is the author of articles ranging from Stone/Campbell history to aesthetic theory and the tragic emotions. He is a graduate of Great Lakes Christian College (B,R.E.), Emmanuel School of Religion (M.A.R.), Lexington Theological Seminary (M.Div. and D.Min.), and a Ph.D. in humanities at the University of Louisville. He currently blogs at The Company of the Eudaimon, on [D]mergent, and on Twitter at @reseudaimon. Penwell frequently crochets Mexican serapes from the tattered remnants of repurposed 1970s tube socks.

It is a tenet of liberal Enlightenment faith that belief and knowledge are distinct and separable and that even if you do not embrace a point of view, you can still understand it. This is the credo Satan announces in Paradise Regained when he says, most men admire / Virtue who follow not her lore (I, 482-483). That is, it is always possible to appreciate a way of life that is not yours. Milton would respond that unless the way of life is yours, you have no understanding of it; and that is why, he declares in another place, that a man who would write a true poem must himself be a true poem and can only praise or even recognize worthy things if he is himself worthy. (Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 247).

Over the last 10 days, Ive had occasion to be congratulated and insulted (usually with a lot of capital letters), since Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, where I am senior minister, voted to support marriage equality by refraining from signing marriage licenses until LGBTQ people are extended the same rights. It is surreal to watch people whove never met you argue about what kind of person you are. Some people are certain that I wear my hair long to cover up devils horns. Others have suggested that our stand at DBCC must signal some latent truth about my own sexuality. While, still others are convinced that I recline only on beds of freshly pick spring flowers, tended to by angels still in their probationary period. But, for the most part, its difficult to take any of it too seriously. They dont really know much about me apart from a few news reports.

There is one criticism, though, that I find difficult to look past. It goes something like this:

The bible clearly says that homosexuality is wrong, and if you say its not, then you must not believe the bible. In fact, youre only doing what youre doing because youre a liberal boot-licker. Any good Christian can see that you only care about a left-leaning social agenda, not about obeying Jesus. You should just drop the pretense, and quit calling yourself a Christian.

Underlying this allegation is an assumption that I think liberal Christians need to challenge vigorously and often. Sentiments like this, it seems to me, center on the conviction that what is most important about following Jesus is believing all the right things about him (e.g., the correct human/divine ratio, the substitutionary nature of the work he accomplished on the cross, the precise blend of personal ethical maxims, capitalist free-market economics, and national pride, etc.). If you happen to raise questions about any of those, or, more actively, to offer disagreement, you will have ventured into some form of vicious heterodoxy unknown since the days of Torquemada. That is to say, that well-known 1960s Christo-hippie chorus has been transformed at the hands of some Christians, so that now it proclaims that they will know we are Christians by our appropriately worded bumper stickers. This presumption of the necessity of verbalizing correct belief is what constitutes Christianity for some folks. If you know the right answer, you should be fine. On this account, the churchs job primarily revolves around disseminating correct information, while enthusiastically seeking to overwhelm those whom it perceives to be its opponents.

The claim that I think liberal Christians ought to defend more scrupulously, however, is that the actions they take, the positions they stake out are not merely self-conscious attempts to avoid taking scripture seriously. Quite to the contrary, in fact. The liberal Christians I know seek justice for the poor, the marginalized, the powerless precisely because they believe that in so doing they are being faithful to the witness of scripture. That liberal Christians don’t view the bible as some sort of casuistic step-by-step guidebook to discerning, for instance, whether God opposes any Rock ‘n Roll not preceded by the qualifier “Christian” doesn’t mean that they don’t value scripture as authoritative, any more than saying that conservative Christians who read the Sermon on the Mount and come away from the experience believing that “Jesus would have been cool with thermonuclear weapons” means that they don’t value Jesus as authoritative. It really comes down to the interpretative strategies one employs–an issue I won’t try to solve here. My point is that though liberal Christians read the bible with a different set of assumptions about the kind of truth the bible is capable of producing, it does not follow that they are not committed to the bible–or, less generously, that they are not even Christians–just because they don’t share the same set of assumptions as conservative Christians.

I am aware that my description of the value placed on scripture by liberal Christians will be heard by conservative Christians as rationalization, as merely a justification for making the scriptures say whatever liberal Christians want them to say. And that, I think, is the problem. It is this primary posture of suspicion that forecloses conversation. To say that liberal Christians have some ulterior motive in interpreting scripture (while conservative Christians “just read the clear truth of what’s there”), is to begin from the premise that liberal Christians are either the overeager but unwitting dupes of 19th century German theologians or 20th century French philosophers, or that they are evil dissemblers disguising themselves as Christians for the purpose of . . . what? I’m not sure. On this reading, liberal Christians are being led around by the nose at the hands of their cigarette-smoking post-structuralist overlords, or they are the mendacious toadies of the coming one-world government. (Let me be quick to point out that liberals can shut off conversation with the same kind of dismissiveness–namely, conservatives as handmaidens of a discredited form of overconfident Enlightenment rationalism, or as rubes and hicks who learn theology at the feet of preachers who’ve spent too much time in front blow-dryers.) I think liberal Christians ought not to cede the hermeneutical high-ground.

It’s not that liberal Christians are trying to figure out the most diabolical ways to dismantle “old-fashioned Christianity”; instead, the liberal Christians I know love Jesus so much they can’t imagine living in a world organized and structured in ways that would grieve him by doing harm to those whom he loves. Liberal Christians, in other words, aren’t just trying to speak the poem correctly; they are, as Milton said, trying to be the poem. Because as Christians we believe that scripture isn’t something first to be understood, and then lived. It first to be lived, with the hope that understanding will meet us somewhere along the way.

That the way liberal Christians go about honoring Jesus’ compassion and concern for justice for those on the outside subverts some conservative ways of reading scripture shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus was always stomping about in someone else’s petunias, always dismantling traditional expectations of who’s in power, and who ought to go to the back of the line. He was all about breaking down the walls everyone had always thought were insuperable. I’m not sure what they call it now, but in liberal Christianity we call it Easter. And Easter’s as subversive as it gets.

It’s Easter Sunday and I am grumpy and tired and it’s raining and my son has just learned to whistle and WILL NOT STOP PRACTICING IT. Meanwhile – just as background, if you’ve been wondering about where I am – I have been getting in debates hither and yon about whether:

1) It is better to have a liberal method (i.e. “We welcome all views with an open mind and a charitable tone, due to the awareness that we may be wrong”); OR it is better to have actual progressive convictions (i.e. “No, seriously, oppression of queer folks/women/people of color/people with disabilities/poor folks is actually objectively bad, and this is a claim I make and hold, and don’t think might be wrong.”)

2) It is better for people in positions of authority to absolutely FALL OVER themselves trying to gently, gently convince their more-privileged charges that they really ought to listen to less-privileged folks, even if that looks suspiciously like, oh, pretty much EVERY OTHER unjust system ever where the most-privileged have attention lavished upon them and everyone else is kindly invited to shut up and not raise any icky-poo uncomfortable conflict drama; OR… not.

Similar themes, no? Two different conversations. Hard conversations. With people I care about and admire and hate disagreeing with. And if you know me at all, you probably know that I come down squarely in the latter camp. But, anyway, now it’s Easter. And those conversations have me thinking about why I or anyone else should care.

“Resurrection” is an Easter-only word for many Christians, practically a technical term. That’s what Easter’s supposed to be about: Jesus’ resurrection, often taken to mean Jesus’ resuscitation. The payoff of which is often understood to be, “Hey! I don’t have to die, after all. Hooray! Well, I mean, I have to die, but it’s all pretend, because I’ll be in heaven, or else maybe asleep to be revived later.”

Or, for the crunchy intellectually earnest lefty-evangy Christians, it’s an Easter-and-Wendell-Berry word: We PRACTICE resurrection. We grow fancy chard in our backyards and we come to deep moral convictions based our fearlessness toward death, and we consult said convictions whenever we are asked What Other People Ought To Do, In Theory.

Yeah, well… yeah. Can we talk about something else, though, for a minute? Once there was a Palestinian Jew, born as a refugee, possibly a landless day-laborer or possibly middle class, who while he was alive lived in relative obscurity — as most people who’ve ever lived do — and then was tortured and killed by the government for insurrection: exactly none of which would have been seen as remarkable in that day. Later some of his friends talked about his death in a way which suggested they believed him to be a martyr, and believed God to have vindicated his death as (so they believed) God vindicates all the righteous martyrs.

