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Doubt Suspended in Confidence

Season seven, episode seven of the Fox series Bones features a nine-month pregnant Dr. Temperance Brennan wading through a crowded fight in the cafeteria of a men’s prison without a care in the world. Her anxious partner, Booth, begs her to have some sense and not over-exert herself, but she casually states that hurting a child is one of the biggest prison taboos, and carries on. And she is right; the prisoners catch sight of her immense belly and fall over themselves to get out of her way. Her path is miraculously cleared in the midst of tackling bodies, headlocks, and thrown punches. She is aware of something cognitively and she fearlessly applies it to her physical life without a second thought. She is confident in her own mind.

tenetsI hoard my favorite quotes in notebooks and look over them periodically like a miser counting gemstones. Several oft-read quotes are pulled from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. At the risk of being thought delusional, I in all honesty find that Nietzsche, “God is dead” Nietzsche, provides me with as much affirmation in my faith as any Christian writer ever has, if not more. Particularly these lines: “When we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea.’” Let me explain. I enter the crowded fight between Nietzsche and God with the knowledge that God is not dead, not anymore. And the crowd parts before me. “The old god is dead,” yes, and the new God has risen, and a new dawn shines on us. We can venture out without fear of sin. We can grow in our knowledge, knowing that the open sea of God’s forgiveness lies before us. Few things I have read have given me more hope. Of course, I am blatantly projecting my own personal beliefs and convictions upon the undoubtedly unwilling Nietzsche. I am being rude, perhaps; I am blaspheming, even. I have a habit of gathering hope from typically barren places such as this. Is it a unique and valuable form of faith, or am I over-confident and foolish? In the wise words of our own Houghton alumnus Gordon Brown, “Bad self-esteem and inflated self-esteem are two sides of the same coin.”

In season eight, episode ten of Bones, Dr. Brennan enters a ballroom dancing competition while undercover with Booth. She has never danced before, but she observes the other dancers and says with the same assuredness as before that she can translate the same movements that they make to the corresponding parts of her own body. She then proceeds to do so… and is dreadful. She believes that she is mimicking their motions exactly, but she does not have the practice that they have, and in actuality has no idea what she herself looks like in action. This kind of misguided confidence is seen all too often in the efforts of various evangelizers. The desire to appear infallible and have all the answers repeatedly overwhelms the real need for earnest seeking and authenticity. There is a delicate balance here. My fiancé Andy Nelson writes, “We should question our faith. We should express our views with humility. But we should not adopt a state of constant uncertainty and doubt.” Too much, honesty is replaced by bravado; but just as much, assertiveness is degraded by a kind of shrugging denial of confidence. Neither approach is effective in excess.

There is a poem by Denise Levertov titled “Suspended” that reads, “The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember/ Must have upheld my leaden weight/ From falling, even so,/ For though I claw at empty air and feel/ Nothing, no embrace,/ I have not plummeted.” Whether or not complete confidence in every aspect of faith is possible, certainly I can be confident in the fact that I am suspended, that I float on the level with the core tenets of my Christian faith. While some value doubt and others value confidence, each cannot exist without the other. Faith, more than anything else, is a satisfaction in the self. If I, like Dr. Brennan, have confidence in my own mind, then I can feel free to doubt and question, to test my boundaries, to move fearlessly. After all, I have not plummeted.

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I Dare You

Truth or dare? Truth. That was always my answer. I was afraid of the dare. Who knew what one of my friends’ little 14-year-old-minds could come up with? I knew what I could come up with and that scared me enough to keep me from ever answering with “dare.” The unknown is wild and exciting, but more than that it is quite frightening. Whenever one of my friends was feeling more courageous and answered “dare,” there followed a collective and sustained “OOHHH!” We all became excited, and even nervous, for this heroic, young risk-taker.

notFast-forward a few years and here we are today, still playing that game, still answering that question. And often we still answer with the all-too-safe “truth.” The irony is that we are, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, people of the dare. To live is to accept one dare or another. Existence requires it. But ever since we were young we were made to think there was a safe way out. I’m here to say: there’s not.

