The Questioning Christian

Category: Progress

  • Our faithfulness, not our success, is what matters

    “As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News.”  So says the new bishop-elect of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, the Rev. Herman “Holly” Hollerith, IV.  This standard, I submit, applies not just to priests, but to all of us:  What matters is not our apparent success or failure in the world, but whether we remain faithful to God and his Good News.

    Fr. Hollerith’s comment is found in his nominee statement, where he tells of an important moment in his spiritual journey:

    Perhaps one critical and vocationally formative moment occurred when I was a young rector of a parish in South Carolina.  I had hit a low in my ministry and was feeling like all my efforts to enlighten minds, raise the consciousness of my flock, and resolve problems had come to naught.  I honestly felt the parish was moving backward in time, and I was pretty sure it was my fault and that I was simply an inadequate leader. 

    Across the street from the parish rectory was a neighbor of mine, a prominent retired priest, who had been a supportive mentor and sounding board.  I wandered over to update him on my lack of progress and feelings of failure.  

    Finally, in mid-sentence he stopped me, pointed his finger right at my nose and said, “Your problem, Hollerith, is that you have confused success with faithfulness.  They are not the same thing, but you have yet to figure this out and you think, only when you are successful, that you are doing the will of God.”   

    Those words hit me right between the eyes, because they were the words of Christ.  Faithfulness and success are not the same thing!  As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News.  It was a critical spiritual moment in my life that has since defined how I see things.

    (Italics in original; bold-faced emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

    We have to remember that the world will always tend to reward the appearance of success more than it does faithful effort alone. (We should also remember that the appearance of success can be fleeting, as recent turmoil in financial markets unhappily reminds us.)

    And we can’t just blithely ignore results, the reality of what our efforts actually produce.  Being faithful to the Good News requires facing the facts and being willing to change course when necessary.

    But if we do the best we can —

    • to face the facts;
    • to appreciate the goodness of the creation;
    • and to seek the best for our neighbors as we do for ourselves;

    — in other words, if we do our best to follow the Summary of the Law — then we can stop worrying about whether we’ll ever see “success” in our lives. Instead, we can luxuriate in the trust that in the very long term, things will turn out OK.

  • History’s promise is not serenity, but possibility

    George F. Will, recalling a 1908 racial pogrom in Springfield, Illinois, points out that things today are not as bad as some would think:

    Today, Russia’s government is despotism leavened by assassination, China will achieve universal emphysema before meaningful universal suffrage, and Americans, in a slough of despond about economic difficulties that have not yet even reached a recession, gloomily embrace an inversion of the Whig Theory of History, which holds, or once did, that progress —  steadily enlarged and ennobled liberty — is the essence of the human story.

    So, remember Springfield. The siege of the jail, the rioting, the
    lynching and mutilating all occurred within walking distance of where,
    in 2007, Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Whatever
    you think of his apotheosis, it illustrates history’s essential
    promise, which is not serenity — that progress is inevitable — but
    possibility, which is enough:     Things have not always been as they are.

    George F. Will, A Long Road Out of Springfield, Washington Post, Sat. Aug. 9, 2008 (emphasis added).

  • Esau was the mensch, not Jacob – John Buchanan

    I was struck by Christian Century editor John M. Buchanan’s observation about Esau and Jacob:

    Every time I read a portion of the
    Jacob-Esau saga, I end up reading the whole drama. Esau is so good,
    straightforward and innocent; Isaac so vulnerable, trusting and human;
    Jacob so opportunistic, devious and dreadful; Rebekah so committed to
    the success of her favorite son, Jacob, and so efficient in her
    choreography of one of history’s greatest scams.

    And in and
    through it all, God uses Jacob for God’s ultimately good purposes. You
    simply cannot read this story without being stunned by the mysterious
    reach of grace. If God can use Jacob, then there is hope for all of us.

    The
    story turns finally on the outsider’s magnanimity and graciousness.
    When Esau and Jacob meet at last, Esau does not kill his brother as he
    vowed, but runs to meet him, reminding the reader of that aggrieved
    father in the New Testament who runs down the road to welcome a wayward
    child home. Esau, not Jacob, represents the radical notion at the heart
    of Judaism and Christianity that the justice God requires is not
    revenge but forgiveness.

    John M. Buchanan, The reach of grace, The Christian Century, Aug. 12, 2008, at 3 (emphasis added).

