Sacramental Politics: Religious Worship as Political Action

This is a book that reads like a PhD thesis which has been slightly redacted for more public consumption. As such, it is not a book that many will find easy going: it has a lot of detail; it is extensively end-noted; there is a good amount of presentation of texts and commentary on them. The texts, in this case, are mostly transcripts or the written basis of spoken prayers or of speeches.

I was disappointed that the pdf copy I have had not been properly prepped for reading in this way: the footnotes were not hyperlinked between the main text and the footnote. I hope that this might be fixed in any other e-versions that might be released.

I have to say that one of the effects on me of reading this book was that I became more deeply concerned and at times scared by what I was reading. That may sound a bit dramatic and it would do so particularly to many readers who might be from the USA. And there is a degree of irony in that since we are considering a nation in which the separation of Church and state is highly valued constitutionally enshrined. And yet, this book seems to show that this separation seems to be less in some respects than in Britain where we have, in theory, an established church. My fear at reading the research in this book is for the way that USAmerican influence might be prodded and pushed along by a form of religion which is not good for the global community (let alone for its host nation).

The form of religion which I saw as I read the research presented in this book is one in which the global dominance of the USA is pretty much equated with the will of God. It reminded me so much of how Victorian England seems to have viewed itself (and now we are beginning to understand the history better we can see more readily how much Godly values were betrayed by that empire). I don't think I'd truly grasped the depth of popular USAmerican exceptionalism until I read the way that public prayers in The USA assume and promote that the Kingdom of God is pretty much co-terminous with USAmerican interests. Of course, there is, for many on the political right there, a contradiction -given the vehemence with which liberal values are attacked as ungodly- when a Democratic regime is in power. This contradiction, is in practice resorved by the fact that in foreign policy terms, a Democratic regime is scarcely any different. Just as in the British Empire, it seemed to make little difference whether Whigs or Tories were running the government: military power continued to be used worldwide to asset-strip and terrorise colonies and trading 'partners'.

This poisonous mix of religion (and not just formally Christian, either) and chauvinism is seen expressed and assumed in prayers and rhetoric. And for the rest of us it is deeply scary and gives no real sense of benevolence to the rest of the world; so we have to live with edgy appeasement or fearful opposition. here is Empire and the Constantinian settlement is alive and well. The problem is, we are the barbarians in this way of looking at the world.

There is some let up from the mostly disturbing and grim picture revealed. Some of the confluence of prayer and politics shows those with concern for the marginalised, poor and for respite from violence and militarism enacting their prayers also into public space. But, of course, that happens to fit my own understanding of Godly values. I keep hearing in my mind's ear one of Cromwell's better insights expressed thus: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, to think that you could be wrong". This exposes the biggest problem of all in so much of what the research shows up: the lack of humility to consider that we may have insights and something of the mind of Christ to learn from those we consider or have presented to us as 'enemies'.

I kept longing for the prayers to show some recognition that the prayists might have misunderstood God's will or that some insight into God's purposes might be gleaned from people who take a different view and therefore to pursue some kind of consensus building approaches. Instead so many of the prayers were, in effect, a presentation before God of the dialogue of the close-minded.

Of course, God is not the only audience and on page 46 (electronically. p.35 otherwise) a helpful reminder is given:

"all public prayer contains an important difference from that of private prayer: the addition of a public audience. Even in the case of someone praying/speaking in tongues (that is, speaking in sounds not understandable by the speaker or even other people present), such rhetoric cannot be considered as only for the divine"

I think that this is an important thing to remember and is a matter I am currently reflecting on as I write Hacking the Prayer Meeting (if that's what it ends up being called): noting that we have to pay attention to the social effects and reception of acts of praying within and beyond a prayer meeting. Sacramental Politics is doing us a service by reminding us that such a reception has, necessarily, political effects and even Political heft.

Quibbles

On p.21, we're informed: 'For faithful Catholics, transubstantiation does not occur gradually or as a process; rather, it occurs instantaneously when the priest utters the “Words of Initiation.”' Of course, there's a typo there or a lapse of the keyboard: these are the words of "Institution".

Then, next sentence, we're also told 'The priest speaks into existencethe transformation by saying “this is my body” (for the bread) and “this is ...my blood” for the wine. Without these words spoken, transubstantiation does not occur.' There are two problems with this, and I have chatted with Roman Catholic priests who confirm the points I'm about to make. First, we should be aware that transubstantiation isn't a dogma in the RC doctrinal framework, merely one way to express and defend the assertion of the Real Presence. The other point is that in official RC theology, the words of institution do not constitute transubstantiation or make the Presence of Christ real. The reason for this is that there is an eastern rite church in communion with the Bishop of Rome which has a Eucharistic prayer in which there is no narrative or words of institution. This church's prayer is considered to be Catholic by the Roman Church. But this really is only a quibble in this context, since the main point is unaffected by it.


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I should point out that I received an electronic copy of this book via Speakeasy in return for agreeing to post a review within 30 days. The review need not be favourable.