A dare is a call to a particular action. It is obvious (and also obviously suppressed) that our lives are made up of a collection of particular actions over a period of time; and that these actions form us. Our very beings are formed by the dares we take on. It is not my hope that this will make you think about taking on a dare sometime, in fact this wouldn’t even make sense for me to hope for. No, my hope is that you realize that you have no choice but to take on dares. So, affirm the dare. Be daring.

Now let us humbly converse with the other option: truth. In all my affirmation of the dare I do not intend to, in any way, eclipse or trivialize truth. I only mean to point out the misunderstanding of truth, this all-too-safe “truth”. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche reminds us that “only thoughts reached by walking have value.” He did not mean that we must literally be walking around to have valuable thoughts (though I do not think this is a bad practice … maybe classes should have walking routes as opposed to classrooms). I think he was trying to suggest that as existing individuals the truth and the dare are very much related.

What is this relationship? I’m not going to pretend to know the complexities of it, but I will humbly speculate this: the truth about who you are is not the truth about who you are unless it motivates the dares that you choose to take on; and the dares you choose to take on will form the truth about who you are. You may be thinking, “Hey, that’s super circular though.” Well, you’re right! That is why there is a need for the gift of Grace in order for existence to take place.

This gift of Grace also happens to be the ultimate example of this relationship between the truth and the dare: that The Truth took on the greatest dare of all; that is, The Truth became a person of the dare. All this time we’ve been thinking that answering “truth” was the safe option, but that is only because we have dressed truth up in many costumes and suffocated her, so she is neither recognizable, nor mobile, nor alive. Sounds strangely familiar? Do you recall the historical account of The Truth? The point is this: truth is dangerous!

In the same way that a financial manager acknowledges that there is a certain amount of systematic, non-diversifiable risk involved in any investment, we must acknowledge that there is unavoidable risk that comes along with existence. One basic risk in the relationship of truth and dare is the risk of hypocrisy. Often times I find myself afraid to act because I know I can’t live by the all-too-safe truths I hold. But this is hypocritical in the most fundamental sense. It is a way of living and acting (or not acting) that implies “I don’t exist,” when the truth is, I do.

We must not be afraid of these risks. We must acknowledge the uncertainty of life. By affirming this, we enable ourselves to live more truthfully, to make better decisions about the dares that we take on. So, truth or dare? Dare, you say? I dare you to become a person of the dare. I dare you to exist.

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Be Motivated! Young People and News Engagement

When I think about news engagement (that is, how often one watches or reads the daily news), I often think about my grandparents. Every morning of the week or the weekend whenever they would visit my family as a child, the TV monitor would tuned to a local or national news station (and often flipped between several if there were commercial breaks.) It was a ritual for my grandparents to turn on the news station and listen to the reports while they fixed their bacon, eggs, and coffee and got ready to begin the day.

youngI remember my grandparents because according to statistics, news engagement, such as reading a daily printed newspaper or watching a news program, appears to be diminishing with every passing generation. In other words, there has been an alarming occurrence of young people going “newsless” and news engagement habits – such as my grandparents habit of watching morning news programs every day – seem to be disappearing.

According to a 2012 Pew Research report, a full 29% of younger Americans under the age of 25 tend to be “newsless” on a typical day (including digital news) while older Americans are less likely to do so. In addition to this, young people that do pay attention and engage with the news are also less likely to spend much time with it. Pew reports that those younger than 30 spent an average of 45 minutes engaging with the news while older age groups spend a range of 62 to 83 minutes per day. However, according to another Pew poll, the major audience for “fake” news programs such as Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” or Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” are youth – some of whom even cite those programs as their main source of news.

I have known these frightful statistics to parallel conversations that I have had with my peers. Some that I have talked with have cited frustration with media in general, specifying concerns about propaganda or bias in major national news networks which causes them to shun media in general. (These are, I expect, people who would watch “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report.”) Others do not see the enterprise as very important or relevant to their daily lives and just don’t bother to take the time.

