Category Archives: Theology

My Lenten Trauma

Posted on by Yuki
6

I hate Lent.

There, I said it.

Yes, I hate a liturgical season; we’ve never gotten along very well, and I realize that it’s been a terrible relationship with faults and problems on both sides. I have always seen Lent as a dark, horrific season that begins with a reminder of death and then spends the next six weeks on a progressive march toward torture that culminates in the hell that is the Good Friday observance. This has probably been very uncharitable toward Lent, which is, after all, supposed to be more of a time of reflection and preparation for renewal. Or so I’ve been told. I just can’t quite see it. I see what Lent professes, and yet I feel that it is acting kind of two-faced, in which it talks a good game about renewal and then kicks its dog when it thinks I’m not paying attention.

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Handful of seeds

Posted on by tam121
2

My Hebrew professor, Toni Craven, made the point once upon a time that Genesis doesn’t actually start with “In the beginning, God ….” If I remember right, it was more like “And as God was creating …” because the phrase started with a vav consecutive — i.e., a conjunction. As the telling began to be told, we were already in the middle of things.

I like that. Lots of times the beginning is unclear and the only place to start is in the middle. Or, better yet, with questions. My first question is how to approach this intro, because being surrounded by smart, funny women is intimidating and tends to freeze a keyboard if not a mind. So, here are some possibilities.

(1) I could start by self-identifying as the one who is Way Too Serious. Or maybe my Runs-With-Scissors name could be Needs to Laugh More (except I think the Queen took that one already, she having surveyed all before me). So, that makes this blog the perfect place to land; I will be laughing with y’all. Please, poke me when I get Too Serious.

(2) Or I could tell you that this* is what listening looks like. *This being my life of the last 15 years or so. I listened to Bonnie Miller McLemore and embraced “good enough.” I listened to Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Paolo Freire and helped launch an anti-racist church seeking solidarity. I listened to Audre Lorde and figured out I was gay (and started working on the whole fear thing). This list goes on forever, by the way … (see 1). Having listened, I tend to take things seriously.

(3) I could start with intersectionality … definitely living it and trying to live it better …. Patricia Hill Collins has it going on. So does Chela Sandoval. Who are you listening to?

(4) Oh, and this coulda/shoulda been my pseudonym: Controvert. Aka, an introvert who can’t leave it alone when it comes to wrassling with -isms and privilege. It’s been said I don’t play well with others; but it may be time to dispense with that canard. The reality is I have a gift for loving difference, and folks I am different from … and for biting the hand that is (wanting to control me by) feeding me. Between these two gifts, I have an interesting and bumpy life.

(5) Another possibility to explore is being one of those “stronger in the broken places” people. By the time I was 12, I was already walking wounded from religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, sexual abuse and racism. Heady stuff. But thanks to a bunch of good Sams (headed by one Daisy Machado), I did not get left in any of those ditches, and have lived to fight another day.

(6) Maybe I have those early experiences to thank for the realization that what tears the body also tears the soul, and both must heal. So, incarnational and embodied theologies are central for me, and now I’m trying to see how colonization/decolonization fits into that. I’ve written it a couple of different ways (including a bit for AAR called “Decolonization of the White Mind and Soul”), but don’t think I’ve cracked the nut yet. (Any of you smart people want to have a go with me? [grin])

(7) Or there’s always the struggle of trying to live a Micah 6:8 kind of life; thankfully, there is grace, because I fail. But I think love that is not doing justice is no kind of love at all.

(8) I could talk about having written a white anti-racist theology as my dissertation. (You know, the one no one recognized as theology. (No, I guess I am not surprised.))

(9) One of my best things so far is realizing epistemology is the new social location. So, I could tell you “me” in those terms:

a) The headline on my epistemology would be something like the knowledge worth producing and knowing is that which liberates. An extreme take on this would be that if it doesn’t liberate, it’s not worth knowing.

b) My social location is white (specifically, of Texas borderlands gringa extraction); lesbian (specifically a bendy femme*; I love me some old-school butches [yeah, one in particular, mmm]); citizen of the US empire (dissent is my version of patriotism); old enough to be subject to age-ism in the hiring practices of most institutions (which is one of the reasons I am a theologian at large) and young enough to do whatever it is anyway (my dirty dancing drives the women wild); Protestant (something like Anabaptist crossed with pagan crossed with UCC); middle class … and so on. More later … this is getting long.

* Bendy = gender-bending, a little bit … the gender variance among queer women is one of my favorite things in the world, and the more trans friends I meet, the more fascinated I am by gender and what we all have to learn. Like, pretty much everything is on a continuum. Binary, schminary. Community work/writing on this one would be oh too wonderful.

(10) Or maybe I could just say that it took me until I was 42 to find out the Secret to Life, the Universe and Everything, and now I am seven years into the journey. Knowing hasn’t solved everything, but it sure has made this life more ….

Well, there you go. Ten places I could start … a handful of seeds. If any look good to you, don’t be shy … let a girl know!

Comic Books and Theological Imagination: Or, Why I Weep at Dwayne McDuffie’s Passing

Posted on by Yuki
6

I woke up this morning to discover via the Racialicious blog that Marvel and DC comics writer and Milestone Comics co-founder Dwayne McDuffie died. If you have kids — or partners — who are into superheroes, you might have heard of McDuffie through the animated TV shows Static Shock, Ben 10: Alien Force, Teen Titans and the Justice League franchise, all of which were, hands down, some of the best stuff on TV. Not just the best animated shows, not just the best superhero shows, but the best shows. His characters were complicated, three-dimensional and real. And, something that was very important to me, they were diverse. McDuffie’s characters, whether they were persons of color or not, whether they were women or not, had contexts. They had race, color, creed, sexuality. They had families that were grounded in a cultural or historical past that affected their historical and cultural presents. Their relationships with others had impacts on the way they understood themselves and their roles in moving through their worlds. This is rare. And what made McDuffie amazing is that even though a lot of his characters were so-called minorities, they didn’t have to be in order to claim their contexts.

Glen Weldon at NPR, in his obit for McDuffie, said it nicely:

His characters had personalities, not outsize personality disorders. They were heroic because they chose to be, not because it was their job. Race was dealt with matter-of-factly, but it was dealt with.

A new generation of kids who watched McDuffie’s work saw worlds full of heroes — worlds that looked a lot like their own, and heroes that looked a lot like them.

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At Least Galileo Never Practiced Yoga

Posted on by Sarah
6

Albert Mohler’s careful reading of the New Testament has made him very concerned about hegemony and empire… NO, sorry, I mean systemic oppression of marginalized peop… NO, wait, hang on, sorry. He’s very concerned about yoga.

“[T]he growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding.”

Guys, did you know that there is a definitive Christian understanding of the body? I did not! Hmmm.

Which one is THE Christian understanding, I wonder? Like, is it the one where the homunculus is in the head of the sperm and the woman’s contribution to reproduction is to be a passive vessel in which the homunculus grows — and let’s hope she doesn’t mess that up by being physically defective and turning the homunculus (gasp) female!

Or maybe it’s the one where you remember things by imprinting them on some sort of wax-tablet-like space in the mind. Or the one where the soul is a wet, vivifying, breathy life-force.

Or perhaps it’s the understanding wherein the really awful thing about reproduction is that if you’re a man (and I assume that you are, because I’m addressing you, and why would I do so otherwise?), you have to succumb to your passions in order to reproduce. Which is just such SO HURTY to our BIG INVULNERABLE LATE ANCIENT HELLENISTIC MAN FEELINGS because that’s how ANIMALS have to reproduce and we want better for ourselves, BECAUSE WE ARE SPECIAL, because we are the subduers of creation. [pout]

Or maybe it’s the pre-germ-theory understanding wherein you have to police everybody’s behavior in your church because if one group of people sins it stands to reason that some other part of the church “body” will get sick.

Or maybe it’s the one where a violent divine father shrugs and says “Sorry, but the debt has to be paid or it would be an affront to my goodness” before mandating that his son be tortured and die. Or the historically-related one where we all get saved by being washed in the blood. Nothing like a good bloodbath!

Or maybe it’s the one where sexual intercourse is actually a theological diagram about divine masculine activity and human feminine receptivity. And you had better not put the wrong bits together or it will confuse all those people who were planning on learning Christian doctrine by taking notes on the biological aspects of your romantic trysts. I mean they will be SO CONFUSED! (What do you mean, you never signed on to be a diagram? What do you mean, “my issues”?)