Sacramental Politics: Religious Worship as Political Action (Frontiers in Political Communication): Amazon.co.uk: Brian Kaylor: 9781433126154: Books

Spokesbeing for the beast: Ayn Rand

Over the last year or so, I've become aware that Ayn Rand is an influential figure for many on the USAmerican right. This is well-worrying. It seems to me that her world-view is obnoxious and antichrist. I rarely go as far as that but this woman's ideas fill me with loathing. So I feel it is important to amass helpful evaluations of her ideas, for, as the author of the referred article, Alan Wolfe, says: "Should the Republicans actually win in 2012, we might need to study her in the academic world. It would be for the same reason we sometimes need to study creationism."

 and this blog may well collect some as I find them. So here's our starter for ten:
The Ridiculous Rise of Ayn Rand - The Conversation - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The writer sets out his stall:

I will be teaching a course next semester called “Liberalism and Conservatism.” John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke will be on the reading list. So will libertarians such as Friedrich von Hayek and the founder of the National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. Contemporary liberals such as E.J. Dionne will be there. But not Rand. My reasons for excluding her may be the same reasons that other academics ignore her.

We will need to understand why she can be so un-rated academically and yet so popular and influential among the new right.
If you're not familiar with her, here's the brief summary of her core themes:

Rand’s “thought,” such as it is, boils down to two propositions. One is that selfishness is the highest of moral virtues. The other is that the masses, above all resentful of success, are parasites living off the hard work of capitalists far superior to them in every way.

So immediately, I guess, part of the appeal becomes apparent: it emboldens and offers undeserved succour to the 1% and their stooges. The irony being that Rand reverses the truth of the matter by making out that "self-made" capitalists are the hosts and the rest the parasites. (I'm not actually saying all capitalists are parasites, incidentally, just that believing the myth of 'self-made' wo/wan puts one in 'creedal' terms in the position of failing to recognise their interconnectedness and debts to 'society' which could actually turn them parasitical).

Professor Wolfe puts his finger on an important critique of Rand's thesis:

while we continue to discuss mass media and mass culture, we have also learned, as Mills tried to teach us, that elites have flaws of their own. A theory of society that attributes virtues to one group and vices to another cannot pass the realism test: Rand’s “inverted” Marxism, as Chait calls it, is as myopic as its opposite.

In other words, her basic idea is not nuanced, and is observationally inadequate to the data. In discussions (can there be such?) with her fans, this is probably a major point to keep in mind.

The wonderful Journal of Oz; academic publishing rackets

When you put it like this:

Maybe the solution is for faculty to work with their universities to find ways to support a scholarly society without the condition being the restriction of research availability. There is enough money in the system to be creative about this, but not so long as our scholarly societies are extracting it from our libraries and giving it to for profit publishers

It seems obvious that somehow some publishers have managed to capture a goldmine and managed the hegemonic trick of persuading people that this is the natural state of affairs, as it was in the beginning, is now and evermore shall be.

Disintemediation is the logic once the hegemony has been revealed: the publishers really are the telephone sanitisers of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. They offer no real service that could not be done just as well by the collective that is the scholars themselves. Peer-reviewed blogs make as much sense. Crowd sourcing the crit might even do so; the reputation of reviewers would become the imprimatur. The title of the publication is an alibi.

In effect, peer review is the imprimatur, already, all on its own: the fact is just hidden behind the curtain of the wonderful Journal of Oz. What you've got is a bunch of people who already know something about the matter in hand and so can offer a credible opinion on the worthwhileness of the ideas and research. All you need to do is bring that together. A journal isn't necessary for that; it is merely a shorthand, a proxy for the expertise and reputations of the scholars concerned. It's a shorthand produced by the economics of paper publishing in the past and is now sponging off the reputation and historical legacy.

The sleight of hand is the psycho-historical fact that probably most of these scholars at some point have measured their self-worth as scholars by being invited to be part of the journal's vetting and barring procedures. They feel a debt of gratitude to what they think has 'made' them. And then they have 'forgotten' that they themselves -over time- are actually what props up the rep of the journal.
The journal really is otiose.
It has merely managed to inveigle it's way into the charmed cycle by virtue of controlling a disposable part of the publishing process (which too few have noticed is disposable, or are scared to notice).
The emperor has no clothes. However the lad has been paid to keep schtumm.

All it needs is a bunch of scholars with a good bunch of rep to set up a collective and to publish electronically with whatever copyright license they see fit (I would assume some kind of Creative Commons would be appropriate) and Robert is ones niece's father.

Disintermediation would be complete.
Apologies to those put out of work in publishing paper copies, but most of them could presumably find other jobs in academic or publishing or curating posts enabled by the funding freed up from university libraries not having to pay huge fees to unnecessary journals.
I shed no tears for the fat cat owners who've been riding this gravy train: I assume their offshore accounts should tide them over.