This is the point in the story where those of us who have been appointed religious authorities on matters Jesusy sometimes like to say “AHA!” loudly. “It was GOD who vindicated the righteous martyr. Not US. Therefore (fingerwag, fingerwag) you Really Ought Not Try To Bring About Justice Through Human Means Because It’s God Who Does It.” The only justice worth striving for is one which proceeds from proper theological principles.

I suppose that’s one way to see it. This week I watched an online discussion unfold about EXACTLY WHICH white male evangelical pastor endorsed wives submitting to domestic violence, and to PRECISELY WHICH degree they each endorse same, and WHAT SCRUPULOUSLY EXACTING LEVEL OF NUANCE might be brought to bear upon the VERY SUBTLE WAYS in which such endorsement does and does not reflect upon the religious organizations with which they are affiliated, and EXACTLY WHICH claims the various debaters were using to defend their arguments and whether they were logically sound, and EXACTLY WHAT view of scripture and tradition you have to hold in order to not endorse wife-beating for reasons which are THEOLOGICALLY ABOVE REPROACH.

Because where domestic violence is concerned, clearly the most important thing is to be theologically above reproach. (My husband, God bless him, finally got in there and said “Wow, dudes. You sure showed each other. In all your back and forth you never mentioned or told the story of a single woman. How about you think about that? Meanwhile, here is a link to a domestic violence shelter in your area. They are looking for volunteers.”)

So, yeah, that’s one way of looking at it. Since vindication is coming from God, we’d better be sure we don’t seek any sort of vindication that doesn’t proceed logically and unassailably from theologically-defensible views of God.

Hey, though! Here’s another possibility: People who’ve been martyred — or squashed, ground up, strung up, exploited, hit, had their bodies used to signify less-than-human, mocked, beaten up in restrooms to the point of seizure, insulted, spat on, thrown in jail, etc. — have vindication coming that they don’t depend on our well-intentioned largesse for, fellow earnest do-gooders who are in a position to have a well-thought-out position. Maybe that’s what is meant by God’s vindication.

So, ergo, I submit: Either Easter has no truth in it whatsoever (in which case, don’t get me wrong, I’m totes down the bunnies and the chocolate and the eggs and the Peeps) or else vindication is coming. And it’s NOT coming about as a result of our earnest mullings-over, or our careful placating and ego-stroking and concern above all to keep from giving offense. And it is DEFINITELY NOT coming such a way that you have to have a proper view of scripture/authority/theological method before you’re allowed to care abot people being beaten. (JUST AS AN EXAMPLE.)

I honestly don’t know which is true, some days. Some days it’s a struggle to believe there’s anything more lasting than Peeps. Sometimes it’s other Christians making the religious version of Easter look implausible. Some days, in some eyes, I’m sure, it’s me doing the very same.

Two very interesting, thoughtful, influential Christian pastors passed away in the last few days: one Roman Catholic, one American Baptist; one cloistered, and one who participated in presidential inaugurations.

Father Matthew Kelty — longtime monk, priest, and homilist at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, confessor to Thomas Merton, and author of numerous books of collected sermons and essays — died last week at age 96. In a lovely obituary at Religion Dispatches, Louis Ruprecht notes that Fr. Kelty wrote an essay at age 90 called “Celibacy and the Gift of Gay” in which he argued that:

A celibate priesthood, community, is a grace for the Church, a song of the Kingdom (where there will be no marriage but all will be whole),and a joy for all in it. There are none more called to it, more capable of it, more created for it, than the people we call gay. They begin from day one a process of integration others do not even have a hint of before they are 40. Bless them! (My Song is of Mercy, 258-259)

At least some of Fr. Kelty’s homilies are online, and are beautiful reads. Here is one I particularly enjoyed. The large-crowd communication system he imagines I’ve in fact seen practiced at big demonstrations with no sound amplification.

Rev. Peter Gomes passed away Monday at the too-young age of 68. A chaired professor at Harvard, and the minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, Rev. Gomes was the leading spiritual adviser at the university; he was also a prolific author and a beloved teacher and preacher.

Below is an interview with Rev. Gomes. (Transcript follows.)

Interviewer: How do you, um, exegete “I am the way, the truth, and the life?”