In seriousness, this is the sort of thing I try to drive home in my theology classes. Theological constructions are theological, but they are constructions. Like constructed buildings, they have an architectural style suited to a particular time and place and function. And there are always tradeoffs involved in the design. Older constructions have a kind of nostalgic charm that appeals to some. But their floor plans don’t match how we use space today, they aren’t accessible, and hoo-boy, the upkeep. Some early modern constructions can be a bit soulless and uniform, in retrospect. And then there are the architectural hodgepodges that don’t evince coherent design so much as blurts: “I like gables!” and “Ooh! Ooh! A wet bar! Want!”

No, there isn’t one “Christian understanding of the body.” Arguably – though even here it’s an oversimplification – there’s a late Hellenistic, imperial, masculine understanding of the body, and you can read about it in Peter Browns The Body and Society or Virginia Burrus’ Begotten Not Made or probably many other lovely books. Arguably there’s an generalizable early medieval European understanding of the body. Arguably there’s a late medieval one. And of course within the medieval European world you’d get a bit different answer depending on if you asked Thomas Aquinas or, say, a peasant.

And – surprise! – there are first-world-early-2010 understandings of the body, many of which coalesce into something that’s pretty representative of our day. And even the Christians that like to play Let’s Pretend It’s 1260 still… oh… drive on the interstate, take family pictures, go to the gym, tell each other cautionary takes about “toxins,”* experience themselves as having inner depths and believe they are on an earth revolving around a sun.

Or, wait… Oh I quit.

*-Has anyone yet written a book on the social construction of toxins in early-’aughties first world culture? Because I really think a line could be drawn: Demon—>Dragon—->Fairy Tale Monster—->Toxin. But I’m not a social scientist or a folklorist. Anyway. Someone smart write this book, please?

If You’re A Religion Blogger You Have To Write A Post About Glenn Beck This Week or They Kick You Off The Internet

Posted on by Sarah
22

[Update: I've decided to do a giveaway for this post. If we get more than ten comments - excluding replies by me - then I will have a drawing for a $10 Sock Dreams gift card, for anyone who has ever commented to the blog. If you're a PTS student you can't win, though. I'm so sorry; it would just cross a line. Everyone else, though... go!]

So Glenn Beck had a big God Fest on Sunday night, evidently, and the scuttlebutt is that people with important things to say about religion are supposed to care.

Sigh.

Okay, confession time: It is unspeakably difficult for the theological part of my brain to take Glenn Beck seriously. This is not to say I pay him no notice whatsoever. To the contrary, the political part of my brain can’t help but regard him with the sort of seriousness with which one regards a sewer backup in the basement. In other words, it’s not that I behold the smelly spectacle and conclude, “Wow, this is a phenomenon about which I need to go off and have a long think.” No. But I do look around, groan, and say “Oh, my, this is serious.” I may even marvel: “Mercy, I’ve never smelled something this bad. That came out of humans?” For what else would one do upon coming across noxious stuff that ordinarily stays below the surface, other than deal with it, hopefully taking periodic breaks for fresh air?

But when he starts playing at theology… look, NO. No no no no. I’m sorry. I can’t write the long, somber Niebuhr- and Cone-quoting post explaining why he’s entirely wrong about Jesus. Others can, but I can’t. He’s gotten everything so invincibly backwards, and is so preeningly happy to have done so, that to even contemplate addressing his… I mean, what? What are they? They don’t really rise to the level of “claims.” Addressing his maxims, let’s say… Well, it just makes me tired to even think about composing some kind of theologically smart correction.

This is not an instance of having to back the truck up to the last intersection and take a different turn. This is an instance of the truck not running at all, because although you ordered a truck and paid for a truck, what you actually got delivered from the factory was a ski-lift chair with a cardboard box draped over it and some headlights drawn on. And, look, even a ski-lift chair might POSSIBLY be a form of conveyance if it were attached to a ski lift, but it’s not. It’s detached from anything that might make it go anywhere. And you’ve got the guy from the auto dealer on the phone saying, “Well, what do you mean there’s something wrong with it? Can you be more specific? Most people find the seating very comfortable.”

Oh for heaven’s sake. Do you see? Do you see the kind of tortured analogies to which I must resort when trying to talk about something so convoluted and incoherent? Glenn Beck is someone who asserts “America is good” on principle, then says “[God] is the center of my life,” evidently unconcerned with the possibility that those two tenets might – even theoretically – conflict; then decries as unjust any effort of the government to “force” people to “share;” then says (about immigration, for example) that the law is what it is and nobody is above it. How do any three of those hold together, I’d like to know? He is someone who evidently believes that Jesus — a first-century Palestinian Jew who was perceived as such a threat to the empire that he got executed — cares a great deal about being in individuals’ hearts, but does not care about “oppressor and victim.” Indeed, he thinks that any theology which includes such an analysis is not “true Christianity.”

