Listening to critics: a surprising pluralism

I have always believed that it’s good to listen to critics, to give them a fair hearing. The reason is that they just might be onto something. Since I’m already convinced—and my wife confirms—that I fail to get everything right, a critic might spot something I should change, or rethink, or redo, or apologize for. Now, I don’t like the process involved, and usually feel rather annoyed when they get some criticism of me correct. Even if they in the process remind me how annoying other people can be. Sorry, I mean even if also they remind me how easily I can be annoyed.

Anyway. I believe the same thing about my faith. The best test, it seems to me, is not whether I feel confident in what I believe, but whether I can face the best challenges of the most thoughtful unbelievers and not only believe but with sufficiently good reasons.

Sometimes I am surprised by the challenges or questions issued by the critics of my faith. They hold a position I have not fully appreciated, or are bothered by something I had not considered all that important. Listening to the critics of the faith, in other words, has benefits.

I wish I could recommend A Muslim View of Christianity to everyone, but it is a scholarly book, produced by an Islamic academic for fellow scholars who are engaged in Muslim-Christian dialogue. Although well written and thoughtfully developed, Mahmoud Ayoub’s collection of essays tends to be academically demanding in the best sense of the term.

When I began A Muslim View of Christianity, I expected to find (among other things) thoughtful arguments about both the similarities and differences between Islam and Christianity, serious questions about the veracity of Scripture and the historicity of Christ’s death and resurrection, and reflections on the conflicts between the two from the pages of history. Ayoub provided all that and more.

What I was surprised to find was a plea for pluralism. Not pluralism in the sense that differing religions live side by side in tolerance, but pluralism in the philosophical sense, that in a pluralistic world no ultimate truth claims can be made. Three quotes among many, taken at random:

“We now know that no religion can claim an exclusive monopoly on salvation and truth. We must accept the fact that our forebears knew far less about world religions than we know. Hence, we must see our faith in global perspective as one among many, each having its own spiritual heritage and civilization. In light of this, no religious” community or religio-ethnic group can claim a special and exclusive mission to mankind.” [60]

“The Qur’an, far more than Muslims have ever done, accepts the pluralism of religions and affirms the unity of faith. The only common elements it insists on are sincere faith in God and works of righteousness.” [21]

“True dialogue is conversation among persons and not a confrontation between ideas. If Muslim-Christian dialogue is to be at all meaningful, it must go beyond the letter of scriptures, creed, and tradition. Men and women of faith in both communities must learn to listen to the divine voice speaking through revelation and history, and together seek to understand what God is saying to Muslims through Christianity and to Christians through Islam. In more practical terms, this means that Christians and Muslims must go beyond the history of a reified religion and try instead to share in the commonality of faith. Then it will, we hope, be realized that although Christians and Muslims have followed different roads toward the goal of human fulfillment in God, the goal is one and the roads meet at many points.” [229]

One more thing: Although I am not at liberty to name my sources, I have it on good authority that more and more Islamic clerics are arguing for religious pluralism, especially among Shi’a scholars in Qum, the holy city in Iran.

For the delight of creativity

Here is a music video that must be seen to be believed:




Thanks to dooce.com for this.

“There’s always a story”

I am reading Netherland with some friends. A novel set in post 9/11 New York by Joseph O’Neill, it is a meditation on being lost. Hans van den Broek, a successful financial analyst who is working in the American branch of a European bank, is a man caught in the postmodern dilemma: how is it possible to have so much in such a driven, technologically advanced world and yet find so little meaning in any of it. His wife, a successful attorney, has returned to London with their son to live with her parents. They have not divorced, but a subtle distancing haunts their relationship.

Hans discovers that those he should have most in common with—the analysts and planners in the rarefied world of high finance—have little time for real relationships and little patience for unhurried conversation. He discovers that unknown to most New Yorkers, a parallel world exists where immigrants gather in clubs to play cricket in city parks. The players come from all over the globe: Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Hans and Chuck Ramkissoon, who he first meets as an umpire at a match, become friends. Netherland is essentially their story.

Netherland is also about cricket, a sport I have never understood, and still don’t. In the novel it functions less as a sport we must understand or like than a metaphor for something greater. In this it is like the baseball in The Brothers K, an essential part of the story yet bigger than what can be seen on ESBN.