This is worrisome because a well-informed national population often means a strong civic culture. Being informed on current events means that people will be more likely to take action on important issues, whether it be on the local, national, or international level. A father may be encouraged to get involved with the PTO after reading about a decision that his child’s school board makes. A woman may write a letter of concern to members of Congress following an article covering a political issue important to her. A church group may decide to organize a relief effort following news of an international disaster. There are many examples of how paying attention to current events can galvanize people to action. When young people do not pay attention to the news, will they be able to take action and contribute to the democratic system that our country prides? Or participate in international affairs?

In other words: read, watch, and listen to the news, young people. Change your attitudes, change your habits. Establish a routine – such as looking at the headlines of a front page of a news website each day – and find a way to incorporate engaging with the news on a frequent basis. Who knows? You may find yourself motivated to make a stand for your beliefs or to do things that contribute to other people’s welfare along the way.

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Rethinking the Houghton Community

Community. You can get your token laugh-of-familiar-amusement out of the way now. I’m not writing about community because it’s a long established Houghton tradition; I’m writing about it because I’ve been thinking about it, and my conclusion is that there’s more to be said about community than we who are so familiar with the term might imagine. This has been on my mind because a few weeks ago, one of my seminars ended with an enthusiastic discussion about the nature of a Christian liberal arts college: is this kind of thing a community? My preference is to answer “yes,” though with a caveat: a Christian liberal arts college can, and should, be a community. Whether or not it actually is – that’s a different question. So, what do I have in mind, when I use the word community?

communityOur lives involve all sorts of projects, things we’re pursuing and working on. Lots of our projects are shared with other people. Sports teams share the project and pursuit of athleticism; musical ensembles share the project and pursuit of producing quality music. At minimum, this common pursuit, or common end, unifies individuals into a cohesive group. But, better than merely finding common ground in some pursuit or end is to care about the team or group for its own sake. This doesn’t happen easily, or immediately, but it certainly does happen. After playing together for a while, the team ceases to care only about winning, and the team members start to care about their shared pursuit of winning. Once the team members start to love the team for its own sake, the care spills over and is extended to individual members of the team. At this point, I think, community enters the picture. When a collection of people start to care about their shared project for its own sake, their care extends to the other members of the group, and the group becomes concerned for each one of its members, over and beyond that member’s ability to contribute to the group. For instance, the choir expresses community when it mourns a death in the family of one of its members (which is, strictly speaking, not relevant to singing well together). The mourning becomes relevant if the choir is a community that cares deeply about each of its individual members.

Now, I’m assuming Houghton’s primary project is education, or more specifically, Christian liberal arts education. That’s what we’re pursuing, and unless you take an entirely mercenary approach to your education, the shared pursuit of education is unifying: it makes us a group, a team. At least, then, Houghton is a shared project. But is it a community?

It’s worth pausing before answering that. I don’t think community is to be taken lightly, since community involves the accepting of other people’s well-being over your own. To be in community is to ally yourself with others in a fundamental way. Thus, community is not about warm-fuzzies, or team spirit. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these things, and they’re helpful in establishing an especially well-functioning community. Yet, to equate community with emotional attachment to a group of people is to reduce community into something too ethereal. A community is a substantive thing, the kind of thing that can and hopefully will exist even when team spirit and warm-fuzzies have faded away.

This is, of course, a tall order. This demands something from us, something more than wearing purple or gold and faithfully attending SPOT. It’s also a rather complex goal: the good of Houghton as a community is linked to your individual good, if you’re part of the community, but neither is your good reduced to what’s good for the community, since the community is also adopting your good as relevant to its own. Given this complexity, it might be a little naïve or optimistic for me to argue that Houghton is a community. Nonetheless, I do think that Houghton can be a community. It may be difficult for such a large group of people to be a community, but it’s not impossible. For us to be a community, individual members would have to express concern for the good of other individuals, the institution would have to make the well-being of its individual members a priority, and individual members would have to care about the institution for its own sake. Hard to achieve, but not impossible. Moreover, I’ll take this “can be a community” a step farther: given Houghton’s Christian commitments, Houghton should be a community. So, don’t just claim community in virtue of your emotional attachment to the school. Make community happen, through your attitudes and behaviors towards the institution and the individual members of the institution.

 

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A New Old Ecclesiology, Part 2

Last week I discussed my work as an intern at a local church and the idea of a reimagined ecclesiology. I examined the need for the church to stop tricking people into its doors, to become less like a weekly commitment and more like a way of life. Here I would like to continue this discussion by examining some issues I have seen and what to be careful of when viewing the church as “family.”

churchOne of the most pressing issues I have encountered at the church is the sheer lack of time parishioners spend in the church community. I see this as an issue particularly with the youth. These children are in the most formative years of their lives and yet they are only spending an hour or two a week with the church community. These young men and women, girls and boys, are bombarded with new ideas and pressured to conform to their world at every moment.

So how are we, the church, supposed to influence, shape, form and support our youth, indeed our adults as well, if we are only together an hour or two every seven days? We cannot expect a good sermon to last a week, to be formative enough to counteract everything our culture throws at us. The church cannot be only a weekly commitment, it has to be a haven, a safe place to return to after work each day, a safe place to relax at the end of a long week, a safe place to mourn, rejoice, worship and engage local and global issues. The church should be like returning to the comforts of one’s own home.

This is not to say that the church should not challenge. Families challenge. In our safest places we can be, rather we should be, challenged constructively. Of course we see this in Jesus: he is both our greatest comfort and our greatest challenge. The church should be a place where, although we are comfortable, we are able to exchange ideas, challenge each other to grow and question each other’s beliefs. All the while we should be reaffirming each other as children of God.

The forces of culture, politics, and social experiences influencing us on a daily basis should be countered by a church that does the same. I find as a youth director that it is extremely difficult to effectively counter what my students have experienced the past week with what we as a church wish to instill in their hearts. They have seen way more of the world in 6 days than I could show them of the church in one. For example, regularly I watch as healthy young women agonize over their weight, developing major insecurities because they have been told by their society that they are supposed to be skinny.

Now, I do not wish to sound like we should brainwash our parishioners. If you have seen the documentary Jesus Camp, know that I am not advocating anything of the sort. Indeed I believe that our culture does teach some healthy ideas, but the job of the church should be to act as a social filter. The church should be a place where parishioners sort out the wheat from the chaff; a place where men and women, young and adult, can abandon their insecurities and learn to find God in the places where they least expect him.

The whole idea of viewing the church as a family is to see that “secular” actions like hanging out, watching football, and playing cards and “Christian” actions like worship, word and sacrament can begin to find a place together. I am not advocating that we play cards in the middle of worship time, but I am advocating that Christians stop viewing church as a weekly commitment and start viewing it as the community in which they live out all aspects of their lives, the way a family member exists as part of a family.

Now I realize that the imagery of a “family” is flawed. There are plenty of broken families, and the idea of what a “traditional Christian family” should be is so elusive that employing it as a metaphor is almost useless. Here I define family as a group of people in which unconditional love thrives, a group of people who take care of their own and genuinely care for each other, a group of people who take the time to help form and shape, challenge and support each other, a group that is willing to spend time with each other.  Of course, there are plenty of families who do all these things and manage to be very inhospitable to those “outside” the family. So perhaps it is best to define the church as an “Open Family,” a group that takes care of its own, lives in community with each other, takes its relationships with extreme sincerity and has open doors to any and all who desire to enter. That is what the church should be.