And the sad thing is, exactly none of this is new or interesting or original. The only interesting wrinkle is the fact that Beck is a Mormon… which is “interesting” inasmuch as it tends to prompt us on the religious left, with characteristic smugness, to pop some popcorn and settle down to watch what we hope will be a slug-fest between the evangelical Protestant Christian right (who don’t believe Mormons are Christians) and the theologically unfussy tea partiers. (There is nothing we on the Christian left like better than to catch the right in a moment of hypocrisy. It’s like birthdaychristmaspromjazzhands!)

As Sarah Posner writes at RD:

As a religion reporter, I actually find Glenn Beck pretty boring. His schtick is derivative, and his line-up of faithy speakers is so familiar to me. His history “professor,” David Barton, feeds him his “Christian nation” mythology, and the falling on your knees to pray for America bit is old hat.

As a theologian, let me go a bit more ranty: What does Glenn Beck mean theologically for progressive people of faith? Nothing. Seriously. Nothing. To suggest that he should be the impetus for “our side” making our case more urgently or differently, gives him far too much importance. It suggests that we couldn’t be bothered to do so with conviction until some petty half-coherent demagogue came along… whereupon we all collectively said, “Oh, gosh, maybe we should really argue the ‘social justice’ bit and claim that identity proudly.”

Which, honestly, I’m rather worried is in fact the case, so I’m throwing up my hands here and saying “Change the subject, for, literally, the LOVE OF GOD. Please change the subject!” Beck has brilliantly positioned himself to be the spokeperson for a kind of intellectually dishonest religious hackery that preceded him… whose tenets can be reduced to three or four pious-sounding yips for which logical coherence is entirely beside the point. And oh, incidentally? We on the left have our own versions of the same.

But theology that’s thoughtful — not necessarily highly thoughtful, or correct, or unassailable, or just, or privilege-aware, let alone interesting or intellectually sound; but even just minimally thoughtful — will never out-sound-bite this kind of fatuous blahblah. Like, seriously, can… can we please stop trying to do so? Minimally thoughtful theology takes more than a few sentences to say. It will account for more life experiences than just those of the speaker in the last five minutes; and it will reckon with history and cultural context. Now, me, I think that’s a pretty low bar. But a lot of people seem to love running headlong into low bars, so ::shrug:: I’m more interested in shutting up about Beck and doing better.

Where are you from?

Posted on by Sarah
7

Couple things to start off: 1) This is really long, but sometimes trains of thought are long, and 2) I used to be a postliberal.

Postliberal theology, for those of you whose hobbies don’t include following the latest trends and lingo in the theological academy, is a theological school of thought… and, well, a sensibility, really… that I will probably presently describe in ways that make real honest-to-goodness postliberals say, “Hey, I don’t think that’s really fair or especially nuanced.”

Please understand, I shall do my best to be both fair and nuanced, but there’s just so much that one COULD say — about the differences between George Lindbeck and Hans Frei and Stanley Hauerwas, for example — and meanwhile I’m kinda committed to not getting bogged down in a lot of insider words, so you won’t hear me uttering “Wittgenstein” or “language games” or “MacIntyre” or “postfoundationalist” or “metanarrative.” So consider this a proviso that what follows is a popularization, at least; and if you are a postliberal and what I say rankles you, please feel free to take it up with me personally or in the comments (though of course my blog has a pretty strict comments policy and my personal interactions don’t, beyond the basic universal interpersonal boundary of “It may or may not suit me to talk about this just now, or ever. Thank you in advance for your understanding.”)

Anyway. Postliberal theology. Also known as The Yale School, even though it has now migrated to Duke, where it’s involved in an intensely passionate long-distance relationship with its British sweetheart Radical Orthodoxy, whom it met at a conference.

The basic idea is that it’s actually – surprise! – a really good thing that in this postmodern age we’re all suspicious about metanarratives metaphysics totalizing horizons Big Stories That Claim To Account For Everything Ever.