Gomes: I exegete that always in the context of another verse, which Jesus says: ‘Other sheep have I not of this fold.’ And it seems to me that in exegeting any text of scripture, you take the verse, and you take the context, and you take the larger picture. I simply cannot accept the notion that that verse is the one absolute justification for a “my church or no church” point of view. I think Jesus is talking to a group of people and he says “Look, if you want to get in on this then you’ve gotta come with me. I’m the one who’ll get you there. I’ll show you how to do it.” He’s talking to a particular group of people. He’s not making a universal pronounciation [sic] there.

And even if he were — this is where I venture onto cracking ice I know — but even if he were, one has to ask: Surely God must have given some thought to all these other people, and what might that thought be? And just because I don’t know what that thought is, doesn’t mean that God doesn’t know. So I remember J.B. Phillips book many years ago, Your God is Too Small.

Interviewer: Your God is Too Small.

Gomes: I said: I have got to have a God who is not an American Baptist.

Interviewer: Well I can assure you…

Gomes: He is not. [laughter]

Well, I have to have a God who is not even a Christian. And somehow the God that I worship and who has made everything — and not just the post-Reformation church — has somehow a plan, a way, a thinking, and I have to take that seriously. I have to discover it.

So my relations with other faiths and other religions means that I have to be reverent of them, because somehow God is… has a responsibility towards them, as I must have. And therefore I can’t say “Well the only way I can deal with you is that you must become as I am.” And that… because that makes my little view God’s view, and I’m not sure that’s really quite right.

I suspect it might be cheesy to close an “In Memoriam” with the words of a hymn, but, you know, there’s a place for cheese — and I think there’s also a reason why people reach to song to express aspects of loss (even of famous people we’ve never met) that can’t be expressed in didactic prose. So in the words of one of my favorite Southern Harmony hymns:

My Christian friends, in bonds of love,
Whose hearts in sweetest union join,
Your friendship’s like a drawing band,
Yet we must take the parting hand.
Your company’s sweet, your union dear,
Your words delightful to my ear,
Yet when I see that we must part,
You draw like cords around my heart.

For the life of Fr. Kelty and Rev. Gomes, gratitude.

Due to a boring WordPress issue that would take far longer to explain than it’s likely to hold anyone’s interest, we here at The Seedbed wound up with a backlog of introduction posts that languished away pending review. Do you know why? Evidently the blog was waiting for me to approve them. The blog has a much higher opinion of my authority than is appropriate, higher than any human would be likely to form, and for this reason I didn’t know I needed to take that step. Ah well. Now I have done so, and changed the settings so that this won’t happen again. But because I’m worried about great posts getting buried, may I please direct your attention to:

This post in which Priscilla the Explainer introduces herself in what she SAYS will be her most serious post ever. (I’ll take her at her word about POSTS, SPECIFICALLY, but I also think that she might be one of the heavy-hitters in the comments, is all I’m saying.) Incidentally, don’t you think it’s charming and incredibly generous of Priscilla to be thanking the rest of us whackaloon lefties for abiding the presence of a relative conservative in our midst? Well I do. As though it’s not we who should be thanking her for being willing to be outnumbered.

But please also do not neglect this post in which rock star Yuki (I’m going to have to start thinking of synonyms for “rock star” because we are nine rock stars deep) eulogizes Dwayne McDuffie and manages – because she’s just that cool – to connect this to what Theologian and Official Famous Person David Tracy says about imaginative stories. I happen to know Yuki in real life — a datum which I never tire of dropping into conversation as it never fails to impress — and I will say that this is a tiny little sample of some work she’s done that has Gotten Noticed In The Field. So, you want to read this.

Once you’re finished with that, I SUPPOSE you may have a break, but then do make sure to read Cassandra of Troy’s introduction because… well, Cassandra of Troy is kind of internet-famous under another name AND YES I POACHED HER. (Okay, I didn’t “poach” her so much as I politely begged her to throw some posts our way as she’s able to fit us into her life, and not only did she agree but she’s gotten us out of most of the WordPress-related jams mentioned above and then some. One of my favorite lines comes early in the post, when she talks about what “drives me to think until my head hurts, to soul search until I cry, and to read until the wee hours of the morning. I believe faith and reason can intersect without requiring me to lie to you or me or anyone else.” Cassandra? Brava. World at large? Read, please. Thank you.

Oh, but don’t think you’re done just because you’ve pondered the nature of truth! Oh no no no no. Because you’ve yet to plumb Badasstheologychickwivattitude’s intro post in which she comes up with THE MOST DELIGHTFUL IMAGE OF WHAT THEOLOGY IS ALL ABOUT that I’ve ever read. You think you know what theology’s about because you read a little Helmut Thielicke? Pah. Once you’ve read BATCWA’s bit about the magazine – and that’s the only hint you’re going to get, internet! – you’ll wonder how you ever made it this far without that image in your head.

I can’t say there will be a quiz, but I can say I will give a teacherly stinkeye to any of you Internet People who gloss over these posts. None of us wants that, I think. So I shan’t distract you any longer. Have fun.

Now that I’ve started getting other opportunities to write elsewhere on the internet, I thought it might be a good time to expand the masthead. So a few days ago I put out a tentative appeal to some Facebook ladyfriends who were already of a writerly disposition, and who reliably had smart commentary on things religious. “Would you,” I hemmed and hawed while digging my toe into the ground and trying to make clear that I wasn’t trying to be annoying about it and would totally understand if the answer was no, “be interested in going in together on a group blog of religiously smart lady writers”?

So here is the astounding thing:

NINE. PEOPLE. WERE. INTERESTED.

I just can’t even contain my excitement. Details to follow as I add them, and as people discern whether they want/need to write under pseudonyms or so forth. The basics of the comment policy haven’t changed: We admit and encourage privilege analyses here, no mansplaining or whitesplaining or straightsplaining or cissplaining or TABsplaining and so forth… to say nothing of denying that any of these -isms exist, which is definitely out of bounds here.

But, that said, this group of amazing women does not constitute an echo chamber by any means, and I am sure in time we will find things to grumblingly disagree with each other about, likely to humorous effect. Plus, EXACTLY NONE of them are so highbrow that they can’t abide the occasional fluff/perfume/”Ha ha look, an otter doing silly things!” post.

Since there are more than a couple academics and pastors in our midst, one dream being floated around — which I and at least one other co-blogger are energized at the thought of — is the possibility of someday teaching free online classes, using an opensource learning management system. Making The Seedbed into a sort of free school, which is quite appropriate given the name. (“Seedbed” is the English for “seminarium,” the word from which “seminary” — what has been traditionally a training school for clergy, but whose definition is being broadened/reimagined as we speak — derives. Of course, the fact that the blog will be a bunch of religiously-thoughtful women makes the language even more evocative, when you consider the stubborn representation of “woman” as “passive receiving-ground for the man’s word/seed” that has so afflicted much of western theology, philosophy, and myth.)

Anyway, I just could not be more thrilled. I’ll write up a bio page/post once everyone’s degrees of anonymity and WordPress IDs are sorted out. In the meantime, though, some bloggers have been added and may begin posting any time. Hip hip hooray! I feel like it’s Christmas and Alan Rickman has just appeared in my doorway to give me a magical talking pony, some Reypenaer cheese, and a bottomless bottle of l’Artisan Dzing.

Oh sweet Maude. This is the second day we have been stuck in the house, unable to venture out because of baguette-high snow covering all of Tulsa. (Yes, yes, that would be a lengthwise baguette, smartypantses.) I am reaching the end of what little forbearance I had when this began. A clergy Facebook friend posted a – gentle and very pastorally-appropriate – bit of advice to those dealing with small children and cabin fever. “The three C’s,” he counseled. “Cooperation, calm and…” oh, something else, I don’t remember. I replied that I planned on getting through by means of chocolate, Crown Royal, and clomazepam. Mercifully, he took the remark in good humor. Unmercifully, in our house we lack all but the first. At one point today the children were playing a game called – and I give you my word I am not making this up – “Pirate Mummy Fart Skeleton Astronaut.” The idea, as far as I understood, was that one player pretends he (or she, when I got pulled in) is an astronaut exploring the surface of the moon. You can tell this, you see, by the fact that that player has a laundry basket on hir head. Well, you can imagine the astronaut’s surprise when zie comes across a MUMMY! On the moon! Can you beat that? Unwrapping the mummy, the astronaut discovers that it is in fact the skeleton of a famous pirate. Even more startlingly, the skeleton then FARTS! This, I gather, is supposed to be the fun part.

