Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure: A review

For a long time I've been drawn to Jewish spirituality in relation to hasidic attitudes to celebration and pleasure. As a probable background to Jesus' own spirituality it has been something that has helped me to weigh up inherited European Christian attitudes to bodiliness and to appreciate the good-givenness of the material creation. And in writing those things, I partly illustrate part of the point of this book -that Christian cultural history versus Jewish cultural history- has tended to be suspicious of pleasure and this has led to a set of cultural postures -historically speaking- that have been less that celebratory about bodily pleasure and have tended to inculcate a default guilt posture about them: -'if it feels good it must be wrong' sort of thing.
It's not my upbringing but I recognise it in others -especially in many on the fringes of Christian faith. Interestingly most active Christians I know don't tend to take this view. It seems it's a perspective that lingers in cultural christianity and perhaps helps keep some at least from more active discipleship: the fear of living in constant intensified guilt. That's why it's an important thing to look at, in my view.
As for me, I have for as long as I recall knowing something about Jewish (hasidic-related) spirituality been drawn to its appreciative approach to life's positives and even some of the less 'seemly' things; having a specific blessing for going to the loo seems a good thing to me.
I have to confess I'm still working through this book -one downside is the e-book version type seems to be dark grey and unfortunately my device doesn't change it to white or paler when it is on night-time mode. As night time is when I get most of my book reading done at present, this has delayed my review -but I decided a review of part is better than none at all!
So far I have found really helpful the historical background accounts of Judaism in the first centuries of CE and of Christianity in the same period. This really helps not only see the trajectory of the thesis but provides helpful background to the NT itself and intriguing lines of enquiry in my own mind about the relationship between the two contemporary forms of religion we call Christianity and Judaism -but are arguably very close siblings -and neither are like what was Judaism until the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. Our situation is not the same one as faced by James, Stephen, Saul/Paul.
That said, I am concerned at this point in my reading that the author is downplaying the significance of the church's struggle with gnosticism in that it forced early church theologians to recognise the 'Jewish' appreciation of matter and the goodness of creation. So it seems to me that perhaps the real question is how, despite its best insights in that respect, much Christian popular piety was captured by gnostic disparagement of 'flesh' for so long. Perhaps as I read on there will be more insights on that. It does seem that cultural capture aided by the growing antagonism between official Judaism and official Christianity (which to our shame provided a bed rock for anti-semitism) may have misled us quite seriously.
From what I know/suppose of early twentienth century western Christianity, it is at least plausible that the thesis of this book in relation to the entertainment industries has at least a germ of truth to it.

Link-Love for this Review

Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure on Amazon
Robert Cherry at Brooklyn College

Tag for this book:   #JewishAndChristianViewsOnBodilyPleasure

A belief in meritocracy makes us selfish

It has seemed obvious to me for a very long time that the Bill Gates, Richard Bransons and Elon Musks of this world are not the exceptional geniuses they are sometimes painted to be but individuals who have had the luck to be in the right place and the right time for the talents and perspectives that they had to prosper. The corollary of this is that there are dozen, in fact probably thousands or even millions of people with a similar level of skill and insight and ability to all of those who 'make it' in whatever field who have simply not had the background or the opportunities (often delivered by sheer fluke) to make the money or come to the prominence that the lionised have. I seems my observation and reflection may be being borne out.

Furthermore, the idea that nurtures this belief in the exceptional deservingness of these men (as it nearly always is) is actually bad for us as societies for ...

...a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

Which suggests that we should be spreading the awareness of 'success' as a product most prominently of the vicissitudes of life, biases in the social system and favourable accumulation of good fortune. We need to help people at large to realise that there are many of us who could do just as well if we had been in the right place at the right time.

Now, that can sound a bit like 'the politics of envy' -and it could of course fuel such a thing. However, I'm not sure that some of that is not called for. But we could develop an attitude of "Well ,good for you, lucky you: but don't go around thinking you are so much better than others; be aware of your good fortune and be humble, recognise that so many others are just as deserving but without the breaks you have had and act accordingly".

It might also make us less squeamish about recognising that the monetary accumulations that come with many versions of 'success' are also products of good fortune and the tendencies for 'more to become more' as illustrated in the game of monopoly -in other words the accumulative nature of what in economics is called rent.