Oh, you might THINK that Christian theology, inasmuch as it is certainly a Big Story with Big Claims about Big Things, would be ill-served by a cultural and philosophical economy in which it’s believed that nobody can trust Big Stories. But the maneuver of postliberal theology is to say: Hey, we Christians never should have gotten into the objective truth claims business in the first place. Because what, after all, is an objective truth claim? Who’s “objective”? Haven’t we figured out that there’s no access to any kind of uninterpreted reality, and truth claims only have coherence inasmuch as they’re part of a community’s way of life? And, oh, say, The Church (always “The Church” rather than “churches”) is actually a community with a way of life! So how about we make sure our theological claims just cohere with the stories we tell, and with our embodied way of life — rather than trying to hold those claims up to some objective reality and see if they match?

All of which sounds pretty good, especially (I imagine) to people who are used to Christians who say things like “The fossil record is totes compatible with belief in a creation of six twenty-four-hour days, because um because um because I said so is why.”

OR, alternately, to Christians who say things like, “All the great religions of the world basically teach the Same Thing Deep Down, amounting to some sort of deep feeling of At-One-Ness with The Ultimate. Because, you see, the historical specificity and cultural context of those religions aren’t all that important. Now, granted, it’s only we post-Enlightenment western educated folks who are so clever as to NOTICE that all the great religions of the world say the same thing, but because we’re so nice WE WON’T EVEN DEMAND A BIG PARADE in honor of our cleverness. Maybe just a MEDIUM-SIZED parade. Say, you’re welcome!”

So, postliberal theology has appeal because it more than improves on those. Which is all well and good, except for… um, the way it plays out sometimes. Because that’s the odd thing. Often, what a postliberal theological outlook seems to mean, is that the postliberal Christian can say, emphatically, seemingly in the manner that one says things which one believes to actually be the case, “God is three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.”

And then if you say, in reply, “Nah, I don’t think so,” the postliberal Christian can reply that you and ze are clearly speaking out of two different communities with different practices and different interpretations and different shared goods and really these are all pretty much incommensurable and we’re not going to achieve any kind of shared understanding anyway, no offense, and of course YOU wouldn’t believe that God is Father, Son and Spirit because you’re not part of a community that PRACTICES TRINITY, and ha ha truth claims can’t live with ‘em can’t live without ‘em and no hard feelings and how about them Cards?

And then ze will go off into a huddle with other postliberals and say “Of course, WE ALL know that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, amirite? High five!”

But I’m actually not writing this to trash postliberal theology. If I don’t anymore find postliberal theology persuasive, as a method or outlook, I still have a lot of affection and fondness for some postliberals. To say nothing of all the things that I learned from my time as a postliberal. Also, as a theology, postliberalism really does make a thrilling adventure out of faith, in a way that its rivals don’t so much. What I mean is, you do feel caught up in a great cause, and you can make GREAT friendships… the kind of friendships where friends do things like deliberately live together, share meals, share material goods in common, pray together, fast together, feast together, engage in tasks that are difficult, etc. All for the sake of the great Thing We’re Doing Here, for the community, for the practices, for the way of life.

(Also, related to why I stipulate that I’m not writing this to trash postliberalism: Not for nothing, I think I was a VERY obnoxious sort of postliberal when I was a postliberal. So I need to proceed with some humility here. You all may as well know that for most of my life I’ve been the sort of person who could reliably be counted upon to have some sort of conversion every few years, which unfortunately means that I can also be counted upon to have a convert’s zeal every few years. Which is… trying, I think, for one’s friends. So I’m trying not to make my postliberal friends into my theological toilet here, because they’ve had the patience of saints.)

So, once more with feeling: I’m not writing this to trash all things and people postliberal. I mention postliberalism because my eventual beef with it is part of what got me thinking about what is actually, someday, going to be the topic of this post. Which I will really get to eventually, but first, another necessary intermediate point: What I eventually concluded about postliberal theology is that it contains, within it, a nearly 100 percent reliable way to deflect any discussion of privilege.

I mean, right? You can see how this would work, yes? Well-meaning interlocutor says “Hey, I notice a lot of y’all seem to benefit a whole lot from white and male and class privilege… and in fact, that those things really helped your message become so popular!” And then all that Postliberal Friend has to say is “Whoa, buddy, NOT MY DISCOURSE! ‘Privilege’ is not in the vocabulary that emerges from the practices of The Church. Our identity doesn’t come from our privilege. It comes from our baptism. We’re divided by oppression, but we are one in baptism, and the oneness trumps the division, annnd SCENE!”

And really, if they’ve pretty much advertised that they’re not going to consider anything that can’t be said in an explicitly Christian idiom — or at least, aren’t going to consider anything that can’t be said in an explicitly Christian idiom, if what we’re talking about are fundamental issues of identity and purpose and meaning and divinity and such — then they’re being consistent here. Alas, it’s not like Jesus went around spouting critical race theory, or that Thomas Aquinas devoted a section of his Summa Theologiae to heterosexism and how it hurts people.

(Of course, you could argue that Jesus didn’t go around spouting Hellenistic philosophy either, yet early Christians were happy enough to import THAT foreign discourse into their explanations for things… but then your postliberal friend might say something like “Yes, but the Holy Spirit guides the church, and the concept ‘incarnate Logos’ has been part of Christian discourse for a long time, so we have a pretty good idea that that idea forms who we are. These notions of privilege… well, we just don’t KNOW yet if they cohere with The Church’s Way of Life. Say, how about we subsume ‘privilege’ under some more general discussion of sin?”)

So when I looked at postliberal theology from that angle, I found myself halfway out the door already, looking wistfully back at the friendships that aren’t as easy now that I’ve moved and am standing over here somewhere and my friends are over there. BUT ALL THAT IS STILL NOT WHAT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT.

What I want to talk about is the kind of longing, that I think is evidenced in postliberal theology and possibly other similar cultural gestures. A longing to be FROM somewhere. Expressed by people whose perspectives have been so universalized, made so normal and nice and everyday and default… that they start to feel, dizzyingly, terrifyingly, as though their perspectives might actually situate every place, but be from no-place.

I am speaking from my own experience and making what I think are informed guesses about the experiences of some people I’ve known, okay? If you’re a postliberal and you understand privilege and you don’t long to be from anywhere, then I’m not talking about you. But I do know my own experience and I do know that, for me, and I really think for at least a significant number of others, this was/is part of the appeal of postliberal theology.

Look, I’ve lived in St. Louis, New Haven, DC, Durham, South Bend, and now Tulsa. For most of my childhood we went to the church that had been my family’s church for a century; and then meanwhile I lived and went to school waaaay across town in a school district that was very Jewish, and the two social ecosystems didn’t overlap at all. My ancestors are from Germany and England and Scotland, but since those things long ago got alchemized into a privileged category called “white American” I don’t exactly spend a lot of time thinking about folk traditions from the Black Forest and how they impact my family’s customs and view of the world. (A Christmas Tree? Why that’s just Good Honest Family Christmas Hallmark God Bless Amurrica Holiday Special set dressing.)

Meanwhile I’m white and cisgender and Christian and able-bodied and middle-class and presenting heterosexual — so, the default, according to the dominant culture; othered only according to my gender — and of course, being “normal” means you don’t have to think much about those aspects about yourself wherein your normalness is allowed to rest undisturbed.

Add to that the fact that I am to move many times over the course of my educational and professional life. And then, keeping THAT in mind, consider that for churchgoers moving every few years means finding a new church every few years… and then try to factor in the array of Protestant denominations. Honestly: please, try. Have a go at it, and get back to me if you come up with something coherent, and I will be very grateful. Because frankly I’m stuck. I mean, keep trying to write the “Are Denominations Still Important? Yes or No?” post, only to get stuck in the same kind of confusion exhibited by… I don’t know… my dog, when there’s a barking dog on television and she rushes behind the TV set to look for it. I don’t know where to look in order to assess denominations’ relevance. I can’t even find where I’m supposed to be looking. I’m barking behind the television set, confused about why there’s nothing there.

Because actually the kind of churches I’ve gravitated to over the years — urban, traditional worship style, politically and theologically left-leaning, with at least some economic diversity among the membership — are pretty consistent. That is the kind of church we seem to be able to deal with and sometimes thrive in, sometimes find community in, sometimes have things to offer within. Ah, clearly I’m from the “Urban, Traditional Worship, Politically and Theologically Left-Leaning, Economic Diversity” denomination, right? That’s my tradition, yes?

