Simple survival

It's been nearly ten months since I last posted, and every one has laid heavy on my mind. I'm one of those for whom writing about a subject is thinking about it, and both the end of trump's reign of error and the success of covid19 infections, which are related, has demanded I do a lot of thinking but very little writing. But here it is, nearly solstice, so I must say something.

Solstice is important to me as it's also our wedding anniversary. This year marks our 30th. But neither of us has bought or made the other a gift. I think it's the mere fact we remain as a unit that is the gift. It is also the year I turned 60 and that likewise was a gift to remain alive and comparatively healthy in a year marked by so much death. That is not to say we haven't been touched: both my wife and I have seen a dozen or more patients for whom infection hastened the end. She has endured several illnesses that leave us nervous that she's been infected, and through her I've also been suspected of infection. Testing has proven us free of that worry. Now, a vaccine has been developed and released that is promising, and I received it 2 days ago; I experienced the smallest symptoms as my immune system kicked in yesterday, enough to ensure that I don't want to have anything like that.

Solstice is important to me too because, as Dr Robin Kimmerer of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation has said, "Winter is a teacher of vulnerability."  This year has not lacked for lessons in vulnerability and I have no doubt winter promises to bring more, probably harsher, lessons. As Elizabeth Dias points out, for most of human history and even for many humans today, winter is a period when simple survival is the aim. "Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of what it means to be human...The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter."  

Our solstice darkness of the past four years has opened to what we hope is the brighter period of Joe Biden's presidency. I have great hopes for this, but what I think many of us have learned is that we can survive. But many of us have not survived, neither trump nor covid 19, and we must not lose sight of this. This is what people like me need to remember, that some of our neighbors are struggling, on multiple levels, with simple survival.

The Red-Monster

I certainly wasn't his best friend. And although I knew him for a long time and we stayed in touch as well as we could, I couldn't call him a close friend. But he saw me, in his wife's words, as "a good shit." I would have said the same, and for a lot of us, that's about as good as it gets.

We were in grad school together, his first time and my second. He was part of what another friend described as "the Raymond Carver crew," writers in the 90s who felt the power of the word lay in saying things plainly, without flowers, without elaboration. Back then he only wrote fiction, so that when I found out years later he'd published a chapbook, I wondered when he'd started writing poetry.

He married, had kids, found steady work that was meaningful and often frustrating. If I hadn't kept in touch with him on Facebook, I wouldn't have known him if I'd passed him on the street. He went from a Marky Ramone shaggy mullet to a hairline rivaling Patrick Stewart's for brevity. When he died a couple weeks ago, it was a shock. He hadn't been sick, had stopped drinking a long time before, didn't even smoke or eat much fried food. I heard it was his heart and I like to think it surprised him too, so he didn't feel anything more than the snap of an artery.

He was the kind of good shit that, when a lot of us got together last Saturday to remember him, the words said more often than any others were, "I'm gonna miss him." We told a lot of stories about him, and I wrote this one down for his wife and kids. He might have told them, but maybe it's mine to tell.

This was back before I knew him, back when he was still drinking and living the sort of life he would write about. "I was in jail in St. Peter, on a DUI charge. The judge gave me a choice, I could stay in my cell during the day or go to college. I chose school because I'd been in cells before. There was a school in St. Peter but I couldn't afford that, and Mankato is about 12 miles south, and they accepted me.

"They took away my license and my car, so I had to bike the distance. I took classes every day so I didn't have to stay in my cell. It was dead winter, and there I was biking there every morning and back every afternoon. I did that my whole sentence. I was about 7 weeks in when I realized I must be getting something out of it."

Always be the helpers

I'm not generally one who reads advice columns, but this one, aimed at parents, nudged at me, making me want to share it.

Too often, it strikes me that the person writing in for advice is asking for something specific to him or her, a response to a problem that's unique to him and him alone. But this mother's plaint is common, and not just to parents. I struggle, too, with the question of how to effect optimism with friends and others without, as she puts it, "overloading" them.

Carvell Wallace puts it plainly: "To be a child in 2018 is to know that the adults have completely abdicated our collective responsibility to make a decent world for our kids." Game, set, and match. Abdicated is the polite way to put it; the truth is we have, as a species, gone out of our way to fuck this world up with a passion.

Her suggestion, taken from a now-famous Fred Rogers' quote, is spot-on: In order for our children to find the helpers, we must be he helpers. What good does it do them if we're all behaving like chickens with our heads lopped off or, worse, as if the issue doesn't matter? America claims it hates a bully, and goes out of its way to elect one. We say children are our future and are important to us, and defund and beggar the very schools and programs meant to help them grow into that future.  We insist school be a safe place for them, and offer nothing more than thoughts and prayers to keep guns out of them. 

Everyone knows kids aren't stupid and we all like to brag about how intelligent ours are, but then we behave as if they're not only dim but blind and deaf too. The note that little ones have big ears and eyes is so common it's trite, but it's not only their own parents they're listening and watching. It's what we mean by having compassion: When you're outside your home, act like there's a kid watching and mimicking you. I do this myself. I feel better for it. Because there often is one somewhere. And they will eventually treat me the same as they see me treating others 

We Have a Kid

I think a month and a half break from publishing is long enough. During that time, much has happened. Trump's first hundred days have come and gone, numerous scandals relating to said 100 days and earlier have been discovered or uncovered, members of a family were murdered during an argument between a woman and her "bully[ing,] ticking time bomb" of a husband who nonetheless had access to a gun, people were killed by van and knife in London, and a lot of people naturally were killed between May 1 and May 31 around the world in various terrorist attacks. And during this period, we finally took in a foster son.

It was a long process, begun last year. Since, over the years, we have housed up many of my homeless and traveling friends, my wife said, "I think I'm getting the hang of this. Maybe we can have a kid come live with us." We'd talked for years, mostly in the theoretical language we appreciate, of having a teen come to live with us, but now we decided we had crossed the Rubicon between theory and practice and were ready to give ourselves in place of lectures or a little charity. So we began what was, in retrospect, not so bad a process but at the time seemed a huge burden to carry, essentially explaining the way we'd decided to live our lives in such a way that people for whom anything much outside the lines was a line too far (and they begrudged us that, oh yes, they did, keeping us on tenterhooks down to the wire as to whether they would even accept us or not) to be satisfied that we would not assault or eat any teenage children they threw our way. We knew, from the beginning, we would prefer teens as that age is very hard to place, but is the age group with which we were most comfortable.

The Tall Kid is a good kid, 6'4" of opportunity and issues. Like any of us are. Without getting into his history, I will say he's in foster care for the first time, having been placed with different members of his family and being rejected in each case. He behaves well around home, and while there are missteps, they aren't major ones (well, except using my wife's still-working credit card information on her former phone he uses to order sneakers, but we caught that fast and dealt quickly with it. One of the major elements I insist on is that, once a situation has been corrected, that's the last he hears about it, unless he does it again); it's been different at school. There, he's an authority-confronting, teacher-defying frequent user of their In-School Suspension Room, and the day before the end of school his principal called to tell me he had worn out his welcome there and was now suspended for the rest of the school year (which meant, of course, a day and a half).

We are hoping he makes the changes he wants to over the summer before starting high school. We suspect many of the problems at school are attributible to his past behavior and the fact, as someone new to the foster system, and as a Tall Black Kid, he's a focus of attention. At least high school offers  a place for new behaviors. I'm not so naive to assue he suddenly straightens up and flies right. I remember my own teens too well. But I am hoping the new place makes him want to be a different, better person.

I'm reading a book that's 20 years out of date, but is nonetheless one I'm learning a lot from: A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, by Patricia Hersch. If nothing else, it gives me an insight into the way his parents might have grown up and why they treated him in the ways they did. Color me hopeful.

What fascists share

If we would name the coming Trump presidency as a political entity twitching with fascistic life, then it's incumbent on us to take into account the experiences and explanations provided for us by people who actually lived through and grew up in fascistic regimes, like Umberto Eco. I love Eco's novels (or used to, I haven't taken the time to read one in at least a decade) but his primary field was semiotics, the explanation for how words and symbols mean. And it's in that vein that he tried to articulate what fascism is comprised of.

Not everyone can take the time or effort to read Eco, I know, and I am one of those lazy eggheads who can do so. I also flatter myself I can make him understandable. So here is my condensation of Eco from twenty years ago explaining Ur-Fascism, that is, what all fascisms have in common (my emphases):

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...[P]eople of different religions...started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages...As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values...The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.4. ...For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. 7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country...Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. 8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies... However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. 9. For Ur-Fascism...pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.10. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians....[who] are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. 11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism...In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak...All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk [or reality] show.

258 candles-days 122-125

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.


Today: I've often advocated for the inclusion of former prisoners in most businesses. It helps both their self-esteem and their fight against reoffending. Despite the misperception that might be suggested by its terminology, felon-friendly employment is a worthy cause that we need more and more.

258 candles-days 113-119

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: As KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions used to say, "You Must Learn."

258 candles-day 98

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: What would happen if we taught meditation as part of American education?

258 candles-day 23

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I agree with NYTImes columnist Frank Bruni about three times a year, and this is one. He celebrates the use by college applications officers of extracurricular information gleaned from essays and letters of recommendation that often trumps academic test scores. 

258 candles-day 20

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases. 

Today: Nursery Fields Forever. 

being governor of India

As might be noted from the paucity of posts since the first of the year, 2015 has been a busy one for me. While I'd like to lay the blame on not having much to say or write, the truth is more complicated and involves my work.

I really enjoy what I do, a sentiment I think nearly anyone involved in hospice work would echo. It's challenging and necessary and I often find I'm overwhelmed by what I do and how little I know. That is the background to my post today. Why do I have this job?

The question is more complicated than you might think. What I mean is, Why do I have a job doing work that sometimes requires extensive clinical experience when I could not get accepted into the training? Most people in my position and in my company have four units, or one year, of advanced Clinical Pastoral Experience, or are in the process of getting it. I couldn't find a program that would accept me, or even interview me, but was hired as a chaplain, first with teens in recovery, and then with people who are dying, on the strength (I guess) of the talent my references say I have.