A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Aeon Ideas:

Faith-loss -a few questions and observations.

The book which publishes the research underlying this article is now on my 'to read' list. Part of my interest is from having been vicar at a church where I was told, when I was interviewed for the post, that the church had a big front door but a large back door too (ie it was good at welcoming people to the church but also had a good few leaving). Since then I've been interested in the issues that flow from that.

One of the things that the article does is give an overview of some of the 'risk factors':

 people who lose their faith tend to have certain personality traits, and underlying beliefs and values (the ingredients). These include having an above-average intelligence, and low tolerance for submitting to authority and for right-wing political ideas; valuing self-determination and being in control; and being open to experience.

As I read that I realised that I'm in the risk category on every count. So I wonder, then, what keeps me, and others like me, in Christian faith and whether there is something to be learned from that.

In fact, it leads me to ask whether there are a lot of people in this hanging on in there sort of category and what our collective experience might tell us. My suspicion is that it tells us something about Christian formation in the long-haul and the way that churches need to collaborate in long-term discipleship.
This goes to one of the other things the article mentions as a probably pathway to faithloss: "when parents or churches mistakenly equate their unique take on Christianity with the essentials of Christianity itself"
I could characterise that as 'our way or the highway' -and certainly I do come across people for whom that seems to have been the way out. The sadness is knowing that there are expressions of faith and church 'out there' that would have been able to support and hold that person but they had been demonised and that route for faith development had been closed off psychologically. That's why I'm interested in the way that we can collaborate across different expressions of church to make it possible for people to be 'blessed out' of one expression of Christian faith into another. Of course this requires a certain degree of maturity and restraint -but it has happened and does still in various parts of the church universal. Evangelicals will collaborate even while disagreeing vehemently about some things. They will put evangelism and 'by all means win some' as a higher priority and in doing so recognise that a common basis of faith is enough even if it doesn't clear up well-founded disagreements; there's a recognition of bona fides. More recent Anglican conservative Evangelical and Anglican Catholic collaborations have demonstrated something similar. So it is possible if the stakes are understood and high enough.

I do have another question about this, though. I generally take a perspective that everyone has faith: we all, as humans, seek meaning, live by values and have beliefs about how and why such things do or don't reflect reality. It's not radical -the declarations of human rights recognise that atheism is a form of belief, for example, and so cannot be used to deny someone their human rights and is protected in terms of its manifestation.

From this perspective, it's not that people lose their faith, it's that they change it. And I wonder whether that's a more fruitful way to think about the matter. In fact towards the end of the piece we almost get to that:

Marriott reports that “the vast majority of deconverts” whom he has interviewed “felt that a weight had been lifted off them and that they were now free”. They spoke of being “set free” and “liberated” — language that is usually associated with conversion stories, not their reverse.

Which story I have also heard from people shifting from, say, narrow fundamentalism to a more liberal or sacramental version of Christian faith. Or in some cases from a 'tired' or stultifying sort of church life to something with more vibrancy which felt confident about having something worthwhile to share. The difficulty is that some versions of Christian faith make it seems that their way is all-or-nothing or that it is better to drop out altogether than go over to the within-faith enemy. That's what we need to get past and perhaps help churches to recognise other churches in such a way as to bless people on the next stage of their journey with another kind of church polity or style. At different stages in our Christian development we may find in helpful to have a different approach in various ways, and to embrace that positively rather than to discourage it and risk losing some altogether might be a better way forward. In the past in this country that has happened through church splits and churn. Maybe now it's time to be more intentional. Also, it might help address this:

maybe some values and assumptions and expectations that this person holds that are a result of living in a 21st-century, modern world that aren’t necessarily indicative of just some sort of pure rationality. They are also part of a construct. . . And maybe they should ask themselves some questions about some of their underlying assumptions and some of the values that they think are very important

In other words there are elements of faith in whatever approach to life we adopt, it's the plausibility that is at issue. But if we conceive of it not so much as losing faith as changing faith, we may begin to have better conceptual tools to respond -as the article indicates that the book gives us.


What causes people to lose their faith?: