Tag: christian

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Stories In Focus

Album Review: Five Iron Frenzy, “Engine of a Million Plots”

Five Iron Frenzy. The band’s name honors a golf club swinging paranoiac. Its albums have names like All the Hype That Money Can Buy, It’s Funny but Not Very Creative, and Our Newest Album Ever! (exclamation point not mine). A few of its songs quote literary figures like Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare, while others feature imaginary scenarios with dancing glittery unicorns or hungry wizards.

And it’s a Christian band. Earnestly, realistically Christian.

If this description intrigues you, stop reading and go listen to Five Iron Frenzy’s new album, Engine of a Million Plots. If the description has confused, alarmed, or disgusted you, then please keep reading.

Five Iron Frenzy is a ska-core band, meaning they combine the reggae-like rhythms and prominent horn sections of ska with the fast, intense, and sometimes abrasive sounds of hardcore punk rock. The band formed in 1995, released nine albums between then and 2004, and after a nine year gap released a tenth album in November of this year. The latest album, Engine of a Million Plots, features twelve of the band’s characteristically weird, spirited, and astute reflections on life. The music—with its strong beat, catchy melodies, exuberant horn playing, and hint of melancholy—is fantastic. However, the album’s greatest strength is in the lyrics to its songs.

That is, once they make sense. Listening casually, I found the meaning of these songs difficult to grasp. This is partly because the words can blend into the music and partly because the words often seem nonsensical. The snippets “we are professors at robot spy college,” or “I fight tsunamis with an umbrella” for example, don’t convey much. However, reading the full lyrics revealed commentary on despair, arrogance, lost faith, and tightly held hope. The album presents a complex picture of Christianity—alternately joking bitterly about its failures, regretting times when it is lost, and triumphing in the confidence it offers.

Courtesy of relevantmagazine.com
Courtesy of relevantmagazine.com

The song “Zen and the Art of Xenophobia,” for example, mocks the hypocrisy and disdain of so-called Christians. With biting sarcasm, the lyrics say to “cling to your god and guns,” and to “lock and load—just like Jesus did.” The line “give me liberty…or something” highlights the loss of ideals, while the suggestion to “turn your wine back into water” evokes the self-righteous Pharisees’ rejection of Jesus’s miracles. The final words, “and Jesus was American,” are a sharp rebuke for a false sense of superiority.

With an entirely different tone, the song “Blizzards and Bygones” reflects on the loss of a once vibrant faith. The song is resigned in attitude, with lyrics like “you look around but find yourself all alone, and you hunker down, but the cold’s already in your bones.” However, the portrayal of faith is beautiful and loving. The song contrasts the time “back when the angels of heaven would sing” with a time of “frost and no thaw,” and describes “a flicker of desire…a faintly glowing fire for some truth” that remains even when faith is gone.

Of all the songs on the album, “I’ve Seen the Sun” caught me most unaware with the power of its lyrics. The details are vivid and chaotic—“I’m facing down death like a fly on the windscreen. You bring the Warheads, I’m bringing ice cream” or “I’m screaming down into the black abyss…bells are ringing.” But they bring to life the central lines, “I’ve seen the sun come down…And in the dark of night I hold to its return.” This radical hope appears again in the words “tell me that I’m doomed and I’ll keep singing. The fight won’t end with me.” Then, in the last line, the song boldly celebrates the source of such hope: “Savior says…everything’s gonna be alright.”

Five Iron Frenzy’s new album is simultaneously profound and playful, depressed and confident, accusing and joyful. A brief description should have made obvious that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. Arguably because of this, Engine of a Million Plots offers a thought-provoking look at the real brokenness surrounding Christianity and the real salvation we find in Jesus Christ.

