Victims of metaphor: serious crimes and stepping into creativity

the eight Buffalo schoolgirls “were victims, though no one realized it at the time, not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor.”

You might reasonably ask how that could be.Well it is to do with how the police investigating framed their task and how that framing was summed up in metaphor (or is that vice versa?) In this case the police didn't put certain information into the public domain that could have pceweted further rapes because they saw their task as catching the bad guy rather than saving girls from violation.

And this article on dehumanisation in generating violence seems to show a similar process at work: reframing using metaphors* to categorise and 'prime' responses.

The articles referenced here report some research into how metaphoric framing affects reasoning ability in relation to crime.The article links this to the way that science is reported (because in actual fact, popularising science relies on metaphor and simile) but the same could be said of practical theology.

This insight tells us how important it can be that we reflect on the way that we are perceiving and thinking about things. We can be trapped in our own approaches and limited perceptions. By questioning them and consciously seeking to look at them differently or to supplement them using other images, models or metaphors we can create new possibilities, new futures, more resilient solutions more creative responses. In theological reflection the exploration/analysis should be a point of recognition of the metaphors, models or images that we currently use and to become aware that they may be limited and pull in new-to-us ways to view whatever it is. In the reflection stage we consciously try to bring to bear the riches of biblical imagery or incidents which can in turn open up not only different ways to think about whatever it is but also give us the possibility of perceiving and connecting with the ways of God in it.


*Though David Livingstone Smith claims that 'untermenschen' is not a metaphor but literal. I'm not so sure that works not when the term is linked as it was to terms like "vermin" or "disease" applied to people. It seems to me that untermenschen in that case is merely a catch-all term for a cluster of metaphors aimed at reframing a certain group in terms that made an implicit case for their enslavement and eventual elimination.

Cleanliness is next to modliness

There's something about this article that resonates with me. Now I like things to be clean, but we have to be aware that our guts are full of bacteria and that we live in a mutually beneficial relationship with them most of the time. We provide them with food and shelter, they help us digest stuff we'd have no chance of getting into our metabolism otherwise.

If your home is full of invisible bacteria that will kill your children at any second, you may need all these chemicals to stop this dreadful contamination. Yet there are those who now think that hyper-clean environments may reduce immune system capability. Where we do seriously need to worry about hygiene is in hospitals, not most homes. Still, there is a huge amount of money to be made from scaremongering.

It is possible for sterile to be just that: sterile -inimical to life. We need a certain amount of 'dirt': and this article gets us to think about the culturally conditioned concepts 'dirt', 'clean' and how they serve to mark insider and outsider. Perhaps what we need to consider is symbolically how the dirt we despise is so often what gives us life. Literally: soil is dirt. If it's sterile it's bad news for food...

Paradoxes of the good life

When I write 'good life' I mean something like a life lived in wisdom and virtue showing something of 'shalom'. In the article the following quote comes from the issue is 'happiness' but the philosophy is almost epicurean in the true sense of finding a middle way (sounds almost Buddhist too) that leads to contentment. I think that there is much in that vision that a Christian can affirm. And in fact the quote I'm about to reproduce seems to sum up things I keep rubbing up against in spiritual direction: mine and others'.

1. Accept myself, but expect more of myself. ...
2. Take myself less seriously—and take myself more seriously.
3. Push myself to use my time efficiently, yet also make time to play, to wander, to read at whim, to fail.

There are some others worth considering too.

Dialogue with Humanists?

For Evangelical Christians, as for the Roman Catholics in this article, it is a live issue as to why one would want to be involved in interfaith dialogue. Now a word before you read the quote following and think "hang on; that's not about interfaith dialogue; humanists aren't a faith". Well, I'd point out that the issues are the same and that we sholudn't get hung up on labels. However, there is a case to group together humanists with people who follow Christ, Mohammed/Qur'an, Buddha etc. One of those figures was, apparently, agnostic on the God question which would cohere with the humanist position -at least some versions of it. And if a faith is a belief system that provides perspectives and values for living, then humanism certainly fits with that. In addition consider that the European legislation on religious discrimination etc; usually gets worked out in terms of religions and 'life philosophies'. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that humanism should, in a number of public fora, be grouped with religious and spiritual bodies and movements.

This quote starts from the difficulty that often people who engage in dialogical events can't 'bind' their constituencies to anything they may themselves agree or change their minds about. To do so would be tantamount to saying that a conversion of one agent in such and event would be a conversion of all. Clearly that cannot be: individual conscience still is paramount. So ...

‘If you are not representing anybody, you already know what the other side is going to say, and you’re probably not going to change their minds, why bother?’ He then answered that question by appealing to the importance of ‘civility’. Civility ‘is not about agreement, or even negotiation,’ says Sims. ‘It is about how we can disagree in such a way that we retain the respect of those we disagree with, and build the possibility of common cause on issues beyond our disagreements.’

 What I like about that is the recognition that there is a value in 'civility' based on conviviality, if you like. In a society where there are a number of different views on all sorts of things progress can only be made by agreement, common-cause and/or 'co-belligerancy'. We need to be in the business of creating the conditions for alliances to be made and for disagreements to be worked out with respect and charity. These are matters, in Christian terms, it seems to me, of straightforwardly working out loving ones neighbour. In addition, if we believe that God's mission involves justice, peace and peacemaking, then we cannot avoid effort towards creating the conditions for those things and that means dialogue with others who do not see things as we do.

