iamadam

http://news.yahoo.com/documents-shed-light-trayvon-martin-killing-235341368.html

This article is incredibly provocative for me. I have been living in San Francisco for the last 7 years and with that emerson I have developed critical frameworks, lenses through which I interpret events, reality, experience. When the news came that this 17 year old back boy wearing a hood was shot by a racist neighborhood watch guard my community was in step with a nation that cried for justice. This act reignited our passion against racism and especially violence against our youth.

Here we have this article. The dust is settling over our initial pain and we get clearer views. We encounter the the complexity of innocence and violence. There is no pure space from which to claim punishment. The archetypal villan simply does not exist.

In response to my church community at (glide.org) – also located in physical space in San Francisco on the corner of Ellis and Taylor – I wrote this message:
Humanity is rot with complexity, signals of innocence and blatant violence.
Restorative Justice is different than law… it does not ask whose guilty
and what is the punishment – it seeks a higher healing – it asks what
happened, who was harmed and what does restoration and healing look like…

Our culture is living through disenchantment. It is not only an individual
experience; it is a collective experience of shared consciousness. We are
not only a national culture… now, we are global culture experiencing
conscious and material compression on all fronts: race, class, sex, gender,
population, waste, species extinction, climate change, hyper-isolation and
consumerism, exorbitant privilege and poverty.

Single events capture the latent rage living right below the surface.
See Trayvon Martin.

Anger must give way to peace, disenchantment must give way to a lived
experience of resonant interconnectedness.

Let us build and affirm the new story of Earthly peoples… We do not need
more bodies in jail. The state of California is ripe for change; it spends
$50,000 per inmate and $8667 per student! Nothing can stop the flow of
living love radiating from Glide.

Adam Hudson

Instructor: Richard Shapiro

Critical Discourses On Religion

CIIS

Absence and Inheritance

“Freedom is awakened little by little, in the extent to which we become aware of our ties, like the sleeper of his senses; then our acts finally have a name.”[1]

            Immediately, my thoughts traverse ground very familiar to me – I am my Christian legacy.  Few things could be so certain?  Enter the confession: what happened to me in my youth, adolescence, and adulthood (insofar as I am an adult) is completely unknown to me.  I see “clearly” only histories whose “ties” I have “become aware of.”  The imagery of the sleeper is apt; I am sure I remain sleeping.  My mother named me – Adam and the Birth of Hope.  I cannot speak about what I am – I am lost to me.  An “event” is occurring?  I have been connected and influenced by a form of “religious” affiliation and community?  Here are the beginnings of the question.  They are all impenetrable limits.  I am always already more than the legacy composed of my history/memories/inheritance.  It is here I find myself, having traversed a singular path (are there more than one?) that is completely resonant with a “tradition” and is at the same time complexly different, utterly unknown.  All my narratives have faded between the horizons of certainty and destitute.  It is (I am) at once full and empty, a legacy of problems and of hope.  Did I choose this?  “What difference is there between choosing and being chosen when we can do nothing but submit to the choice?”[2]

My whole life I have had no choice.  I was born in East Tennessee; there is no choice in that.  I was taught to pray very early.  I have memories of my mother’s faith and spirituality.  My father was a true authority.  Her resolute obedience to God and his power, judgment, and integrity still reside in my life: forms of subtle characteristics remain in greater or lesser strengths.  It is true that from a perspective I inherited an ideal life: an accounting about which in truth, again I do not know.  What I have lost from an inheritance is what I have gained from its absence.  I inherited a lecture of Christian values, though “Christianity” is lost to me.  Is this not an event?  “We do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it.”[3]

I know it was my father whose persistence and resolutivity created my Church-love.  It was his parents before him who moved calmly “Christian-like” in a community of resounding quietness and security.  Jesus was, in my early years, a marginal referent.  I was taught virtue, honesty, respect, kindness, love more so than “Jesus.”  My Methodist roots provided a harbor for a memorized social inequity.  This inheritance lived in a quietness whose rupture was found only in the desperation of internalized obedience.  Christianity was the ruse marking the territory of the silent mass.  A community kept watch.  This was the panopticon and the gaze.  It was almost enough to show up to Church dressed well.  A southern genteelness marked one’s cultural likeness and familiarities.  It was a distinct culture of allegiance not to “Christianity” but to the “Methodist Church.”  The only mark of difference was denomination.  Prayer kept the community and country safe.  Faith in the Revelation was paramount, never mind interpretation – no “hermeneutic of suspicion.”  One must know – The Bible – (“a race born of the book?”[4]) “there could be no history without the gravity and labor of literality.”[5]  This “literality” always performed the appropriate abstraction masking the traces of other gods: the shadow of power and truthfulness always already fleeing from mine awareness.  What happened that I might move toward a prosperity bound, charismatic, evangelicalism?  Let us not forget – I am an American.  There was too much suppressed/hidden/unspoken in my tradition.  In my community I found alternatives and prosperity outside my family’s tradition: this marked the beginning of my exploration.  I wanted to risk having meaning.  I had unwittingly inherited a “dissatisfaction.”  It was not only my families – it was a people’s.  “A first encounter, an encounter above all unique because it was a separation…”[6]

How is it that I escape myself – a separation from myself?  It was immediate contradiction that I inherited: a family and community whose actions foretold the lie.  I was taught to believe in myself – the “priesthood of the believer” was sufficient for salvation.  There was a Truth and I could access it for my eternal benefit: indeed profess to myself and my community that I understood myself.  It was largely here where I discovered my interiority.  I always believed I was hearing the voice of God?  This event – the discovery of my-self – was powerful.  I was in a community that legitimated this revelatory experience – it was not unexpected.  “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend.”[7]  Comprehension: the discovery of myself as the rupture whose disturbance seeds the question.  My relation to myself, taught and nurtured by a community seeking a normalization of minds and actions, by its own method created my perplexity – an aporia.

This perplexity both began and ended with my traditions command – in Jesus’ words: “Follow me.”  My father, my mother, my community, my church, even in my school this explicit “magisterial locution” impressed itself in my psyche.  It made no sense – could this be the reason for the quietness?  Everyone around me professed this as their modus operandi, “Jesus is Lord!” yet no one’s life articulated/exemplified this confession – it was not lived.  Everyone I knew spent one maybe two days a week at Church, and five, maybe more, for work and school.  Traces of the gods are present in our practices.  It was in Church that I discovered Jesus and in school that I discovered the lie – the lie and question of God.  “Proceeding within the duplicity of his own questionability, God does not act in the simplest ways; he is not truthful, he is not sincere.  Sincerity, which is simplicity, is a lying virtue. It is necessary, on the contrary, to accede to the virtue of the lie.”[8]

This, my “Christian legacy,” halts behind the influence of another – a hidden god, inherited and untruthful.  That which I (again), “do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it.”[9]  Its fragments keep immerging – the name escapes me.  It has multiple tendencies strung together as a whole, yet incomprehensible.  This “other” (the sign of a god) lays claim to my “religio-cultural-spiritual-faith tradition.”  It exists behind, next to, above and below those forms immediately/explicitly present – for a long time, there was only a consistent/monolithic Christian tradition.  Here I find at once surprise and fright: that tradition to which I pay allegiance daily, in which I have affirming faith, upon which I have been raised and have worshiped ceaselessly is not “Christianity” but a modern-scientific-techno-industrial-liberal-democratic-secular-Christian-commercial-consumer-captialism.  The absurdity is in the naming.  This legacy has indeed constituted my whole existence from youth till now and persists in organizing all my relations.  The power of this tradition exercises its might by remaining hidden.  It is a separate and disperse discourse fragmented from itself so as to remain in the shadows of the unthought.  This ideological tradition in which my whole life has been situated is what I know the least: “‘religion’ is at the same time involved in reacting antagonistically and reaffirmatively outbidding itself…and the entire question of religion comes down, perhaps, to this lack of assurance.”[10]

What is happening to me, what has happened to me, is completely unknown to me.  Like my Christian legacy, this deeper legacy is even more a mystery – a beginning and end of the question.  Mine is a tradition whose explicit “religiosity” has folded back in on itself and justified itself as “anti-religious” as “secular.”  “I am speaking here of the discourse that comes to be, in a pervasive and overwhelming, hegemonic fashion, accredited in the world’s public space.”[11]  The legitimating apparatuses of expertise defining/situating the “norms” beg the question.  This accreditation replaces faith and the question of its mythos is delegitimated.  “For in taking God as witness, even when he is not named in the most ‘secular’ pledge of commitment, the oath cannot not produce, invoke or convoke him as already there, and therefore as unengendered and unengenderable, prior to being itself: unproducible.”[12]  Nothing could be more clear: what is inherited is absence.  The departure of my beliefs is the re-evaluation of values – a deracination of ‘religion’ and ‘God’ – re-moved and re-presented in my life as a practice.

I was taught to think this, here, now.  My questions were encouraged.  Enter: “In the beginning is hermeneutics.”[13]  I remember the first complete process of rupture that fragmented my Christian identity under the wedge of a perspectival hermeneutic: learning the Bible as a book.  It was the beginning of the question of the book.  “The book of man is a book of question.”[14]  The revelation fell hard and a move toward pragmatism was met in the wake of what would be a journey of deaths.  I, like philosophy, am wondering toward the meaning of my death.[15]  Falliblism marked its place in my mind along side the birth of philosophy and a shifting Christian identity: it became “tradition as adventure.”[16]  A new practice of listening to the gods moving before me, making demands: “Follow me.”  It was the ancestors command to speak about the unspoken.  My history has a legacy of speaking its hiding place – I learned value in the absent.  Specters speak.  “Production and reproduction of the unproducible absent in place.  Everything begins with the presence of that absence.  The ‘deaths of God’, before Christianity, in it and beyond it, are only figures of episodes.”[17]