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Stories In Focus

Differing Perspectives on the Military Spark Discussions of Conviction and Support

Courtesy of houghton.edu

Bowing his head over the chapel pulpit on Monday, November 11, Michael Jordan gave thanks for the sacrifices of those in the military, confessed the mistakes of this and every country, and asked earnestly for peace. His prayer observed Veteran’s Day and the Canadian Remembrance Day. Also, whether intentionally or not, it honored those at Houghton involved in the military while showing respect for those here with pacifist convictions. This is a necessity for a college that strives to offer support to individuals with ties to the military but also to recognize those who have other perspectives on Christian involvement in the military.

“The Christian tradition as a whole has within it two long standing traditions regarding the use of violence and the military—pacifism and just war theory,” explained Shirley Mullen, president of the college.  “As a Christian college, I believe we have a responsibility to familiarize students with both of those traditions.”

One way the college does this, while providing for the needs of students in or aspiring to join the military, is through the Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) program. The ROTC program on campus began in the late 70s, following years in which Houghton students participated in ROTC through St. Bonaventure University.

“The benefits [of ROTC] are too great in number to achieve an accurate count,” said Alyssa Kiser, a senior cadet in the Houghton ROTC program. Formerly part of a high school JROTC unit, Kiser said “[JROTC] taught me to be honest, be courageous, and how to be proud of not only my achievements, but the achievement of the team working together to reach a goal.” Kiser said the benefits of her college ROTC involvement include “a four-year scholarship awarded right out of high school (for contracted cadets), a monthly stipend (for contracted cadets), relationships with people from all over the United States and abroad, a guaranteed job after graduation, and skills that will last a lifetime.”

Others at Houghton do not share this enthusiasm about ROTC. “There have been some in our community and some in our alumni constituency who believe that we should not have ROTC on campus,” Mullen commented. “My own position on this is the following:  If we were a college of one of the Peace Denominations, then we would not have ROTC…But the Wesleyan Methodist denomination has historically had within itself both pacifist and just war advocates. So our denomination does not dictate our position on this issue…In supporting ROTC, I have always encouraged our ROTC group to be proactive in creating a forum where these issues can be discussed. So that the presence of ROTC is, itself, an educational opportunity for students at a Christian liberal arts college.”

Connie Finney, professor of education, is among those who question the role of ROTC at a liberal arts college. Finney described herself as “not personally against the military, but…against some of the ways it functions.” While making it clear that she respects and cares about the individuals involved in the ROTC program, Finney commented “The ROTC program being housed at a Christian liberal arts college is a bit puzzling to me in the sense that my understanding of the military is that you are not encouraged to be an independent thinker – you are encouraged to follow orders.  It would be difficult to have a well-functioning military otherwise. This does not, in my mind, seem consistent with liberal arts thinking.”

Whatever their views on Christians in the military, Houghton students, faculty and staff are generally supportive of individual members of the college community who are involved with the military. The support takes various forms. It may be prayers in chapel and elsewhere. It may be, as Kiser described, “excusal from classes in understanding of training events for the military, attendance at military functions, silence when performing in color guards (the parading of the National flag), and not disgracing the personnel in uniform.” It may be the respect which John Van Wicklin, faculty advisor for ROTC, said “starts from the President of the College and works its way down.” It may be former ROTC advisor Robert Danner’s challenge to Houghton cadets: “that they be good leaders in the Army, and good witnesses for Christ…”

 

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Opinions

Missiology 101

Hello, Phil. I hear you’ve got to know this new fellow who has moved into your town lately, and I’ve been wondering what you think about him. He’s an immigrant, a missionary from a Muslim country, here to try to convert Americans to Islam. He certainly seems surprising, in some ways. He knows nothing about Christianity, or about what Christians believe. When someone asked him, he had no idea which country was on the other side of the United States’ northern border. And it was complete news to him that America had begun as a collection of British colonies, which rebelled against British rule and achieved independence in the eighteenth century. He doesn’t speak English, and is certainly taking his sweet time about learning it. But then, as he says (through an interpreter), some people just aren’t good at languages.

In fact, self-deprecation seems to be his long suit. He keeps saying what a dummy he is, how naïve etc.. Though I notice that, when you give him information that will be useful to him, he almost makes a point of forgetting it again right away, as though he didn’t want to be contaminated by it — as if naïveté were a treasured part of his self-image.

And then there’s the strange matter of American names. You can’t have failed to notice. As he explains, there is a custom in his country that all foreign names containing a simple ‘i’ sound have to be pronounced with ‘oo’. It’s not that the ‘i’ sound is difficult for him (there are plenty such names in his own country, for goodness’ sake); it’s just that they have a rule among themselves to pronounce all foreign names this way. So he calls Philadelphia ‘Fooladelphia’, and addresses you as ‘Fool’ — and, in the nicest, humblest possible way, he rather expects you to answer to it. And if you tackle him on this, he does his favorite ‘hurt feelings’ look, and says it’s the custom of his country, a part of his identity. And how could you try to take that away from him?

So what I want to know is this:  What do you think of this fellow, Phil? (or ‘Fool’?) Please don’t tell me merely that you expect him to be rather unsuccessful in converting Americans to Islam. I think we can take that much for granted. No: I’m playing the shrink here, with the big “So how do you Feel?” How do you feel about him?

missionaryMy guess is that, at a minimum, you will view him as a pitiable but also unwelcome intrusion into your town. Maybe you go further, and hold him in some degree of contempt for his attitudes. It’s possible you even go so far as to view him with actual anger and hostility.

Since it’s hard to feel threatened by him (although his country is powerful, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the U.S., and people there are an awful lot poorer than they are here), I suspect that you go for the more moderate reactions toward him. If the relationships were reversed, though, and his was the more powerful and wealthier society that was influencing our daily lives in countless ways, I suspect that your reactions would move over toward the more virulent end of the spectrum.

Scratch all that. I just made it up. And anyway, you’re not Phil. So let me tell you instead about a young couple I really have met, who really were surprising, in exactly the ways our imaginary Muslim in Phil’s home town was surprising. And I have to say that it’s OK — not great, but still OK — not to have any idea who Cyril and Methodius were. Or whether Istanbul is at the eastern end of Turkey, or the western. Or which country Belgrade is in. Maybe you know none of those things. It’s not great to be ignorant about them, because they matter. But the world is a big place, and I’m sure you could easily find facts of equivalent importance about, say, western China, concerning which I would be equally ignorant.

And anyhow, we’re in America. Indeed, it would still be OK not to know those things if we were in the U.S. and planning to start a business (or some political move, or do some Christian missions work) in, say, Peru or India. But this couple? They were missionaries in Macedonia. By that I mean, they had already arrived there. Now, Macedonia is a predominantly Orthodox country (Cyril and Methodius are the crucial figures in Slavic Orthodox history), that was under the rule of the Ottoman Turks for more than five centuries until just about within living memory. And it spent most of the twentieth century as part of Yugoslavia — which was ruled from the Serbian capital of Belgrade. And our couple knew nothing about these fundamental features of the country’s culture, religion, history, or geography.

A missionary is a person who, to put it bluntly, goes somewhere to tell the locals what’s what. But our friends didn’t know what’s anything.

We’ll take as read the fact that they didn’t know any of the language until they arrived. Who would expect anything else? And, of course, they pronounce the capital city of Skopje as ‘Skoapje’. You can say that’s the American pronunciation — like calling the Italian city of Firenze ‘Florence’ — if you want. Except that it wouldn’t be true. Because, even if we accept the unlikely assumption that they’d even heard of the city before they arrived, or had heard American pronunciations of it, they pronounced it that way straight away anyway, and ditto for smaller places that would have been completely off their radar. No: everyone around them in Macedonia says one thing — so they say another. It’s the custom, right? And my friend Kosta gets addressed if he were a beer mat: Coaster.

Can we see that anything milder than furious outrage would be altogether too kind a reaction by the unfortunate hosts?

But our friends are not the exceptions: they’re typical. To be sure, I know counterexamples. There’s an American pastor who has lived in a small town of that country for nine years. He looks and dresses like a local, sends his kids to the local school, and speaks so well that many can’t even tell he’s a foreigner.

But he’s the exception. The clueless young couple are the rule. So how should they respond to the points I just made? I’d tell you how they will respond — but you already know. Smile; look bewildered; make self-effacing jokes about what dummies they are; do something groovy that’ll entertain the local kids; look hurt and keep what they fondly imagine to be a ‘holy’ silence. But, whatever they do, make no change.

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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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A Case for Chocolate and Coffee

It doesn’t matter how much faith you have or for how long you’ve been around Christian community. There is hardly anything that makes you feel more uncomfortable and thrown aback than a stranger or a mere acquaintance coming up to you and asking, “Do you love God?”

Chocolate and CoffeeI realize that the uniquely warm and Christian environment of Houghton may give us the wrong impression that this is a completely normal small talk topic to demonstrate our love for one another; we call this sort of thing relating to our “brothers and sisters in Christ.” Here’s the catch though: siblings, even the kind in Christ, are generally not classified as strangers or acquaintances. Asking these sorts of questions among friends is one thing, but can any of us honestly say that we’d appreciate it if a stranger approached and asked, “Do you love your girlfriend?”, or “How’s your relationship with your boyfriend?” Sometimes I don’t even like my best friends asking me that, because I often don’t know whether what I feel is really love or something else! I mean, at times, my spiritual life feels like a long distance relationship with a girlfriend from another planet; I am told to write letters and leave voice mails but never get a direct reply. What makes it even harder is, I am supposed to believe that my partner still loves me much more than I could ever love her, because her holy ghostwriter said so in letters to strangers from thousands of years ago. So please ask yourself: “Do I love God? Is my spiritual life filled with love?” Now, can you really answer a resounding Yes to those questions? If you can’t, why would you ask a stranger?; or if you can, what are you trying to accomplish by asking a stranger?

My heart only mumbles when I hear those questions. I don’t know how to love God, at least the way the Church says I should. There are too many unanswered questions. I want to love my creator, and I desire to have a longing for Him, yet I do not think this means that I must become an unthinking disciple of culturally discordant Biblical statements. One of the Church issues I can’t find peace with is whether God really is a homophobic, wrathful condemner. Can a loving God subject a powerless man to an eternal suffering, just because he wants to show kindness, gentleness, meekness, patience, and love to another man until death do them apart? Do Christians have to go against the cultural current? Are the words worldly and secular really antithetic to godly? As we do not dine on the Word of God alone, but also on coffee and chocolate for clarity and energy –and sometimes happiness— isn’t it important for us worldly beings to consume and appreciate our culture alongside our Christian tradition?

I have no doubt the church will have a pamphlet with scripture quotes and simple answers for all the questions I’m asking. But Christians have been adapting to contemporary culture, and reinterpreting and reteaching the Bible since God-knows-when, and I really wish that this time, for once, the Church won’t be caught lagging behind everybody else. Just as we frown and wince at the thought of past days Christians quoting scripture to justify slavery or to oppose women’s rights, fifty years from now –or maybe even sooner– people may feel embarrassed to know that the Church at one point preached against homosexuality.

Way too often, during Christian youth seminars or camps, the keynote speakers preach about Christians setting themselves apart from the world; many of us have fooled ourselves into believing that Christians must stay immune to the effects of changing worldly values. I wish my opinionated 700 words could convey my hopes of bringing the Church and culture together. At the very least, I hope that my writing has made you feel agitated, because then you may be able to tell me what I’m missing. More than anything, though, I hope we all learn to be normal people living in 21st century America and keep our small talks, well, small.

So, reader, how’s the weather today?

 

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To Infinity and Beyond; Religious Plurality and Dialogue

We live in a religiously pluralistic society. We see it in manifested in our own faith tradition with tens of thousands of Christian denominations, and also outside in the realm of world religions, spanning Hinduism and Buddhism in the East, to Islam, Judaism, and beyond. Even in the evangelical Christian milieu of Houghton there is still a reasonably large spectrum of beliefs and experience. For Houghton, as a Christian institution, does this plurality merely represent our extensive mission field? Or does it perhaps provide us with the opportunity to understand our faith—as individuals and a community—more deeply?

monstersPractically speaking, it is necessary that we come to terms with our religious differences, both across the spectrum of Christianity (which we experience on campus) and across the spectrum of religions we see as “others”. Though our respective traditions may be directly opposing one another, faith remains essentially a human trait, something solid to provide a basis for successful interfaith dialogue. But how are we to go about this dialogue?

Last fall in my Judaism class, I read an article by the rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, (known popularly as “The Rav”) which I found to provide solid guidelines for interfaith dialogue. He stipulates that a confrontation (dialogue) between two faith communities is only possible if it is accompanied by a “clear assurance that both parties will enjoy equal rights and full religious freedom.” Additionally, both parties must have an assurance that they will be upheld in high respect, and not dragged through the mud, so to speak, when difficult issues or severe disagreements arise. In other words, if we neglect to provide a safe environment for these discussions, it is inevitable that neither party will come away with anything constructive, rather both sides will probably emerge somewhat insulted or discouraged.

Granted for the majority of us on campus it will be far easier to approach different denominations rather than entirely different religions; engaging a Catholic is quite different than engaging a Hindu, whose vocabulary, beliefs, and traditions are completely foreign for most of us. That being said, it is vitally important that we as a Christian institution strive to engage these very “other” communities. If we continue to avoid interacting with these other faiths, we risk allowing “monsters to grow in the silence,” as Dr. Case said, one of our world religions professors. I would define these “monsters” as our tendency to demonize or vilify any religion that opposes Christianity. This mindset only serves to further the disparity between our respective faith traditions, burning bridges rather than building them.

Thus these conversations should not be taken as opportunities to merely target non-Christians for conversion (or even to convert those outside the perimeters of our preferred denomination). In other words, our mission should not be to proselytize, but to establish relationships. These dialogues and relationships would help to destroy our unwarranted prejudices and misconceptions about other faiths, and aid us in being effective in a world that preaches tolerance. Constructive interfaith dialogue should force both sides to be open minded without requiring either side to sacrifice their beliefs to the other, helping foster conversations and relationships as opposed to mission fields.

This being said, we do have a “missionary mandate” as a Christian institution and church, and when all is said and done, even in these honest dialogues there remains an element of persuasion on each side. While conversion should not be our only aim, it is legitimate, but perhaps it is best pursued in the context of these relationships we establish through dialogue. After all, is our goal merely to increase numbers for the church or is it to welcome new members into the body of Christ? It’s at least my experience that the most successful evangelism is done within the context of real relationships, and when it comes to people of other faiths, we cannot hope for true relationships unless we are willing to engage in open dialogue.

Houghton appears to be heading toward becoming a more welcoming campus when it comes to interfaith matters. Dean Michael Jordan has said that the administration is on-board with increasing the diversity of speakers both in and outside of chapel. He mentioned that the Franciscan friars will be back, along with a couple speakers representing the Catholic and Presbyterian churches in the coming spring semester. This is a step in the right direction, providing the campus an opportunity to learn from and engage faiths that may be foreign to our own. Jordan also said that he is open to, and hopes to welcome, speakers outside of the Christian tradition on campus for panel events and discussions in later semesters. Presented with these opportunities, we have the potential to become a community of believers who are open and willing to engage in dialogue with the religious diversity in our own community and outside it.

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The Passion of Miley Cyrus

Miley

I am very sure that you are tired of hearing people talk about Miley Cyrus.  In the aftermath of the VMAs (the MTV Video Music Awards, a live performance in which Miley twerked on Robin Thicke (for the definition of twerking, please resort to your local Google machine (or not)), there was an outpouring of public response, both Christian and non-Christian.  The Christian responses were comprised mainly of tender claims of tears on Miley’s behalf, praying that she find her true self and cast off her sinful ways.  Her “true self,” they claim, can only be found in her eventual salvation. Blogger Rihanna Teixeira penned “A Letter to Miley Cyrus” that went viral soon after the VMAs.  Teixeira felt “sad” for Miley, expressing concern for her continuing rebellion and encouraging her, “I know that there is something deeper in that little heart of yours and that’s what the world wants to see.”  The prevailing sentiment in Christian reactions has been the poor Miley clearly has no idea what she is doing, she is not being true to herself, and some kind of dark outside force is pressuring her to do the things that she is doing.