And in actual fact, if we are broadly right about certain important facets of reality as we think we are, then we are only going to help others to wrestle with that claim and those realities if we prepared to dialogue genuinely. This will mean that we will be changed. But I would argue that this is analogous to the 'change' involved in Incarnation and seen in Jesus' response to the Syro-Phoenician woman. Change doesn't mean necessarily 'apostasy' but could mean a fuller entry into the world of another so that our perspective becomes clearer in other terms than those we started with. This, theologically, in term, may be related to some of the debate about God's impassibility ... but perhaps that would be a longer post than I have time to compose right now. Suffice to say for now Thomas Weinandy and Does God Suffer?

Praying 'vertically' and 'laterally'

I've been meaning to flag this up and mention a few things about it for a couple of weeks now. The interest for me is in the fact that it is dealing with something I've been writing on and off for a handful of years now. The working title is 'Unholy Praying' and the aim is to write up, give rationale for and reflect a bit on a series of group prayer experiments in prayerful conversation which doesn't go all holy on us. It comes out of noting that we talk the talk of taking our 'religion' into the secular, but actually just end up creating mini bits of 'sacred' within the secular rather than truly bringing the two together; and our praying together -'just talking to God'- is no exception: we have a whole set of unwritten rules (which may vary from group to group) -a set of conversational pragmatics, if you will- which have to be learnt and which would mark out a bunch of prayists in a secular setting as doing something a bit wierd.

So I'm right with Kester in asking further questions about what is actually going on, beyond our theo-ideological justifications for 'group prayer' and its typical formats and conventions. One thing he notes: "praying aloud in a group functions to give permission to words that would otherwise be too difficult or awkward to say directly." The thing is that it is talking to God that is deliberately overheard. This actually drives some of the conversational pragmatics (like not interrupting) - actually this is analogous to what I and fellow dog owners do when we talk to our dogs while walking them in the vicinity of others: we say stuff to our dogs that acts as interpretive comment for overhearing dog-walkers and passers-by. (Dog - God; not a deliberate palindrome thing going on there, but, well, perhaps the old subconcious is up to tricks there). But it's okay; we do it all over the place, we are skilled at taking note of our 'audience' actual and ostensibly-addressed and talking to both. Perhaps it's not surprising we do this with God stuff too.

If you want to follow this angle up check out the sub-discipline of linguistics known as pragmatics. It's one of the things I've been brushing up on in odd moments as part of thinking about this UnHoly Praying thing.

What I want to ask, though, is how we can just involve God in conversation and what the obvious physical difficulties with that (God's lack of somatic presence and accompanying vocal tract being the most notable) actually mean for potential practice of a truly 'unreligious' way of prayer. Some of the issue lies with the 'fictive' attribution of presence and how we handle that. By "fictive attribution of presence", I mean the way that we sometimes treat God as if They was* a finite presence: so we suddenly 'agree' God is there and listening and so repeat to Them everything we've just discussed as if They wasn't in the room until just then. (Of course, we're also doing things, quite often, like affirming the concerns of the others and strengthening social bonds). Or we 'locate' God in the sanctuary and bow ... Can we manage to pray together without indulging in these fictive strategies? Should we? Or should we recognise more readily that God is also beyond personhood and learn to do more 'mystical' prayer together?

Referring to: Kester Brewin � “Lord I just…” | Do you believe in Prayer? | Speaking into the unknown
*Just experimenting with pronouns for God. Taking a leaf out of the Hebrew Bible where the word for God -Elohim- is plural in form but singular in the verb forms it takes. I reckoned that a triune God might be worth mixing the forms for, especially as English for about 5 centuries has used 'they' to refer to unspecified or unknown antecedents ("That person ... whoever they are ...") so I'm just experimenting to see if extending the range a bit could begin to sound sort of alright once we got used to it.

The books everyone must read

More based on what people actually read rather than what they are told they should read. Interestingly, I'd say I'd read more of these than the 'canonical' works...

Information is Beautiful on the books everyone must read | Books | guardian.co.uk

Pain, guilt, punishment -some research

The research seems to show that people who feel guilty are likely to both subject themselves to pain more readily and also to feel that pain helps with the guilt. It's the interpretation then that becomes interesting. How far is this cultural and how far somatic. Of course the two are inextricable, but where does the balance lie of factors? Well,

"According to the scientists, although we think of pain as purely physical in nature, in fact we imbue the unpleasant sensation with meaning. Humans have been socialized over ages to think of pain in terms of justice. We equate it with punishment, and as the experimental results suggest, the experience has the psychological effect of rebalancing the scales of justice -- and therefore resolving guilt" Cleansing the soul by hurting the flesh: The guilt-reducing effect of pain

I'm not entirely sure on this hypothesis: I'm willing to believe it but I can't help a niggly feeling that it's offering too much to culture. To be sure we are inveterately meaning-making creatures and therein lies our inescapable culture-making. But I'm wondering whether the pain-punishment-guilt linkage may not be more deeply rooted that this hypothesis seems to give credit for. I'm thinking that the impetus for punishment seems to be more connected to a more instinctual anger/frustration which when turned on to others is often expressed with 'violence'. When turned on the subject results in guilt (ira incurvata in se?), but since this is a form of anger>violence, the pain in the study serves as a release. So this would be a more somatic genesis.

Interested to hear further thoughts. Clearly this has potential implications for issues of forgiveness and atonement (which is actually where my interest comes from at the moment).