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The Home and the Heart

Fall break is just around the corner and masses of Houghton students will sojourn home for a few (we hope) homework-free days. I love going home. It is the only stress-free place I can escape to outside of school, where I can find homemade chili and overwhelming amounts of blankets and actual, real alone time. I was not one of those kids who were excited to leave town and move on to bigger and better things, who could care less if they ever saw any of the same old faces again. I did not spend my senior year of high school itchin g to shake the dust off, to turn my back and run. I spent senior year actively pretending that graduation was but a myth. Freshmen year at Houghton was one big conscious refusal to refer to my dorm room as “home.” Every break I would rush home at the earliest possible moment, not bothering to say goodbye to my friends and hardly talking to them while I was gone. Even as a kid, I would never let my parents send me off to summer camp. It got pretty ridiculous, but home was the place I loved to be.

Coming to Houghton wasn’t the first time I had left home, though. I was born in northern Indiana and lived there for four years before moving to Orchard Park, where I lived for a two years before moving back down to central Indiana. These moves were consistent and concise. We never lingered in one place for too long. I always had my parents and brother with me. Really, nothing changed.

HomeWe stayed in central Indiana for six years before my parents divorced. I moved to Long Lake with my mother, this time leaving behind not just a house, but half my belongings and half my family and all of my friends. I didn’t make things easy on myself. I insisted on calling Indiana my “true home.” Rather than exploring my new town and meeting the kids I would go to school with, I spent my first summer in Long Lake sitting indoors writing letters to my friends back home and talking to them on the phone.

As you probably guessed from my over-the-top reaction to leaving Long Lake to come to Houghton, things eventually changed. My visits back to Indiana became shorter and less frequent. I felt less and less connected to my old friends and to the things that went on there. I formed incredible bonds with the girls in my high school in Long Lake and grew more there than I probably ever would have, had I stayed in Indiana. The transition became fairly easy, actually. Indiana was always there, waiting for me—I never fully had to let go. I could have moved back in with my father whenever I wanted to, and in fact I considered it once or twice. I also thought about going to college in Indiana and living at home before I settled on coming to Houghton. And still, on breaks, I bounce back and forth between Indiana and Long Lake, keeping in touch with all of my old friends.

The transition to Houghton has turned out to be easy so far as well. Long Lake is but a (five hour) drive away. I still see most of my high school friends on breaks. And I’ve had wonderful experiences here at Houghton.  But college is an accepted transitional phase of life—I came here with the expectation that I would learn and apply myself for four years and then move on. I do not think about my home in the same way. I did not move to Long Lake thinking to myself that it would be a nice place to be for high school, but afterwards I would move on without a second thought. I do not think that way about my bedroom at home, my friends’ signatures on the ceiling tiles, my mother. With the impending certainty of graduation, my time in Long Lake will come to a sudden and screeching halt. It is a small town. There are no jobs available. There is no going back.

Home will constantly be changing, and quite often sooner than expected. How was I to know that things would escalate so quickly, that the last time I would spend more than a few hours together with my brother would be when I was twelve, that after leaving for college I would see my cousin maybe once more in his life. Missionary kids are tossed between countries for their entire childhood and then greeted when they return to the States, “Welcome home,” home being a place where they have never lived or had any contacts beyond their conservative grandparents who think they dress strangely, and their weird cousins. People say ‘home is where the heart is’ as if to assist in choosing a singular place to belong, but when the people and things and places that I love are scattered to the four winds, ‘home is where the heart is’ seems more like an impossible puzzle than a reassuring mantra. In order to manage the fissures of my “homes” throughout my life, disconnection becomes necessary between the home and the heart. My heart is in my father’s house. My heart is in my mother’s house. My heart is in the house of my education. My home is wherever I am.

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A New Old Ecclesiology

This past summer and current school year, I have been given the opportunity to work at a local church, assisting with youth and adult ministries. So far the experience has been a good one, but it has got me thinking about the nature of “the church” and its role in society. Ultimately I believe the church as it stands is in dire need of re-imaging lest it slip further and further to the periphery of Western society.

The re-churchimaging of the church is not a matter of being relevant. It is not about trying to make your church as appealing as possible to the outsider in order to draw her in. This, unfortunately, is what many churches are resorting to these days. I see churches that meet in bars, advertising a nice cold pint while you talk about the moral issues of the day. I see churches where worship is akin to a rock concert. And of course there are the 15,000 person mega-churches where the 45-minute sermon reigns supreme. All the while the idea of sacrament has all but vanished from many of these institutions. We are a collection of individuals appealing to individuals.

These attempts at a new church experience ultimately fail. After a while the new tactic stops attracting people and the church is left to find a new way to pull people in. If I were a member of one of these churches I would be infuriated because so much effort is spent on drawing people in that those who are already in the church are left to struggle their way on their own. Thus we are left with spiritually malnourished congregations and rapidly declining numbers in almost every one of the near 40,000 denominations.

So what do we do? Well, many have suggested that we have to start over, abandon our current traditions and become like the first century church. But the problem does not necessarily lie within our traditions; indeed I believe some of the answers are found exactly there. The solution is found in Jesus’ view of the family. For most they are familiar passages (Luke 14:26, Mark 3:31-35): Jesus repels his biological family and says that his followers are his real family. He even goes as far as to say that those who want to follow him must hate their family, turn and follow him.

I don’t think Jesus really means that we should hate our families; I think rather that he is emphasizing the importance of the church as a family. This is what we need to embody for the church to survive in our culture. I do not mean the church should be a family in the sense that we all feel close to one another only every Sunday when we gather. The term “family” does not mean simply that we have to tolerate each other. Reimagining the church as a family means that we meet like a family, interact like a family, care for each other like a family. It means that instead of church being a once-a-week thing, it is a lifestyle, founded on the sacraments. As Dean Jordan stated in chapel on Monday, church is not about the individual experience, it is about existing as a corporate body. The church should be a refuge against the anti-gospel veins in our culture, supplementing them with the words of Christ.

This is where my work at the local church comes in. They are a church that is on the right track. Worship is only every Sunday. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated every Sunday without exception and the church is grounded in the notion that we meet Our Savior every time we eat the bread and drink the wine. But the church does not stop there. Every other day of the week, the church is busy with parishioners coming and going, tending not only to the building but also to each other. The church building is a hub for all that is going on in the church community. People help supply each other with food, tools, service. It is not a group of people who are cordial to each other on Sundays. It is a group of people who live together, work together, play together and depend upon each other. That is what the church must be.

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Honesty is Not the Best Policy?

honestyI started listening to Lorde recently.  She is a sixteen-year-old musician from New Zealand who just released her first album in September.  If you have not heard of her I am sure you have at least heard her hit song, “Royals”.  She has a haunting voice and the hook is super catchy without becoming annoying.  I like to listen to it when I run.  It was the only song of hers that I had heard so far, though, so I decided to learn more about her.  I stumbled across an interview in which she called out Selena Gomez, saying “I love pop music on a sonic level, but I’m a feminist and the theme of her song [“Come & Get It”] is, ‘When you’re ready, come and get it from me.’ I’m sick of women being portrayed this way.”  When I first read this, I was on board.  Without making a comment about the singer herself, I have long found the lyrics to “Come & Get It” to be damaging; “You ain’t gotta worry, it’s an open invitation.  I’ll be sittin’ right here, real patient.  All day, all night, I’ll be waitin’ standby.”  This passive voice paves the way for responses like Robin Thicke’s horrendously rape-y “Blurred Lines” (a song that has been banned at five universities so far), which asserts that women are too coy to express their desire for sex, so men should go ahead and take it from them.  Lorde was offended, and so was I.

Then, however, Lorde also mentioned Lana Del Rey, saying  “She’s great, but … it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: ‘I’m nothing without you’. This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff. That’s not a good thing for young girls, even young people, to hear.”  I was a bit taken aback.  While I like to think I agree with Lorde on an intellectual level, personally, I have always strongly related to Lana’s lyrics, so much so that I would never think to criticize her message.  To me, her lyrics seem much more specific and thought-out as opposed to Selena’s general “come and get it” call to the world.  After all, on an individual level, people really do feel intense longing and desperation.  Are artists like Lana Del Rey supposed to sacrifice their candor and sincerity for the sake of idealism?  Is it not just as important to be honest about your emotions as it is to be a good role model?