Mostly though, Netherland is about living in our postmodern world. About being lost in a cosmos that is home but yet isn’t, where homesickness isn’t so much a disease or a failing as a way of life. About life in a universe where we sense that we belong here but don’t quite fit. That something deep is somehow out of joint, but all the yearning seems to end in more yearning.

Hans relates at one point how he arrives to meet Chuck:

I can see him now, waiting for me on the wooden steps of his porch. He is wearing a cap from his collection of caps, and shorts from his collection of shiny athletic shorts, and a T-shirt from his collection of T-shirts. Chuck covered up his extreme industry with a wardrobe suggestive of extreme leisure.

“So,” he says, “what’s the story?”

“There’s no story,” I say, sitting next to him.

He looks at me with a cocked head, as if I’ve thrown down a challenge. “There’s always a story,” he says. Whereupon he feels for the buzzing phone at his breast.

A three minute video: images & wonder

During the 2010 Rochester L’Abri Conference someone who attended my workshop commented that film is powerful as art partly because it embraces multiple senses. Color, line, lighting, shape and motion fill our sight. Music, dialogue, background sounds, and silence fill our hearing. And it all combines in some mysterious way to fire our imagination with story and images.

Sometimes the images don’t even have to be connected by story or a single narrative to be effective as art. As something that makes us stop, and wonder, and for a moment be drawn outside our ordinary into other spaces and realms. To dream and remember that against all odds each tiny slice of reality has its own significance in a wider tapestry of meaning known only to the One that holds the far-flung galaxies in his hand.

This video is like that, images that almost force us to make up a narrative as we watch, but resist the temptation. Just enjoy them. Let them spark other images, ideas, words, phrases, slices of time that were long forgotten.

The video is the work of Lindsay Kerns, who is applying to MFA programs in creative film production. She attended the 2010 L’Abri Conference, though sadly we didn’t meet. Her giftedness and creativity is obvious, and a reason for gratitude. God’s grace, evidenced once more in this broken world in his people.

For those who might be interested, the song that accompanies the video is “Live For the Sounds” by Brooke Waggoner from her CD Heal For the Honey. (The lyrics are listed below.)

Producing/Directing Reel from Lindsay Kerns on Vimeo.

“Live for the Sounds”

Why do you ask, do you ask me why?

I live inside my head.

You know this.

Croon to the tune of your own sweet sighs

I'll chant and chant and chant this anthem

Beat on the walls and on the ground

To hear the floor and feel the sound

Drink all da' moisture you can down

Of heaven's juice until you drown

Stitch up your lips with pins and please

Never never tell my secrets

We are the ones without disease

But medicine is still much needed

Beat on the walls and on the ground

To hear the floor and feel the sound

Drink all da' moisture you can down

Of heaven's juice until you drown

Why do you ask do you ask me why?

I live for the sounds and gain their wisdom.

Croon to the tune of your own sweet sighs

Beat on the drums 'til you grow numb.

We, the comfortable and safe

Last evening, as we drove home to Rochester from Chicago in a snowstorm, our conversation touched on where we each were at the moment the tragedy of 9/11 began unfolding. We each remembered, of course. We each remembered the horror of watching the Towers collapse, a scene on television that seemed unbelievable for having been imagined so often as a special effect in TV dramas. Even in a snowstorm, watching out for slippery stretches of highway and the mini-whiteouts created by semis and snowplows, we were comfortable in our heated car. It has heated seats, to help ensure the comfort. It took us a bit longer than usual to make the trip, but our safety was never seriously in doubt.

Try as I might, it is difficult for me to imagine what it is like to live in a place where comfort is impossible and where terror, fear, violence, and death so haunt daily life that safety is at best momentary and temporary. Yet some live in such a place.

In his New York Times’ column yesterday, “The World Capital of Killing,” (which you can read here), Nicholas Kristoff reports from one such place: the Congo.

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14—perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up—so she moved in with her uncle.

Kristoff goes on to tell Jeanne’s story, to date, a story of watching relatives be mutilated, herself kidnapped, and repeatedly gang raped. Left for dead by her abductors, she was taken to a hospital where surgeons pieced together her torn body. Three days after being released, soldiers from one of the rampaging militias in the countryside abducted her again. Once again she endured gang rape, and once again she somehow found her way to the hospital. The surgeons think there is too intact tissue left to effect full repairs.

Kristoff ends his piece not with a conclusion, but with questions—questions that must be answered by those of us who are comfortable and safe.

Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo—fueled by profits from mineral exports—will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?

I realize the United States cannot be the world’s police. I understand the rest of the world also bears responsibility. I know that American young men and women stand in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I am aware that we have our own concerns for safety, especially in light of threats made by people and organizations that have struck before.

My question is this: Is it possible that our own concerns for safety can make us hesitate to act when horror unfolds in a part of the world where we have no national interest? That’s what happened as the Holocaust unfolded. May we be a people so committed to justice that we not allow it to happen again.

Beauty in architecture, old and new

Usually, when I think of beauty in large urban buildings, the word “old” or “ancient” immediately comes to mind. It is scenes like these that I am usually thinking of:

From Bratislava, Slovakia:

From Budapest, Hungary:

 And from Prague, the Czech Republic:

It isn’t that a building must be old to be beautiful, but I would argue that some modern architecture is not only ugly but, and I realize I am an amateur here, downright silly. Like the I. M. Pei glass pyramid he plopped down on the grounds among the stately buildings of the Louvre in Paris:

(Now I’ve probably insulted any Parisians or architects reading this—please straighten me out in your comments.)

In contrast is a new skyscraper in Chicago that I want very much to see.

Paul Goldberger introduces us to the building and the architect in a fine piece (which you can read here) in The New Yorker:

Aqua—a new, eighty-two-story apartment tower in the center of Chicago—is made of the same tough, brawny materials as most skyscrapers: metal, concrete, and lots of glass. But the architect, Jeanne Gang, a forty-five year-old Chicagoan, has figured out a way to give it soft, silky lines, like draped fabric. She started with a fairly conventional rectangular glass slab, then transformed it by wrapping it on all four sides with wafer-thin, curving concrete balconies, describing a different shape on each floor. Gang turned the facade into an undulating landscape of bending, flowing concrete, as if the wind were blowing ripples across the surface of the building. You know this tower is huge and solid, but it feels malleable, its exterior pulsing with a gentle rhythm.

Three close ups of the lovely terraces Gang wove into the exterior of the design:

And the architect on one balcony during construction:

Marvelous beauty, amazing imagination, a design for a building that is a deeply moving expression of creativity by someone made in God's image.

Regret and the process of living

I have never had much problem feeling guilty—not because I do little wrong, mind you, but because forgiveness has always been something I’ve pretty much been able to accept. The guilty feelings tend to diminish when forgiveness is promised or granted, and though I find the need for and act of confession fully unpleasant and deplorable, I’m always pleased the guilt feelings don’t tend to lurk around in the background of my consciousness.

Regret based on shame, on the other hand, now that’s a different story altogether. That lurks interminably and rarely quietly. Moments of deep shame remain carved so deeply into my consciousness that the memory of them can feel more real than whatever is happening at the moment. The cure for shame and guilt, as witnessed by the Christian Story, are related but different. But as we all know, grace is free, but costly to embrace.

Like some feelings of guilt, some shame is simply invalid. Knowing that doesn’t bring instant relief I realize, since the mechanisms we have to trigger both guilt and shame are usually too deeply embedded from the past to be changed easily. Reshaping our conscience and heart to live more fully before God’s face is a process that takes time. Still, learning our regret is invalid can be a helpful first step.

I thought about this when I happened upon a statement in Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch. He mentions how often couples say, “I wish we had done this earlier,” expressing regret for having missed the truth of things for long. If I had known this sooner so much pain would have been averted, so many choices could have been made differently. But Schnarch’s response is wise:

What makes you think you could have? It’s taken every bit of development you’ve got to do what you did last night… It takes a long time for a human being to mature. [p. 37]

It’s so easy to forget we are on a pilgrimage, not leaping off a cliff. Growing in knowing and doing is a process, so wishing we could go back and do things over is silly. Not just because time flows in a way that doesn’t allow us access to the past, but because even if I had known then what I know now I most likely could not have processed it adequately to take advantage of it.

The point is not some sort of fatalism, but contentment. Christ, my elder brother is not ashamed of me (talk about a cure for shame! See Hebrews 2:11) and is the One graciously ordering my pilgrimage (see Hebrews 2:11 again).

Contentment and patience, as we are reminded by John Newton:

I have been thirty years forming my own views; and in the course of this time, some of my hills have sunk, and some of my valleys have risen: but, how unreasonable within me to expect all this should take place in another person; and that, in the course of a year or two. [p. 60-61]