But, according to Miley, she has never been more herself than she is now.  In interviews surrounding the release of her upcoming album, Miley has stated numerous times that she finally feels able to express herself artistically.  She told Billboard Magazine, “I want to start as a new artist… I actually found out more about who I am by making this music.”  Like it or not, Miley is not being anything but herself.  It is surprisingly hard news to conceptualize for many.  Miley used to be so innocent and no one can believe that she really turned out this way.  Christians in particular want to believe that if she came to follow Jesus, she would become a different person.

When Saul became Paul, he was in the midst of a Christian-slaying rampage.  He was angry, passionate, and stubborn.  Christians everywhere had heard of his rage and spoke the name Saul with fear.  He was a dangerous person and I am sure they all wished that his craze would cease.  He was quite literally on the warpath when he was stopped in his tracks and spoken to by Jesus, and came to follow Christ.  Thus he became the Paul that we know: prolific, articulate, confident, and, yes, angry, passionate, and stubborn.  Paul, in essence, did not change.  He stopped killing Christians.  But he himself did not change.

Miley Cyrus does not need to be saved.  That is, no more than anyone else.  Her actions may be grandiose, but her motives are no more so than any other average human being.  Saul did not need to be saved any more than anyone else either.  Saul was and Miley is on the same level of metaphysical priority as every other soul.  And I think it is safe to say that if Miley were to start following Jesus tomorrow, she would not change.  She would stop twerking, and posing nude, and singing about drugs, but she herself would not change.  Her personality would remain very much the same.

We were created with unique personalities.  The same characteristics that made Saul a great persecutor also made Paul a great evangelizer.  He believed in himself.  He had strong convictions.  He was convincing and powerful and a hard worker.  Those character traits were an intrinsic part of his self and his personality, and after he began following Jesus, those same traits that caused him to voraciously hunt Christians then caused him to be one of the greatest Christians in history, and the writer of a hefty chunk of the texts on which we base our faith.

Miley’s empire spreads far and wide.  Starting with Hannah Montana and continuing on through Party in the USA, her haircut, twerking, the VMAs, and Wrecking Ball, she has been one of the most talked-about celebrities in history.  Her personality is a large part of what has made that possible.  She is a workaholic; she told Sunday People, “I work so much, I’m always on the road so I eat healthily. I have to give my body what it needs to keep going.”  She’s passionate about what she does.  “I have just put this music first,” she told Billboard Magazine, and to MTV News, “I have had to fight for what I want on this record.”  Hard working, passionate, ambitious, prolific—Miley’s personality is something to be valued and not overlooked.   It is thoughtless to assume that everything Miley has strived for and thrown her energy into is but a façade and some kind of leftover scrap of teenage rebellion.  Yes, her actions are irresponsible and often in poor taste.  Saul’s actions could have been described as irresponsible (if slaughtering human beings can be described so lightly), but no one would ever doubt that he was doing them intentionally and of his own volition.

It is a fine distinction between thinking of being saved as a transformation and thinking of it as a repurposing, but it is an important distinction.  Talking about coming to Christ as being completely changed devalues the strengths and passions that we were born with and probably sounds, to those who are hearing the message of salvation for the first time, as if we must give up being ourselves in order to know Christ.  Salvation is not an erasure of the self.  Salvation is an acknowledgement of self-worth, and a strengthening of the natural personalities and gifts that God blessed us with in a way that brings glory to God.

 

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What Malcom X Taught a Black Christian

Courtesy of http://lifeofablackgirl.wordpress.com/
Courtesy of http://lifeofablackgirl.wordpress.com/

I believed the lie.  For most of my life I, like many of you, saw Malcolm X as the violent and less-successful opponent of the docile MLK.  There he stood, angrily signifying, indicting white America for the ill-treatment of its darker brothers and sisters.  Malcolm said that black was beautiful and that white society possessed no divine standard by which the black community needed to measure itself.  Malcolm’s analysis troubled me.  His palpable anger made me uncomfortable.  The white society that he described, infused through and through with the philosophy of white superiority, sounded nothing like my bevy of white friends at my college preparatory high school in downtown Chicago.  He was divisive.  He was arrogant.  He was nothing like our good Baptist saint MLK.  And most importantly, he wasn’t a Christian – he was a Muslim.  Appraising his ideology and religious affiliation as less than stellar, I had respect for Malcolm but no need for him.  Or so I thought.

In October of my junior year at Houghton, I obtained a copy of the best-selling Autobiography of Malcolm X in the college library and committed myself to reading the entire memoir.  Commitment gave way to utter captivation as I consumed the entire book with an almost sacred delight.  Upon finishing the book, I read and watched everything that I could find about Malcolm.  Consequently, I came to see that I had been mistaken – flat-out wrong – in my premature interpretation of Malcolm X.  Malcolm was no violent, victim-playing vigilante.  He was courageous enough to speak the unmitigated truth to American society about the horrors of the black American experience.  He hated no one, but he loved black people too much to dilute the reality of their condition.  Getting to know the real Malcolm X changed my life, sparking within me an interfaith dialogue that left me more Christian than ever.

Malcolm taught me that I must have a Christianity that addressed me totally – including my blackness.  It is not secret that Evangelical Christianity has largely been interpreted in Euro-centric perspective, often devaluing, intentionally and unintentionally, Afro-centric religious presentations.  Seeing a theology that justified white superiority, Malcolm saw American Christianity as an aid in enslaving the black conscience.  As a devout Christian and lover of history, I take issue with Malcolm.  It was also the black church that had the greatest purveyor of black dignity.  Black Christianity was in and of itself liberating.

However, I could not dismiss Malcolm’s contention.  Too often black Christians have espoused a Christianity that ignores their blackness instead of appreciating and speaking to it.  Even I had been guilty of this, tricked by the illusion.  Malcolm reminded me that though I am at Houghton – a predominantly white institution – that I am black, and that my faith would have to be able to work outside of the safe confines of this community and speak to the violence and poverty of the largely black and brown Chicago community from which I come.  My faith would have to speak to me wholly.

Malcolm was loud and honest about black injustice.  Possessing a swift silver-tongue and a keen intellect, he was able to communicate what Dr. Cornel West terms, “black rage” like no other.  Even MLK, who purposely avoided such rhetoric in an attempt to avert inciting violent reaction, comes second to Malcolm in this respect.  Malcolm was upfront about black frustration with American racism, and as a result he is scary.  He was a prophetic voice, issuing the clarion call in a strange and desolate land.  Malcolm proved to me that empowerment and reconciliation sometimes means being honest about the horrors of oppression.

Too often, in the interest of cheap, rapid reconciliation, we are encouraged to forgive and forget; to be silent about the atrocities of abuse.  Malcolm said that it was OK, in fact, morally obligatory, to be angered by injustice.  True reconciliation is impossible without an acknowledgement of and repentance from the wrongs committed.  Some dismiss Malcolm as divisive and unhelpful for his honesty.  He showed me that “crying aloud” means “sparing not”, even when the truth is hard and painful to hear.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons I learned from Malcolm X was taught to me not by his strengths, but by a weakness of his.  While Malcolm’s ability to communicate black beauty, self-reliance, and rage is unparalleled, his early methodology for handling the issues of the black experience was limited, even tenuous.  Thus, he is a compelling reminder that communicating the plight of the oppressed is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

This is where Malcolm is most weak in the first years of his career (1959-1962), and I believe that he knew this.  It is clear following his departure from the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1964 that he, no longer bound by the exclusionary policies of the NOI, sought to implement a program of political liberation for black people – Black Nationalism.  Meaning, as he said, that black people “should control the politics of [their] own community.”  Malcolm came to see that talking about black dissatisfaction with the system was only effective when coupled with activism to bring about sustainable change.  He “gets” this by 1964, but is unfortunately killed before his maturing revelation can come to fruition.  Malcolm reminds us all that powerful prophetic voices also seek to be solution-finding voices.

Malcolm X wasn’t supposed to teach me anything.  My education and earliest exposure to him sought to assure this.  Malcolm is dangerous.  His dedication to communicating the woes of the marginalized and his appeals to self-reliance pose a threat to the maintenance of the status quo.  I found in Malcolm a challenge to be realistic and intentional about dealing with justice and a renewed dedication to Christian methodology in the fight for human dignity.  My hope is that the entire community will seek to learn more about him.  Allowing his prophetic voice and spirit to motivates us to speak-up and act out.  Let us not believe the lie – Malcolm has something to say and it is worth hearing “by any means necessary.”

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Houghton Students Attend Calvin Conference

Fifteen Houghton students and two professors attended the eighth-annual Faith and International Development Conference at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last weekend.
The conference, subtitled “From Here to Shalom: Participating in God’s Plan for Universal Flourishing,” was intended to inform students of current development issues around the world, and to supply them with new perspectives on how to address them. For conference attendees it was also an opportunity to interact with potential employers.

Courtesy of Derek Schwabe
Courtesy of Derek Schwabe

“It was a great chance to network with NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), some that I would possibly like to work with in the future,” said Moeun Sun, sophomore.
Approximately three hundred and thirty students from thirty colleges and universities attended the conference. It was organized by Calvin students with the assistance of their International Development Studies faculty, and featured representatives from twenty-five different NGOs. It lasted four days, during which attendees were able to enjoy the full extent of Calvin’s snow-covered campus and ventured into Grand Rapids.

The conference was constructed around a number of general plenaries for all to attend, which were interspersed with smaller sessions, in which representatives of various NGOs gave presentations on the nature and goals of their organizations. These presentations ranged the full spectrum of developmental issues, including peacemaking, healthcare, advocacy, and the environment.

Sun said, “I was pleasantly surprised at how many different kinds of FBOs (Faith-Based Organizations) were represented there.” The individual NGOs held smaller sessions to discuss general ideas or issues and the means by which the NGO seeks to address them.

Senior Andrea Pacheco said, “As someone who has attended the conference for two years now, I found it to be very instrumental in learning about the field of international development, and what it involves.” “This year there were key speakers, such as Steve Radelet, that I think added much more academic and professional credibility to the conference,” Pacheco continued, pointing out that many of the NGOs present have high-minded goals while not necessarily having the necessary expertise.

The conference was not simply a collaboration of NGOs from different fields, but also from multiple denominations. Among the speakers and leaders were Mennonite, Reformed, and Episcopalian Christians. Readers who know Church history might appreciate the ecumenical development exemplified at the conference.

While the conference was overall a success, the information which was presented tended to be fairly basic. There is an inherent difficulty in organizing such a conference, as the attendees all come from different backgrounds. While some might find the information to be basic, it might be entirely novel to others, who are more recent to the topic. This diversity shows up even among the Houghton students who went.

Freshman Matthew Munkittrick said, “I went because I am studying International Development and wanted to get to know a bit more about what I am going to be studying.”

Additionally, the speakers generally focused on their own experiences and contextual situations. Pacheco says, “I’d like to see some more presentations on concrete, current research of the field.” The attendance of Dr. Radelet was a step in that direction, but the vast majority of the speakers were still anecdotal.

Despite the criticisms some of the Houghton students had, they all enjoyed the conference, and everyone got more from it than they had anticipated. In the words of Munkittrick, “Overall, it was definitely worth the twelve-hour bus ride!”