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” and I am not entirely sure I agree with him.  To me, it seems more like a cycle.  Artists pick up on barely realized themes within culture, or invent idealized ones, society notices trends within art and embraces them, artists perpetuate the trends, society perpetuates the trends, and the cycle begins again.  Perhaps I relate so strongly to Lana’s lyrics because I have grown up listening to these common themes in pop music my whole life, and the mentality has become ingrained in me.  What would it look like if musicians began addressing issues of love and sex in a much healthier way?  Several years down the road, would we relate just as strongly to those lyrics, having been slowly changing our viewpoints and our actions over time until we were all engaged in relatively healthier relationships?

Where is the line between being honest and being a good example—and how can we find a foothold in the relentless life-imitates-art, art-imitates-life cycle?  After all, Lorde was right—these commonplace “I need  a man” pop lyrics preserve negative gender stereotypes and continually affect the way young men and women see each other.  But Lorde also qualified her opinion by adding, “People got the impression I thought writing about love was shameful. I don’t! I just haven’t found a way of doing it which is powerful and innovative.”  I don’t think we need to throw out emotional honesty and vulnerability altogether.  I think we can be honest about that fact that our dependence on romantic relationships is unhealthy.  I think we can be honest about the fact that we need to find more constructive ways to communicate our desires and our boundaries.  We can celebrate our independence without denying our occasional loneliness.  Pop music has an incredible influence, and that does not have to be a bad thing.

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May the Force (of Words) Be With You

I was challenged and encouraged by the Faith and Justice Symposium last weekend, as I have been every year. Props to Ndunge Kiiti and her team. But, as usual at such gatherings, I was confronted by the idea that we are being asked to “speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.” When I commented on this statement, which was printed on the Bread for the World banner and read at the end of Eugene Cho’s chapel, a friend asked why I was so against it and suggested that perhaps I misunderstood the intended meaning.

What, then, could such statements mean? To me, it implies that there are people who cannot speak, people who are voiceless (another term sometimes used in the humanitarian domain). I take it as a claim of dependence upon those who have voices and power and an inability of the impoverished and oppressed to think and act on their thoughts. Am I reading too much into the words? Is the sentiment of concern and the call to action behind the words all that matters in the end? Perhaps it is just important to have someone stand up for those who are marginalized, no matter who it is taking the stand, as long as they are saying something that seems to be in the interest of the poor. Can good intentions alone produce meaningful and sustainable solutions to global issues that are rooted in the unequal distribution of power?

forceTheorists of dialogue and of critical thought, such as Wells, Bakhtin, Freire, and Gee, often suppose a powerful relationship between action, thought, and word. The connections among action, thought, and word are inconspicuous, but they are tight. They are so tightly woven that it is impossible, I think, to fully define the ways they influence each other. It is not enough to simply suggest that our thoughts affect the ways we speak, that our words will inform our actions, or that our actions prove what we really are thinking. The three are deeply fused, and I think that that is part of what defines humanity, and perhaps life in general. Words are particularly important because of the way they directly connect human beings.

When we say that we are speaking for someone, we not only imply that we are better able to communicate their concerns and ideas, but we also put them in a specific social position. Perhaps the “cannot” in the statement is not meant to indicate an inability on the part of the oppressed. Perhaps it is meant to imply a lack of power or place to speak, which, according to Jackie Ogega, director of a non-profit that promotes peace and grassroots development in rural African communities, is one definition of poverty. Maybe the purpose of the statement is to call people to speak alongside those lacking power and a place to tell their story. But the “for” makes me think otherwise. The “for” acknowledges the power that we (faith-based people, do-gooders, the privileged, etc.) have and perpetuates the hold we have on that power. It encourages dependence, which feeds into the savior complex that the West already suffers from, and inhibits the human right and ability to communicate one’s own desires and solutions for one’s community. I have been profoundly impacted by the work of Paulo Freire, who said that the oppressed must be the ones to lead in their struggle for liberation if they are to claim their dignity. I believe that speaking for people has terrifying potential to deny that dignity and strip them of their humanity.

I was empowered by Eugene Cho, personally and through his message. Bread for the World is an impressive organization that has a powerful influence and vision for change in the government and in systems that allow hunger and poverty to continue. I believe that everyone who took part in the Symposium had good intentions, and I am sure there are many who have considered the same things I have here. But if we truly desire to be champions of justice, we all must begin to think about the ways our words affect our worldviews and the way we relate to the injustices in our world.

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“Slut” is Now a Compliment

Earlier in September a black woman named Brandi Johnson took her black boss to court after he called her the n-word several times in a rant about her professionalism. The court ruled in her favor, and she walked away with $280,000. Headlines in the aftermath read “Black boss’s n-word rant to black employee costs him” and “Lawsuit airs double-standard myths of the n-word,” proclamations that to me sounded a lot like a bunch of white people clapping and cheering and crying, “Take that, blacks!” Now, to be sure, the reactions have been much more varied than just these oddly smug headlines. Most notable were the contrasting views of Shayne Lee, professor of sociology at the University of Houston, and Tammie Campbell, founder of the Honey Brown Hope Foundation, who encouraged the use of the n-word and frowned upon it, respectively. But the majority sentiment throughout mainstream news sources has been that justice was served.

slutThe reactions, though diverse, were all strong. Understandable, considering the word’s clear ties to times of slavery and oppression. Even though slavery in the United States was abolished over 140 years ago, racism is alive and well, there cannot be any doubt about that. Just recently my mixed race step-sister, while working as a hostess in a family restaurant, was told by a customer that he didn’t want a black girl touching his food. However, I grew up in a town where every person is the same color. Racism just is not something that I have personally experienced. I do not think I have ever even heard the n-word outside of a rap song (although I do listen to plenty of those). Forgive my sheltered life thus far, but the only point of view I can legitimately present is my own, right? So rather than discuss at length a word for which I have no context and therefore no right to opine on, I will focus on a word that I know too much about: slut.

Slut, like the n-word, is a word that induces a strong reaction. Also like the n-word, I tend to hear it in my rap songs. Brooke Candy’s self-defining anthem “Das Me” proclaims, “It’s time to take the word back; ‘slut’ is now a compliment … lady who on top of it, a female with a sex drive.”  Candy’s rap echoes the growing movement among women to “take back” the word slut, as made famous by protests such as the SlutWalk, a march against victim-blaming in rape cases. The premise of the movement is similar to what started blacks using the n-word: this word has been used as a weapon to oppress us, so we will take the weapon away from our oppressors. We will negate its definition and we will nullify it. “Slut is now a compliment,” or in the words of Shayne Lee, “As smart, educated, modern people we can use our hermeneutics, our ability to interpret context, rather than just imposing in a blithe way meaning and degradation to a particular word.”

Certainly it is a positive goal to blunt the blades that would try to cut us down. For years, the so-called double standard that the headlines decried has worked in the opposite direction. Only whites called blacks the n-word. Now the tide has turned, and for slut, too, the tide is turning.  Power over something that in the past has had power over me gives me hope, but it is not hope without reservations. I’m not alone in this; others have been slow to embrace the term. Melanie Klein writes for Ms. Magazine, “The word slut now brings up feelings I’ve developed over time about the hypersexualization of our culture … Collectively, this makes claiming the word slut, an effort I found revolutionary and exciting over a decade ago, now feel cliché, confusing and counterproductive.” The important factor, I believe, is how we then use our newly repurposed words. Brandi Johnson’s boss clearly was not using the n-word in a positive way. If, by claiming the word slut as our own, we assert that it will be used to empower women, we cannot turn around and then use it to degrade them. With so many ins and outs at stake, is it not better to simply put such words to rest? Are we really making a difference with how we choose to perceive one word, or are we, in the end, only embracing a reversed double standard, and perpetuating the same stereotypes we wish to erase?