I'm left to wonder where the talent lies. I know it's not in my abilities as a team player. Currently, my management is more a suggestion than a presence, and that suits me fine. I often compare my solo work to my years teaching in prison. It was like being governor of a small state in India where, so long as the locals didn't riot, no one cared what you did. Or I think of it like contact improvisation, a dance form I studied in the 80s, that even untrained dancers can make beautiful.

It may lie in my patience with people. I don't need to talk with them each time and sometimes never. I feel I'm doing good work by sitting quietly while they sleep or watching TV with them. It may lie in my patience with myself. I spend time relaxing and meditating before going anywhere so I'm at my least anxious.

Or it may lie in my simple acceptance that they and I and everyone we know and love will die and the best we can hope to do is to meet death with a steady, if unsure, gaze. I have long come to terms with my own imminent death, and while I don't look forward to it, I don't begrudge it either. Live while alive, I say, you'll get used to being dead.

I have come to know my place

I've experienced depression for many years. Like a lot of people, I did a lot of self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, and I kind of liked that. But I discovered that I was a poster boy for the wonders of Prozac and have been on some form of antidepressent for nearly 20 years. I've never felt suicidal (although a good argument could be made that I have been self-destructive) or whatever term there is for the desire just to remain in bed. I have no trouble moving around and getting my day going, although sometimes it's hard to understand to what purpose. My depression leaves me angry more often than not, sometimes with myself but usually with society.

All this is to say that, when it comes to depression, I'm not un-self-cognizant. It took me a long time to recognize a need for help, and even longer to accept it. I'm not proud of my tendency toward do-it-myselfism, but realize it's a battle I fight continuously.

On Wednesday I had a counseling appointment with a new counselor I started with late last year. Before and after I left for the appointment I took out my aggression that had been building for months on the three dogs I love most, hitting one with a book, pushing another down the stairs, and kicking the third. I was devastated by this behavior and am so ashamed of myself that if I was suicidal I might consider it. None of them was hurt, although all three looked surprised, which is of course being hurt, and like an abuser I tried to make up for my behavior immediately. But it didn't do any good for how I felt about what I'd done.

This is not to make too big a thing of it. I know every animal lover has done something in her thoughtless moments that he regrets and I know that this is really no different. But one thing I've prided myself about is the immeasurable love I have for my animals. But my depression makes them fair game, I know, and my wife just a few weeks ago said she was sometimes anxious about leaving me alone with the animals in winter, knowing that I could take my anger out on them. I told myself if that happened I needed to make a serious change.

So here is the change I'm making.

It's really not a big thing, more a recognition of something in front of me all along. For decades I have tried to be something better than I am, socially and economically. I have gotten several degrees and trainings--I hold two masters and a master of fine arts, and I've trained as a chaplain and a minister. I was a college teacher for a decade and a part-time minister for another decade.

But those are middle class ambitions and I didn't come from that. I am a lower-class prole straight out of Orwell who lucked into those positions and now, in the current employment market, cannot find a way to make lightning strike twice. The market may not be right but it is what we live with and I have come to hear it loud and clear: it does not want me to make my way as a professional. I must make it as a minimum-wage employee.

I have gotten above myself and have been suitably punished for it.

As a result, I renounce my desires to be a minister or chaplain, as I more or less gave up my desire to be a teacher any longer, and starting Monday I will look for any full-time job within ten miles I can find. Keep in mind where I live, deep out on the rim: the best I could hope for around here is work as a machinist and I don't have that kind of training.

Is this a reaction to both my depression and my acting in a way I'm ashamed of? Perhaps. Probably. But I feel lighter as a result of making this decision. For the first time in a long while I feel less like a victim of economic forces and more like someone who's accepted his fate.

This doesn't mean I intend to give up ministering, as I haven't really given up teaching. I've just given up the hope anyone will pay me a living wage doing it. I've come to recognize my place, and it's behind a broom or a cash register, not a lectern or an altar.

teach naked

 

I've no clue where this quote came from--I've done a cursory background search and, aside from this quote, there seems no information on Alexandra K. Trenfor otherwise--but that doesn't diminish from the truth of what she, or someone who attributes it to her, said. 