  • Stop punishing impermissibly positive thoughts – Gregg Easterbrook

    Gregg Easterbrook has a very sensible piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that’s worth a read.  He criticizes political campaigns and the news media for "seek[ing] to punish impermissibly positive
    thoughts," and points out that there are "two realities of life in the United States today:  The way we are, and
    the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but
    overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible,
    awful.     Possibly worse."  Gregg Easterbrook, Life is Good, So Why Do We Feel So Bad?, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2008, p. A15 (emphasis added.)

  • Send in the Latrines – New York Times

    If you want to appreciate how much progress the human race has made in the First World — but also how much work there still is to do elsewhere — consider Rose George’s op-ed piece in today’s Times, about the danger posed by the lack of sanitary facilities in “Myanmar” after the recent Cyclone Nargis:

    … Food, shelter and clean water are what aid agencies emphasize. But human excrement is a weapon of mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million viruses. At least 50 communicable diseases — including cholera, meningitis and typhoid — travel from host to host in human excrement. It doesn’t take much: a small child, maybe, who plays in soil where people have been defecating, then dips his fingers in the family rice pot. The aftermath of a disaster like Cyclone Nargis — with masses of weakened people on the move — is a communicable disease paradise. … ¶ …

    In poor countries, diarrhea is the reason you find malnourished children in well-fed families. It’s why millions of girls drop out of school, and why millions of dollars’ worth of productivity is lost from workers sick with this week’s bout of dysentery.

    Good disposal of human excreta can reduce diarrhea by 40 percent. Washing hands reduces it still further. Health economists reckon that every dollar invested in sanitation can save $7 on health costs and lost productivity. No wonder the readers of The British Medical Journal last year voted sanitation the greatest medical milestone ever, over penicillin and anesthesia.

    Send in the Latrines – New York Times, May 19, 2008 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

  • Jesus’ mission was a bust – at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

    Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me “what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, “since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

    ————————

    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

    ————————

    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

    Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

    ————————

    What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

    • The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

    • History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

    • On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

    For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

    ————————

    Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

    If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.

  • Immigrant assimilation: Watch the trend, not just the snapshot

    From Jason Riley, Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Multiculturalists – WSJ.com (May 15, 2008, p. A17):

    … Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, calls it the “Peter Pan Fallacy.” “Many of us assume, unwittingly, that immigrants are like Peter Pan,” says Mr. Myers, “forever frozen in their status as newcomers, never aging, never advancing economically, and never assimilating.” * * *

    With respect to linguistic assimilation, which is one of the more important measures because it amounts to a job skill that can increase earnings, the historical pattern is as follows: The first generation learns enough English to get by but prefers the mother tongue. The children of immigrants born here grow up in homes where they understand the mother tongue to some extent and may speak it, but they prefer English. When those children become adults, they establish homes where English is the dominant language.

    There’s every indication that Latinos are following this pattern.

  • Heresy is necessary in an ever-changing world

    Dr. Stanley Aronson, dean of medicine emeritus at Brown University, points out that the world changes; that we don’t know everything; and therefore all beliefs must be open to reexamination, so that we can determine which ones remain serviceable: 

    [In a purely-imaginary idyllic world, b]eliefs are determined solely by consensus, by common sense and the evidence provided by one’s immediate senses. It is universally believed in this serene world that the sun rotates around the earth, that the major religious texts are inerrant, that professional athletes employ steroids only for post-retirement arthritis and that the moon is composed of Camembert cheese. …  [In this world, e]motional peace becomes more important than anxiety or the corrosive knowledge of how little is known. Skepticism and curiosity become alien emotions.

    The future, in such a pacific environment, would never be feared since the world will remain unchanged. Tomorrow, and all of the days that follow will be the same blissful Eden as yesterday or today. Ugliness, discord, contentiousness — and heresy — would remain as alien experiences confined to story books. And only the looming shadow of utter boredom would threaten this prospect of tranquility.

    But imagine now, in this placid community, some rebellious individual, someone with the temerity to question the accepted beliefs of the majority, a person eager to assert that the ultimate enemy is not discord but ingrained bigotry and willful ignorance. The elders of this hypothetical community might initially condemn such a heretic, perhaps even destroy his spirit, but in their hearts they will know that all things but death change; that all beliefs must be tested continuously to determine which are false and which worthy and that it is the occasional heretic — with his provoking postulates — and not the peace-lover who brings progress and understanding to the community.

    Read it all. (Hat tip: TitusOneNine; all emphasis added.)

  • Evolutionary basis for Spitzer’s adultery?

    Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier has a piece today in the NY Times about the rarity of monogamy in animal species:

    … Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy.

    Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.

    Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.

    (Extra paragraphing added.)

    Evolutionary psychologists and social biologists tend to think that this furtive, uneasy coexistence of monogamy and promiscuity arises from a confluence of genetic- and social factors:

    • All of us are descendants of ancestors who, by definition, did at least the minimum necessary to pass on copies of their genes to another generation.
    • Statistically, a father who cheats on his mate is likely to pass on more copies of his genes than one who doesn’t cheat (because he’s more likely to have a greater number of offspring).
    • Other things being equal, a mother who tries to enforce fidelity in her mate is more likely to have help, economic and otherwise, in raising her offspring; this ups the odds that her offspring will survive to reproductive age and pass on copies of her genes (and their fathers’) to grandchildren.
    • On average, mothers who cheat are likely to diversify the genetic risk portfolio of their offspring, because of the increased odds that their offspring will be fathered by several different males of varying genetic profiles.
    • When parents stay together to help with the raising of their grandchildren, it enhances even further the odds of that parents’ genes will survive into future generations.

    In short, from a purely-pragmatic perspective, both monogamy and promiscuity have their evolutionary advantages.

    I suspect this is another example of the watermelon-seed effect, in which opposing forces — in this case, the desire for both sexual freedom and a faithful mate — can unexpectedly result in progress (cf. the Hegelian dialectic).

  • Altruism provided us with evolutionary advantages

    Jim Holt is the latest to point out (in the New York Times Magazine) that altruism might be genetically hardwired into us for one or more of several reasons. These reasons testify to the cleverness of Whoever set up evolutionary processes as an engine of progress. For example:

    Kin selection: For most of human history, altruism was directed in large part to those physically nearby. They were likely to be genetically kin to the altruist. The altruist’s generosity thus benefited his gene pool, even if s/he derived no personal benefit. Whichever of those gene(s) that contributed to altruism were thus more likely to survive and be propagated into future generations.

    Reciprocal altruism: Societies practicing reciprocal altruism tend to have a survival advantage (other things being equal). Our gifts of memory and reason help promote reciprocal altruism: Alice is willing to help Bob now, perhaps reasoning that later Bob will remember and help Alice when she needs it.  If Bob fails to do so, then Alice will remember.

    Holt explains:

    Evolutionary psychologists have come up with four plausible Darwinian reasons for altruism. First, there is “kinship selection,” which is supposed to lurk behind the sacrifices you make for your biological family. It’s based on the percentage of genetic overlap. One biologist, when asked if he would lay down his life for his brother, quipped, no, but he would for two brothers or eight cousins.

    Second, there is “reciprocal altruism,” which doesn’t depend on shared genes. Here, the basic idea is: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Reciprocal altruism is seen not just in humans but in some animal species. Vampire bats, for instance, benefit one another by sharing meals of regurgitated blood.

    Kinship and reciprocation are, as Richard Dawkins has written, the “twin pillars of altruism in a Darwinian world.” Neither, however, would appear to be of much use in explaining philanthropy. Bill Gates has no special genetic relationship to the beneficiaries of his foundation. Nor does he expect them to reciprocate by purchasing the next release of Windows.

    A third explanation for altruism, the Darwinian advantage of having a reputation for generosity, might look more promising. Nineteenth-century “robber barons” like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie had ample reason to amend their reputations by generous benefactions. The same might conceivably be true of Bill Gates, judging from the tone of the jokes you find about him on the Internet (several of which place him in hell).

    And how about the final, and certainly most dispiriting, Darwinian rationale for ostentatious giving: the aim of bankrupting one’s rivals? This is sometimes called the Potlatch Effect, after the competitive feasts (“potlatch” in Chinook) of a Pacific Northwest tribe whose rival chieftains try to humiliate one another by unmatchable displays of generosity. Perhaps the Potlatch Effect could explain Bill Gates’s philanthropy as, say, a challenge to the founders of Google to ruin themselves through comparably enormous bequests.

    Holt follows in the footsteps of, among others, Robert Wright.

    Whatever the reasons, it’s becoming more and more indisputable that, in emphasizing love of neighbor, Jesus and his Jewish forebears were on to something fundamental in the universe.