I am supposed to be the sort of person who can say intelligent, interesting things about our religious landscape. For this, I have trained. Instead I have now treated the Internet At Large to a story of “Pirate Mummy Fart Skeleton Astronaut.” Internet, LET US RECALL THAT I NEARLY HAVE A PH.D. Thank you.

Here, whatever, have some things about religion:

I was surprised to read this and realize: Hugo Schwyzer and I almost certainly must know some people in common, and quite possibly have been in the same room at some pacifist Christian gathering or other. Also (what, it’s not all about me?) this is a cool post. At least it resonated with me. “It was pretty to think so” is a very apt eulogy to the so-called consistent ethic of life position, which I also held for a few years.

There has been an arrest in David Kato’s murder of last week. The official report from police is that the murder occurred as the result of a personal disagreement, and not because Kato was an activist for sexual minorities. According to the link, the gay community in Uganda would like a bit more confirmation than that… rather understandably, given the death threats he’d received from, among other sources, the newspaper. Whatever the outcome of the arrest and trial, it’s worth bearing in mind the role of the U.S. religious right in fueling anti-gay sentiment as part of their “missions” in Africa. Bizarrely or cynically, the U.S. religious conservatives put an anti-colonialist spin on their efforts. Here’s an old (2009) post by Michelle Goldberg at Religion Dispatches:

It’s no secret, of course, that there are strong and growing links between American and African conservatives. Rick Warren has been deeply involved in planting churches in Africa and mentoring African preachers. Breakaway factions of American mainline denominations, objecting to the ordination of gay priests and the sanctioning of gay unions, have put themselves under the authority of conservative African clerics….

There is, of course, a fundamental irony in these arrangements. American conservatives have convinced their African peers that collaborating with them somehow represents a kind of anti-colonial resistance. One is almost tempted to applaud the American right’s audacity. After all, it generally opposed Africa’s national liberation movements, and often smeared the progressive churches that supported them. Now, by presenting homosexuality as the corrupt imposition of a decadent, dying West, American Christian conservatives have positioned themselves as champions of the developing world’s cultural authenticity. Meanwhile, African leaders purport to fight Americanization by aligning with some of the most powerful and chauvinistic of American religious leaders, and even taking US government money.

Other things of note: Chick-Fil-A explicitly disapproves of same-sex couples. The Episcopal Church USA Virginia Diocese, once one of the more conservative dioceses, has voted to allow same-sex unions. (Don’t get too excited, though. The reason for the changed stance is that the most anti-gay churches have defected to other Anglican bodies.) And you may have heard about the bizarre Planned Parenthood ‘sting’, orchestrated by Lila Rose. This looks to be part of a renewed effort on the part of a lot of anti-abortion luminaries to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

Yesterday we were wearing shorts here in Old Town (NB: As the state in which I live recently passed an English-only law for all governmental doings, I can only assume that all geographic place names were changed accordingly and thus I no longer live in Tulsa, Oklahoma but in Old Town, Red People. — SMB) and in 36 hours, evidently, we will be contending with sleet, single-digit temperatures, and power outages. Know what can still be entertaining during a power outage when you’re iced in your house? SNIFFING PERFUMES, is the answer. (You guys, come on.) As a foresmell, I bring you my impressions of:

Hermes, Kelly Caleche

It’s not that Cecelia’s family wasn’t well-off. They were. But Moyer’s family were landed gentry. So when it was Moyer’s mom’s turn to pick up both girls from their palatial private school and take them to ballet class, Cecelia rode in a Jaguar. Rode in, and smelled.

All leather and polished wood and shine, it looked and smelled like your entrance into it should be conditional. Which, naturally, it was, but it would have seemed more appropriate if admittance had been conditional upon your a) wearing aviator goggles and a long scarf and giving a thumbs-up to lots of clacking flash bulbs for your picture in the morning paper; or b) having a ticket that you bought, in an absurd moment of profligacy, with your inheritance the moment you came into your majority… and incidentally your father is a steel magnate and it’s the 1920′s and the vehicle in question is going on some sort of ridiculous poorly-thought-through colonialist expedition led by a blinkered naturalist. Or both! You’re BOTH an heiress AND a much-photographed dame giving the thumbs-up to photographers in a picture that would make the morning papers across the world. Country club ladies copy your style and clutch their hands to their chests as they relate the latest gossip about you. That would be fine!