Not that kind of “living in the past”… | Savage Minds:

The intelligence of the senses

Ever since, 26 years ago I was told I couldn't submit a report on a placement at a radio station in the form of a radio programme, I have felt that there are times and topics where we need to be able to let academic discourse out a bit. It sometimes needs to get a life. Instead of reduce everything the the one dimension of written discourse: "Academia often excludes non-linguistic media such as film, photography, or sound on the grounds that they are not recognized academic formats in and of themselves; they do not adhere to strict rules of grammar nor do they necessarily employ the approved tools of study that yield accountable data, such as surveys of customs and kinship systems. But as the significance of embodied knowledge and lived experience increases in the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences, perhaps the academic world can make a little more room for media that best represent this data, encouraging alternative methods of communication to join language with equal credibility."

Of course, all is not bleak; the arts (as in performance, plastic and visual) have been 'doing academic' for a long time. But perhaps it is time to learn from them. I think that there are areas of practical theology which could probably usefully engage with this. And I note that one of the possibilities I wrote into the Engaging Culture course was that the assessment could be done in the form of some other cultural artefact than the essay...

The McGill Daily � The intelligence of the senses

Blogging, formation and theological writing

I'm quite interested in how blogging becomes part of the way we write, reflect and grow. I'm also interested when I get a mention in someone's posting! Here's a note with a bit of both: "I could never have recreated this dynamic record of my thoughts and other people's responses to them with a conventional diary. Let's just hope our academic institutions are up to speed with the way that their students do their theology these days, Andii Bowsher's blogs are perhaps indicative that they certainly are." see at Re-vis.e Re-form: Blogging as formation.
I think that I'm one of only a few regularly blogging academics in UK theological colleges -so perhaps Rachel is being a bit optimistic (?) to see me as an indicator that academics are blogging in theology; some do, most don't. I'd have to say that for me it is a kind of reflection/research tool. There are blogs I use to collect things that I may later use in writing, I make brief comments on whatever it is to help me later on orientate whatever it is to the main area of thinking. Then there is blogging I do more widely where it may not be directly theological (ie work) oriented but related to my wider interests (though even here I note that nothing truly escapes theological interest completely) and even amusement; this is about feeding my curiosity and thinking out loud. I think the latter is related to being an 'E' in Myers-Briggs terms; ie I tend to find that I discover my own thinking/ideas by externalising it or them.

I think that the other reason I blog is to keep me writing. However, it is this that I have to consider: does it get in the way of more 'serious' writing? That is to say, the kind of writing that 'counts' in RAE, for example and goes down on CVs as 'publication'. And perhaps in that we name one big reason that perhaps more academics don't blog. For me it's a shift of paradigm which may, or may not, take hold. In the inherited academic paradigm 'worthy' writing is recognised as such by passing through the filters of peer-review in 'recognised' journals. In the possibly-emerging way-of-things, worthiness is recognised by hits, citations and commendations. The good stuff snowballs into something with lots of links and comment.

However, I have to say that all is not as simple and rosy as that schema might make it. In both worlds there are the vagueries of 'reputation' and some good stuff is missed because either the author is not known, not known by the 'right' people, is diffident about putting themselves forward, mistimes their contribution so it cannot be 'heard' for the noise or in the unpreparedness of the audience or simply it is in the wrong place to catch the attention of a wider audience perhaps because it's a blog hosted by the 'wrong' company because the fashion is for certain kinds of writing to use particular platforms.

So you see, in both worlds/paradigms, there are gatekeepers. In one formally appointed (and prey to the dangers of being self-perpetuating hierarchies and group-think), in the other informally grown but not less prey to distortions. The ideological justification for the blogging model is the Wisdom of Crowds. The reality is that the conditions for the 'wisdom'is don't always exist and we have an informal reproduction of the same-old-same-old. It remains to be seen whether web3.0 with its more semantically-aware algorithms and bots might help to change that, or whether such changes will act to reinforce the brakes on crowd-wisdom emerging.

 

The art of citation

Thanks to Ben Myers, an interesting little post on citation: Faith and Theology: The art of citation: "‘citations in my work are like armed thieves who emerge suddenly and rob leisurely strollers of their convictions.’ He thus uses citations strategically; they are part of the guerilla warfare he wages against the preconceived notions of his reader…. To cite without quotation marks is to offer the idea without the imprimatur of an author or authority. This requires of the idea that it stand or fall on its own merits and not find automatic support from its lineage."
This has got me thinking for a couple of reasons, one is discussions over the last two years with our external markers about, inter alia, the way that students use quotes sometimes to 'hide behind' and so we don't hear their own evaluations and voice in the text, the other is that I'm trying to do some writing and discovering that I'm writing a lot on some topics from the heart with the result that by comparison with stuff I mark and read, it can seem light on citation. Both of these things along with this little reflection are emboldening me to just write and perhaps look at citing later and in a subdued sort of way.
But still thinking (and that's without going onto the practically fraught question of what citation method we should go for at college as standarad!).

Flat World Knowledge

Not here yet: Flat World Knowledge LLC: "Site is info only. We're coming January 2009!
Join our list for updates (email address)." but it promises to bring online textbooks as e-texts. I've signed up to be informed when the project goes live.