 

Similarly, I'm rereading Parker Palmer's Healing the Heart of Democracy, and came across the following wisdom:  "No educational task is more important than helping students reflect on realities larger than their own egos."  This was always, although I never articulated it the way Palmer has, the impetus behind my teaching and I hope that came through to most of my students.  I'm learning to translate this now to everyday life; that's harder and less often rewarded, I've found, but no less rewarding.

teach naked!

on occasion, when I especially miss teaching, I swipe an issue of "the chronicle review," the midsection of the larger chronicle of higher education--my rationale is that it's unlikely most visiters to my local libraries are going to read the chronicle anyway, and it might as well go to use--and spend a few days reading it.  last week I brought home a copy with the short essay "against reading lists" by lennard j. davis.

it's a provocative idea, dropping required readings from syllabi (except for some introductory material) and allowing students to determine, through conversation and suggestion and their own outside reading, where to go next.  say, in a 20th century american lit class opening with some early influential stuff--"song of myself," say, or the red badge of courage--and allow them to determine what and who to read next, maybe choosing from a prepared list of options.

davis recognizes the massive change that ebooks and online availability makes for reading. 

on the internet, one link leads to another.  you look up turner, say, on wikipedia.  that site leads you to the national gallery of art, which in turn leads you to romanticism, which in turn takes you to delacroix, and thus to reubens, who isn't a romantic but whose use of flesh, light, and color influenced that movement.  that little stroll was unpredictable, but a fruitful exercise in intellectual curiosity.  in the past, we've operated with a very different model, conditioned not by the internet and the intellectual meandering it allows but by a kind of linear thinking reflected by the consecutiveness that we find on the printed page.  the fixed reading list is the icon of that linearity.

at first, I wasn't certain he understood what some of the realworld costs of that flexibility meant.  for instance, he suggests that in "the new world of e-books, online publications, and next-day book deliveries, we are freed from the dull hand of tradition," apparently oblivious to the fact that for most students not enrolled at a more expensive school like chicago, where he teaches, such sudden cash expenditures are not easy to negotiate (or for working students to plan reading time around).  he does , however, next present a more affordable and workable alternative, suggesting an e-reader (or an option to spring for paperback copies for the more linear among them) for his students onto which they could download preselected texts.  he says he somehow selected his list so that the 2 groups "would end up spending the same amount of money..." 

that format allowed many impromptu changes in the reading list.  it also allowed us to look at a poem or a short story right at the moment in class when it occured to me to refer to that work.  another benefit was that visual material, not included in the course packet or reading list, could be called up at the mention of a specific reference.

this is doable now, of course, using classbased technology, and I've made much use of that in my more recent practice, putting sites and film clips and readings on the overhead computer screens available in most college classes.  but he makes an excellent point near the conclusion of his essay that what we are looking at is not only new in terms of technology in the class but in the way learning is distributed.

we are now presented with a more 3-dimensional model that reaches through time and space in unpredictable and valuable ways.  the philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari called that kind of knowledge "rhizomatic," after a type of plant.  a rhizome, such as a potato, reproduces by sending out underground shoots that form another plant, which in turn does the same thing, producing a network of roots.  deleuze and guattari contrast that to the "arboreal" model, in which a single set of roots produces a single tree, with all its branches connected to one trunk.  deleuze and guattari see the arboreal model as the older model of knowing, hierarchical and organized, such as strict taxonomes of organisms.  they see the rhizomatic as a newer, more effective scheme for organizing knowledge.

 

teach naked: punk edition

I was reminded recently of this midterm I used while teaching at mcnally-smith college of music in the hub.  I'd made some reference to a seminal punk band--the boomtown rats--and not a single member of that class of overlyhip, overlyhyped snottynosed brats even pretended to know the group.  so I created this midtern in order to get their priorities corrected.  feel free to try it yourself or use it to bring a class' appreciation of history to the fore. 

MIDTERM

Johnny Thunders died for your sins!  So you have a better knowledge and, perhaps, appreciation for the aesthetics of punk, you’re going to learn to write an album review.  You will choose one of the albums listed below, listen to it at least three times all the way through, and review it for a Punk Planet-like publication.  Reviewing doesn’t mean you say you like it or not—no one cares if you like it.  What you must do is put yourself in the frame of mind of someone who is the target audience for the album, the average punk consumer, and locate elements in the songs that would appeal to him or would turn him off.  The usual requirements are still the same—500 words, two double-spaced typed pages, no spelling or grammatical errors.  The change is that I’m going to read it exactly like an editor, which means I’ll read it with an eye toward whether I’m going to print it or not.  The grade I give it is the percent chance it would have of getting published.  (Unlike an actual editor, from whom you’d only hear “yes” or “no,” I’ll make corrections and suggestions and write comments on it.)  Wikipedia has an excellent article on punk and its definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_rock, so it would be a good idea to start there. 

Albums

• Bad Brains, Bad Brains
• Bad Religion, The Empire Strikes First
• Blondie, Blondie
• Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician
• Buzzcocks, Flat Pack Philosophy
• The Clash, Combat Rock
• Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
• The Devotchkas, Live Fast, Die Young
• Elvis Costello and the Attractions, This Year’s Model
• Flogging Molly, Within a Mile of Home
• Gang of Four, Solid Gold
• The Mekons, Fear and Whiskey
• The Muffs, Blonder and Blonder
• Le Tigre, Le Tigre
• The New York Dolls, The New York Dolls
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Best of…
• Patti Smith, Horses
• Pere Ubu, The Art of Walking
• The Pixies, Doolittle
• The Plasmatics, Coup d’Etat
• The Ramones, Rocket to Russia
• Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation
• Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks—Here’s the Sex Pistols!
• Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Best of…
• Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
• The Slits, Cut
• Talking Heads, Talking Heads:  77
• Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground
• X, Under the Big Black Sun
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell

teach naked

The destruction of the [Mongol] invasions, when so much had been lost, led to an intensification of the conservatism that always characterized agrarian society.  When resources were limited, it was impossible to encourage inventiveness and originality in the way that we do today in the modern West, where we expect to know more that our parents' generation and that our children will experience still greater advance.  No society before our own could afford the constant retraining of personnel and replacement of the infrastructure that innovation on this scale demands.  Consequently, in all pre-modern societies, including that of agrarian Europe, education was designed to preserve what had already been achieved and to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the individual, which could undermine the stability of a community that had no means of integrating or exploiting fresh insights.  In the madrasahs, for example, pupils learned old texts and commentaries by heart, and the teaching consisted of a word-by-word explication of a standard textbook.  Public disputation between scholars took for granted that one of the debaters was right and the other wrong.  There was no idea, in the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing the clash of opposing positions to build a new synthesis. 

--from Islam:  A Short History by Karen Armstrong (my emphasis)

teach naked

Nelson [Humboldt] spent the summer after graduation back [home], painting houses and fantasizing hopefully about the next few years of his life. Gallaher had painted an idyllic picture of his own grad school days, living in a Quonset hut in East Lansing, Michigan, writing his master's thesis on a card table at one end of the room while his wife and kids watched Your Show of Shows at the other. As a going-away present, he had given Nelson a handsome slip-covered edition of Aristotle. This would give him a head start on his literary theory seminar, Gallagher said, and Nelson spent the summer reading it cover to cover, his hands smelling of turpentine.

But on his first day as a graduate student, at the very first meeting of Introduction to Literary Theory, his instructor--a gaunt and entirely hairless man in severe wire rims, a jacket of herringbone tweed, and a white roll-neck sweater--lifted a paperback edition of Aristotle with two fingers and set it on fire with a silvery Zippo. He dropped it in a wastebasket without a word and watched it burn, and when Nelson got up and opened a window to let out the smoke, he spun with a sharp, jerking motion and barked at Nelson to sit down.

"Don't touch that, you!" the professor said, in a vaguely Gallic accent; and then, to everyone, "I want you all to smell that. I want it to penetrate to the back of your nostrils. By the end of the term I want that smell to come to you even in your sleep, to be as familiar to you as the stink of your own pale, oozing bodies."

This struck Nelson as a little extreme on a September morning in Indiana.

"For some of you," the professor went on, "I will be an intellectual terroriste, striking brutally"--and here he lunged at a young woman in the front row, who cringed and clutched her notebook to her bosom--"ruthlessly and without warning at the foundation of every you hold dear. But for those of you with the rigor and the intellectual humility to submit to my will, I will be your guerilla chieftain, teaching you, disciplining you, driving you with a terrible love to do things you did not think possible. Some of you will not survive." He fixed Nelson with a fearsome glare, his merciless eyes huge behind his lenses. "But some of you I will lead out of the hills and down into the burning metropole."

He lifted the wastebasket. Aristotle was still smoldering.

"This is just the first step," he said. "We will have to destroy literary theory in order to save it."

Thus Nelson discovered that no one was doing close reading anymore. The professor called himself Jean-Claude Evangeline. Even his colleagues were uncertain of his provenance, although they hadn't examined his vita any further than the College de France, which was good enough for them. His one published volume, Les Mortifications, a book as dense and impenetrable as the man himself, was dedicated equally mysteriously to "Ma belle guerriere!" His English was flawlessly idiomatic, but was he French? Flemish? Quebecois? Those of his colleagues who envied his cultural cachet and his hypnotic hold over graduate students mimicked his accent behind his back and compared him to Pepe LePew.

...Nelson himself felt as though he had passed through the looking glass. An innocent and self-evident remark in Evangeline's class about Conrad's jumbled chronologies raised snorts of derision from his classmates. A severe young woman from the Indian subcontinent addressed Nelson without looking at him, telling him painfully, in a posh imperial accent, that Conrad's racisim was the starting point for any discussion of his work.

"Read Edward Said," she added, in a curt postcolonial sotto voce.

Evangeline himself cut Nelson not un millimetre of slack. In his first paper, Nelson manfully tackled Nietzsche, the earliest theorist Professor Evangeline was willing to sanction, and the professor handed the paper back with a failing grade and only one comment; on the first page he'd circled the word "literature" in blood-red felt tip and written in the margin: "When I see this word, I reach for my revolver."

Thus, Nelson's first lesson in graduate school was to keep his mouth shut.

--from The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes

this is from an interesting comic horror novel I've started reading about an academic whose reattached finger begins to assert his will on everyone around him, a sort of postmodernest revision of faustus or of what faustus would have liked to accomplish. hynes also wrote the collection publish and perish back in the 90s, and I really enjoyed those stories. as with many young literary men--or in this case, middleaged literary men--this story may have autobiographical detail, particularly the above, but I reproduce it not because it reflects my own grad experience--far from it--but because I heard similar stories from many classmates and remember the bloodshot and baggy-lidded eyes of other students, so that I often wondered at my own abilities to avoid such enforced workaholism. for me, grad school and then teaching was mostly fun, and the few times it became insufferable were distinctly because of my own tendencies for procrastinating (which of course I am loathe to give up).

teach naked

this is an essay written for a class on christian education expanding on an earlier essay defining the term.

“Now I Know Why I am an Orthodox Jew”

A recent issue of The Jewish Review of Books contains this anecdote to make clearer late neo-conservative founder Irving Kristol’s identification as a Jew “with an abiding interest in and respect for religion” first and as a political creature second.

A good clue to the answer [why he identified himself as a “neo-Orthodox Jew”] can be found in one of his later essays…Kristol there recounts an experience that his wife [Gertrude Himmelfarb] had while teaching a graduate course on British political thought in which she had spent several sessions on the writings of Edmund Burke. At the end of one class, she was approached by a “quiet and industrious” young woman. “Now,” this student said, “I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.” Needless to say, this wasn’t because Burke had supplied an incontrovertible proof that the Oral Torah had been revealed at Mt. Sinai. “What she meant was that she could now defend Orthodoxy in terms that made sense to the non-Orthodox, because she could now defend a strong deference to tradition, which is the keystone of any orthodoxy, in the language of rational secular discourse, which was the language in which Burke wrote.” (Soloveichik, 19)

This lengthy quote explains nicely, I think, what religious education ought to do: to inculcate in the educated not the dogma of the religion but a way of explaining what it is he or she believes to the non-member of the faith. As Judith Berling writes, “We not only learn through conversation, but we learn how to converse” (emphasis in original; 80). In my previous essay for this class, “We are Church when We are Gathered, We are Church when We are Dispersed,” I defined religious education as follows:

It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

To this I would now add that in addition to helping the student make sense of the world it should also help her or him to explain to others how he or she sees the world. For many students, one of the most important questions revolves around how they can affect the world (hopefully, in a positive fashion). Craig Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, for example, provides

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

I’ve argued that religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to expect students to ask: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

For the graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class, holiness resided in her ability to articulate her faith to someone outside it. To make this particular to my faith, in his pamphlet entitled Should My Child Go to Sunday School?, Unitarian Universalist minister Tony Larsen explains

We teach our children what Unitarian Universalism stands for today so that when people ask them about their faith, they can feel confident answering [their] questions. We help them understand that the inspiration of the divine is to be found not in one book but in many; that we are born not in sin but with the potential for goodness; that the doctrine of hell implies a cruel god, and salvation for members of only one religion would be unjust; and that we have a duty to cherish the earth and revere life instead of sitting back and waiting for some divinely sanctioned cataclysm to come and end it all.

I came to UUism in my 30s. While I spent time with various faiths between them, including Krishna Consciousness, Buddhism and Catholicism, I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist, a religiously and socially orthodox group for whom religious education is based

upon the philosophy that students at all levels of schooling possess individuality and should be educated to use their God-given capacities to become individuals of principle, qualified for any position of life. Education was to begin in the home where the basic values of redemptive discipline and mental and physical health were to be balanced with the importance of work…Adventists have embraced the philosophy that education should be redemptive in nature, for the purpose of restoring human beings to the image of God, our Creator. Mental, physical, social, and spiritual health, intellectual growth, and service to humanity form [its essential] core of values…(Adventist.org)

My memories of my childhood Christian education at what we called Saturday School reflect some of this. I remember quite distinctly the emphasis on work and thrift as well as vegetarianism (for physical health) without which I would be unfit for the Kingdom of God, although I don’t recall a redemptive nature to my schooling. It may have been there and I was too young to appreciate it, although I also recognize a strong redemptive flavor to much of my current theology that may have originated there.

I locate much of my theology of religious education in articulating what is holy. To quote Mullino Moore, who cites Orthodox tradition for her definition: “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (emphasis in the original; 217). I would modify this otherwise excellent definition to reflect my UU perspective by substituting “reality” for “God’s creation.” I am especially influenced in this latter view by Joyce Ann Mercer’s early comment distinguishing practical theology from academic exercises.

For example, practical theologians are not content with abstract proclamations that God cares for all persons as God’s children. Practical theologians ask about the meaning of God’s parentlike care for children in contexts in which particular children experience pain and suffering. They work out visions of such children experiencing and manifesting that care in their everyday lives. They combine such visions with action strategies effecting transformation. (12)

Or, as she writes more succinctly later, “The suffering of children must be acknowledged and addressed…” (244). To paraphrase Jurgen Moltmann, a theology that doesn’t take into account the suffering and pain of children—and in religious terms, we are all God’s children—has nothing to say to us.

Doing this brings into sharp relief my earlier assertion that religious education, in addition to helping people sort out and articulate what they believe, also has to give them the opportunity to determine what the beliefs and actions a moral community of which they want to be a part should include. This attempts to answer questions put by Mark Yaconelli:

What would it mean if the goal of our ministries was simply to be prayerfully present to young people—to allow them to be fully themselves? Could we trust that our presence is enough? How would we treat youth if we weren’t trying to convince them of the importance of the faith, the worthiness of Jesus, the necessity fo the church? What would happen if we sought to minister to young people through our ears, through our presence, through silent prayer and an open heart? What would such radical acceptance evoke in young people? (122)

In her pamphlet UU Religious Education and Your Child, Gaia Brown quotes Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in response to a similar question, “How can you teach without doctrine?”

“The great end of religious instruction is not to stamp our minds irresistibly upon the young but to stir up their own…to touch inward springs.” We have a strong faith in the inherent spirituality of children and see it as our task to nurture, not to indoctrinate. Our respect for the children teaches them respect—for themselves, for others, and for this fragile interdependent web of which we are all a part.

An emphasis on the concerns and experiences of students, supporting their abilities for recognizing the holy in existence, a trust in their abilities to come to sound conclusions, identifying themselves as individuals of principle and helping them to articulate to other people of faith what that means: I would argue that the result of such religious education will look and sound a lot like the experience of that graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class. “Now…I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.”


WORKS CITED
• Adventist.org. (2011.) “Seventh-Day Adventist Church: Education.” Adventist.org: The Official Site of the Seventh-Day Adventist World Church. Accessed November 30, 2011, at http://www.adventist.org/mission-and-service/education.html.
• Berling, Judith. (2004.) Understanding Other Religious Worlds: A Guide for Interreligious Education. Maryknoll, NY; Orbis Books.
• Brown, Gaia. (Undated.) UU Religious Education and Your Child: Frequently Asked Questions. Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Larsen, Tony. (1993.) Should My Child Go to Sunday School? Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Soloveichik, Meir. (2011.) “Irving Kristol, Edmund Burke, and the Rabbis: [A Review of] The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009 by Irving Kristol.” The Jewish Review of Books. Volume 2, number 2; Summer 2011. 19-21.
• Yaconelli, Mark. (2006.) Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI; Zondervan.

worship service mashup

this is a mashup I made both for a teaching presentation for my xian education class and for next monday's CPE worship service. by that time we'll have reached the midpoint in our experience (which ends mid-january). what I wanted to get across was the sense that this is tough but it's an effort we, and our future congregants, will be the better for.

teach naked

below is an essay defining my concept of religious education that I've worked on the past week. if it seems to follow a pattern, that's because it does. the idea is that we define religious--specifically xian--education in the 1st part, expand on that definition in the 2nd, and then give implications of it in the 3rd. that wasn't really very hard but it took me several days longer than it should have because of a cold that knocked me flat on my back all day tuesday, necessitating not only the length of time it took to finish the essay but also, as tuesday is a 6-hour day for me at my CPE site, requiring me to pull extra hours the rest of the week to make them up.

WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE GATHERED,
WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE DISPERSED

Part I: Based on my experience and on the books we’ve read for this class, I’d offer the following as my current definition for the way I see religious education. It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

Part II: The church, any church (or synagogue or mosque or temple or coven or any spiritual gathering, and for simplicity’s sake I’m going to mean all of these groups when I say “church”), is a community, an ecclesia in church terminology. It’s a community made up of individuals but of individuals who, unlike a geographical community or a working or public school community, choose to associate with one another. Their connections with one another are outside place or livelihood. There are some geographical considerations that might complicate that—while an individual living in the rural Midwest might have several Lutheran congregations in a 20 or 30 mile radius to choose from, including choices between which ELCA or WELS congregation to attend, whereas a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim or Jew might have only one choice, while the options might be the reverse in urban areas or on the coast—for the most part one chooses which church to attend out of consideration of the congregation more than anything else. Craig Dykstra notes

[Faith] communities have formative power in the lives of people, nurturing faith and giving shape to the quality and character of their spirits. Spirituality deepens in community, rather than in individualistic isolation. The beliefs, values, attitudes, stories, rituals, and moral practices of a faith community are the human forces most powerful in shaping a person’s spiritual journey. (83)

More than one researcher has noted that, all other elements being equal, what determines which church a person chooses to attend is his or her fellow congregants.

Once we’ve determined the ecclesia we must determine the message the ecclesia intends to spread. Dykstra writes:

The life of Christian faith is life in such intimate relationship with Jesus Christ that, as Paul says, we may live ‘in Christ” and that Christ is ‘in you’…Similarly, we are now free to live ‘according to the Spirit,’ so that ‘the Spirit of God dwells in you’…This is contrasted by Paul with life ‘according to the flesh’…The contrast is not one between life after death and our life on earth. Both life according to the Spirit and life according to the flesh are forms of present, daily, bodily, human living. But life according to the flesh is life aimed at and directed by things that have no ultimate lasting value and power. ‘Life in Christ,’ ‘life according to the Spirit,’ is life-oriented, empowered, undergirded, and sustained by the Source of life itself. (23)

Modifying Dykstra’s message, it’s in the gratitude for what is bigger than ourselves, bigger than mere individual “birth-school-work-marriage-children-death” life itself, that we find a purpose that can bind us together. For Unitarian Universalists it is in the recognition that two people together are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. For Muslims it is in the adoration of the gift of life Allah bestows on each of us. For pagans it is in the interstices of the web of life of which people are themselves only one part.