Oh-HO, but there ISN’T such a denomination; and meanwhile the denominational name on the church sign, in my experience, provides little in the way of prediction of whether it will be that kind of a church. Does it predict what hymnal they will use and how they perform baptism and whether they have communion every week? Sure, but it gives exactly NO answer questions like: Are people going to think I’m a grody ballbuster because I’m the primary wage-earner? Are people going to think my husband’s a shameful throne-abdicator because he stays at home with our kids? Are we going to find anyone here that we can really talk to? Do people here think God is a Super-Dude? I’m 32; are the people at this church going to see me as part of The Youth? Will people give me the stinkeye if I want to have my kids with me in worship because I don’t know the nursery attendant, but lo and behold it turns out my kids don’t comport themselves like tiny middle-aged people in the sanctuary — hands folded, saying a faint “Mm” and nodding slightly when they find a point persuasive? Etc.

Denominational affiliation simply does not predict the answer to these questions which are actually really really important — and NO, not just in a narcissistic individualist way, either; but as the conditions of possibility for self-disclosure and hence for community which BY THE WAY IS NOT ALWAYS SAFE unless you’re extremely fortunate and your position in society is truly unassailable. (So I don’t wanna hear any of that “You’re just a church-shopper!” gritching because it’s not SHOPPING when what you’re after is being treated with basic decency. Hmf. Talking to ME about church-shopping, grumble grumble fade off..)

So.

In light of all that, it has become an urgent question: Where am I from? What particular identity do I have when, just as an example, every Starbucks and Whole Foods and American history text book — which looks exactly like every other Starbucks and Whole Foods and American history text book — shows me a picture of myself and my friends as the Generic Humans? And when I’ve lived in lots of different nodes of the United States which I know are different but which always, for me, seem to involve a lot of very similar retailscapes crafted for crunchy lefty moneyed white people just like me: Where am I from? Where am I from, when I have 300+ Facebook friends spread out all over the country who I guess are my “community” except that they don’t all know each other, and I even have privacy settings and friends lists in place to make sure that this group of people don’t talk do this group of people about such-and-such a topic, etc.? Where am I from when I can’t say I really belong to a particular denomination because I don’t even understand what that would mean, or what kind of world I’d have to inhabit where that would mean anything?

Let the fumes from those questions begin to make you dizzy and woozy, until the scene around you starts to wobble… and perhaps you can start to imagine how reassuringly solid it would feel for someone like me to be able to say, “No, see, I am actually from somewhere. It has something to do with baptism. Now I have a community too, see? Now I’m particular.”

In other words, when Stanley Hauerwas comes along and says, “Being a Christian is a lot like being a Texan!” what someone like me thinks is, “Wow, if this guy is right, then being a Christian means I can be FROM SOMEWHERE, in the same way that a self-described Texan is from Texas. It would be like… like being born somewhere and then growing up there and then being an adult there. Within a community, no less, that’s ostensibly ‘countercultural,’ set against the dominant culture. Rather than being one of its most mobile and pampered exponents, as I am currently. Wow! Thank God!

“Because up to now, the only place I’m ‘from’ is my vast inner expansive landscape of my own selfhood, which has been the constant as I’ve moved from place to place to place, and been catered to by marketers, and been privileged as the default kind of person, and meanwhile fit in only with difficulty in churches whose self-description makes little to no sense to me. And sure, some days that vast inner expanse feels like a playground! A nature preserve! A national park! But some days it feels like a very big and lovely and spacious private hell, because I don’t know where it is or what its boundaries are. Does it… does it have an outside? Does it go on forever? Can other people, you know, VISIT? Am I all alone in here? ECHO! etc.

So, postliberal theology, you say you offer a location? You’re going to tell me a compelling story about where I’m from, and where I show up, in a way that promises a consistent way of life shared with others as part of a big story? Awesome! I’m yours.”

Do I think the postliberal answer will finally suffice? No, for the reasons I mentioned earlier: it too skillfully filters out too many important voices, too many OTHER, crucial, truthful answers to the “Where am I from?” question. The postliberal movement – in its popular fanboy/fangirl expressions if not always in its more nuanced ivory tower expressions – is pretty frank about reserving the right to disregard anything that isn’t translated into its own very particular idiom. (Or, heck, in which it detects even a slight hint of any accent it deems foreign.)

But. Postliberal theology does give an answer to “Where are you from?” and “Where am I from?” in a way that I’m not sure either oldline liberals nor post-postliberals (party of one, right over here! [raises hand]) have done well. I could be wrong. If I’m not, could we maybe get around to this?