Today Moyer’s mom was carrying some flowers. “Hi girls,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Cecelia and Moyer.

“Hi.”

“Hi. (“‘STEEL HEIRESS GOES ON FOOL’S ERRAND, LOOKING STYLISH!!’ Shut up, don’t be weird,” Cecelia blurted inwardly.)

Flowers don’t smell like leather, but smelling the two at the same time was pleasant enough… just like looking at the two at the same time was pleasant enough. Leather, flowers, leather, flowers. It would be nice just to live in here. Maybe someday Cecelia would drive a lovely car like this, dress in chic fashions, toss a bouquet of flowers onto the seat, and be what she knew Moyer’s people called a “beautifully turned-out girl.”

But then the were at ballet class, and Cecelia had to contend with leotards and other fourth-graders and being awkward. She easily forgot about the leather and the flowers.

Very, very bad news out of Uganda that will make you want to sob and punch a wall.

Yesterday David Kato, “one of only a handful” of gay rights activists in Uganda according to the Christian Science Monitor, was attacked in his home and died on the way to the hospital from a severe head wound.

Uganda, as you almost certainly know, is considering an “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” also called the “Kill The Gays” bill. Jeff Sharlet, this summer, summarized the main points in the bill:

Among its provisions: up to three years in prison for failure to report a homosexual; seven years for “promotion”; life imprisonment for a single homosexual act; and, for “aggravated homosexuality” (which includes gay sex while HIV-positive, gay sex with a disabled person, or, if you’re a recidivist, gay sex with anyone — marking the criminal as a “serial offender”), death.

Earlier this month, according to the Monitor, Mr. Kato and two fellow activists successfully brought a lawsuit against the Ugandan paper Rolling Stone, which had published the names, photos, and addresses of what it called Uganda’s “Top Homos,” under a banner saying “Hang Them.”

Kato was an advocacy officer at Sexual Minorities Uganda. From their press release about Kato’s death:

Across the entire country, straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Ugandans mourn the loss of David, a dear friend, colleague, teacher, family member, and human rights defender.

David has been receiving death threats since his face was put on the front page of Rolling Stone Magazine, which called for his death and the death of all homosexuals. David’s death comes directly after the Supreme Court of Uganda ruled that people must stop inciting violence against homosexuals and must respect the right to privacy and human dignity.

Sexual Minorities Uganda and the Ugandan Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex Community call on the Police and the Government of Uganda to seriously investigate the circumstances surrounding David’s death. We also call on religious leaders, political leaders and media houses to stop demonizing sexual minorities in Uganda since doing so creates a climate of violence against gay persons. Val Kalende, the Chair of the Board at Freedom and Roam Uganda stated that “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S Evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” (emphasis added)

Take responsibility? Whatever for? Just because…

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was ‘the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda’ — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” (NYT 1/3/10)

Sure, but it’s not like American evangelicals ever INTENDED this exact, precise OUTCOME. And shouldn’t we all be focused on that?

On Thursday, Don Schmierer, one of the American evangelicals who visited in Uganda in 2009, said Mr. Kato’s death was “horrible.”

“Naturally, I don’t want anyone killed but I don’t feel I had anything to do with that,” said Mr. Schmierer, who added that in Uganda he had focused on parenting skills. He also said that he had been a target of threats himself, recently receiving more than 600 hate mails related to his visit.

“I spoke to help people,” he said, “and I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other.”

YES HE SAID BLUDGEONED.

Mr. Schmierer is a board member, in case you were interested, of Exodus International, a Christian umbrella organization of so-called ministries offering so-called therapies to diminish same-sex attraction and thus give “freedom from homosexuality.”

Very, very pleased to announce that I’m going to be writing for Dialogic Magazine, an online publication of the Xenia Institute. Xenia is based in Norman, Oklahoma – YES OKLAHOMA, thank you, we are not ALL Jim Inhofe acolytes – and is an amazing organization that I’ve been wanting to get closer to for a long time, but had to wait until my dissertation was finished.

The Editorial Director, Barbara Yuki Schwartz, is a Phillips alumna and doctoral candidate at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. She is also awesome.