This is being in community that acknowledges all of what one is rather than simply a part of what one is. It is looking for a community of challenge over a community of comfort. As Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, “Truth-telling is not easy to hear, and it demands a response, whether by individual action or social policy.” Her example of one such hard-to-hear truth-telling comes from historian Vine Deloria, Jr., who charges in “Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America” that his addressees have “forced ‘opinions, myths, and superstitions on us…You have never chosen to know us. You have only come to us to confront and conquer us.’” Mullino Moore further notes that this “echoes the cries of South Africa and elsewhere, where generations of people have been denied basic human rights” (all quotes, 82).
Religious education should prepare people in the ecclesia to hear such questions, whether from Native Americans, the descendants of African slaves, undocumented workers and their children, the homeless and underemployed, and any of dozens of potential other aggrieved groups. It may not prepare them to answer those questions—it may be that the best answer is that they don’t have an answer—but it must give them the basics of what the aggrieved parties are referring to and that they have a right to be sore. It is in recognizing the legitimacy of these questions that religious education helps prepare citizens for the world of justice and equality they are trying to bring about.

How do we determine what is holy? And once we’ve determined what it is, how do we talk about it? It’s generally assumed that holiness differs according to the beliefs of individual faiths and to some extent that’s true. But while some of the particulars might differ—an icon is venerated by an Eastern Orthodox Church member while it is unconscionable to a conservative Muslim—the point is to find an agreed-upon perspective for all the members of the faith community without lapsing into lowest-common-denominatorness. Mullino Moore cites Orthodox tradition for her determination of what holy is (emphasis in the original): “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (217). My only modification to this otherwise excellent definition would be a change from “God’s creation” to “reality.”

Religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to be prepared for: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

Finally, it’s in putting together these elements that religious education teaches learners what it is that their communities of justice and equality ought to look like and how they ought to behave. Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed provides an excellent and realistic example of the way these elements can be melded and the use to which that melding can be put. It is, he writes,

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

Part III: We can never be certain how our best intentions are going to be received—rather than flowers in the streets we may be greeted with looting and an endless war—and there’s no certainty that religious education delivered in this way will have the results we want. But there’s something to be said for trying and here are my hoped-for implications for this type of religious education.

Teaching religion this way, focusing on the ways, for instance, displaced people are treated by society and religion in order to provide context to understand the complaints of the aggrieved and, hopefully, a way to change it, can lead to greater participation by oppressed people in that church. Churches, especially in the US, have a long history of complicity in the way minority peoples have been treated as subjects rather than as persons by the majority. Being a place where such a history is addressed opens the church, and thus people, to healing. “People do not come to church in a vacuum; they come out of the totality of their lives. They bring the forces and experiences and needs of those lives to church” (Crain 1997, in Seymour, 101). When visitors feel addressed by church, that the church has something at stake regarding them, they become congregants.

The question of what’s holy is, for many churches, a matter of tradition rather than a matter of experience. We venerate the Bible not because of what it says to us but because our ancestors did. We venerate God in prayer not because of what God does in our lives but because we have been taught to punctuate services that way. Locating holiness in the everyday experiences of people lends those experiences not only familiarity but a sense of purpose outside routine. As Elizabeth Caldwell writes, in Christian terms, “Religious education seeks primarily to educate Christians for faithful living, for finding a balance between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the ordinary, between the sacraments in liturgy and the ways we live in response to our baptisms as we move out from the table where Jesus Christ is the host” (in Seymour, 80). Her example points up the benefit to be realized when the link between a duty and a sacrament (for instance) is bridged: “[learners] frame their lives in terms of a new way of seeing, hearing, sensing, being, and finally doing…” (80).

Ultimately, what may happen may be the actual discovery by adult and child learners that the world of justice and equality may actually be within their grasp, that it may be something they can actually bring about. Jack Seymour and Donald Miller articulate this hope:

While the problems of the world we address are complex and immense, we must address them through coalitions of people who are often very different from ourselves… Education empowers us to move from conversation to faithful living…[Religious] education fosters a movement theologically informed by the witnesses from the past to address the crucial personal and social issues of our day with faithful current analysis and a vision that is informed by the long-term history of God emerging in a people. [Religious] education provides open spaces to practice God’s presence and to share our lives and vulnerabilities in hospitality and love. (in Seymour, 120)

There is, of course, no guarantee that defining religious education in this way, as a means by which a church teaches its adult and child members how to make a world that’s more reflective of the just and equal world they want to be citizens of through determining the content of their communities, locating the holiness in those communities, and deciding on the appropriate behaviors and morals of its members, will lead to heaven on earth. But it’s certainly worth the attempt.





BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Caldwell, Elizabeth. (1997.) “Religious Instruction: Homemaking.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Crain, Margaret Ann. (1997.) “Listening to Churches: Christian Education in Congregational Life.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Seymour, Jack and Donald Miller. (1997.) “Agenda for the Future.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.