I am redeemed from God?  I am trusted in his absence!  “God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us.”[18]  Here is my linage/history/memory that sets forth a demand to seek and to struggle.  I always thought I was Christian?  There was a time when my “Christian legacy” was sufficient; when I knew myself as a part of an important linage.  My identity was consistent, my thoughts resolute about all things of weight and importance – no struggle.  I was the same as my community.  There is no problem for me to relate still, and this is a complex matter.  I know my family and friends, my community and its region of influence, though I remain in the distance, lost only to myself.  A close friend will interrogate me, “Do you still believe in Jesus?”  I am immediately at a loss.  (May I speak for God?)  “Yes, I reply!” followed by “ands,” “buts,” all to clarify a meaning that dissolves before I express it.  “Yukel, you have always been ill at ease with yourself, you are never HERE, but ELSEWHERE…”[19]

I am more and less Christian than the Christian.  I do not understand “Jesus” apart from my own disintegration.  He is the breach and the rupture – at once never and always present in all presence.  There can be no possible stagnation of the event cleansed of uncleanliness.  The center that moves backward is the reason for the outpourings of spiritual dawns in the history that makes me present.  “Let me clarify.  We are talking about a trauma, and thus an event whose temporality proceeds neither from the now that is present nor from the present that is past but from an im-presentable to come.”[20]  The redeemer and messiah to come – always coming.  A form of discernment is needed here like that of Nietzsche’s: “for the signs of ascent and decline…I know both, I am both.”[21]

It could be hoped that I might return to that which I have warred against from the outset, but a legitimating recursivity is not what is becoming here, now.  I grew up too comfortable.  This “inheritance” has afforded me privilege beyond comprehension.  I was allowed to fall in love with destroying gods.  This that was, “…above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what many seem, in other respects, to be established.”[22]  It was a plague of carelessness and freedom on behalf of my community.  “A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community.  A community of the question about the possibility of the question.  This is very little—almost nothing—but within it, today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision.  An unbreachable responsibility.”[23]    This inheritance which states itself for me, who’s groping towards death has freed my possibility, my potential, my address, is now completely threatened.  This is an “autoimmunitary process” initiated on my behalf.  This process, “…is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity.”[24]  I am my own “religio-cultural-spiritual-faith-tradition’s” unstable dilemma/anxiety and hope.  My legacy carries with it an active struggle seeking a reprise for complete aporia.

My whole existence speaks/testifies: “The impossible has already occurred.”[25]  I still hear the words of Jesus, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”[26]  The image of God put to death: is this not complete action as suffering?  Is God found through death?  “Is death not that upon the basis of which knowledge in general is possible…”[27]  This cross of separation and trial speaks/initiates requited possibilities and knowledge.  My relation to this tradition finds ties to forgotten, extirpated histories that demand an accounting for lives unmarked, pain unresolved, questions unanswered, life mutilated for tyranny and oppression.  “Thus by a paradoxical development, the Christian embrace of suffering led…to a greater concern for—and therefore a new kind of secular activity directed at—the diseased, the poor, and the despised members of society…we find here not merely another meaning of pain but also another economy of action.”[28]

There has always been present a suppressed desperation in my mother’s voice.  My father, faithful to his inheritance, so unabashedly honest, moves like a spectator lost amidst sidelines of broken hope.  Not only that but, caught in a tradition that in awareness and spectacle – exploits.  A tradition of murders, an inheritance of domineers, a legacy of disassociated pains all built on “good intentions.”  “A confluence in which is recalled, conjoined, and condensed the suffering, the millennial reflection of a people, the ‘pain’ ‘whose past and continuity coincide with those of writing…”[29]  In writing I risk the response of an authentic difference bound to “another economy of action.”  This is a history that writes my life.  I am not myself.  No.  I am something much more aphotic – I am dominance reflecting on itself.

This is “an unbreachable responsibility” moving me toward limitation and death.    I need not “kill myself” someone will surly do it for me: The Gift of Death.  It is of my flesh that binds me to the resurrection and forgiveness.  “I always have to be forgiven, to ask forgiveness for not giving, for never giving enough, for never offering or welcoming enough.  One is always guilty, one must always be forgiven the gift.”[30]  An impossibility to live up to my inheritance is found within the confines of my mortality.  Therefore, I must continually demand the discourse of resurrection: “…liberating him from the ever-repeated proximity of death (making him understand that one day he will die).”[31]

I pray not as Master Eckhart spoke: “I pray God rid me of God” rather, I demand of God, grace me with God.

Adam Hudson

Methods and Approaches to the Study of Religion

Professor Steven Goodman

12/17/09

“It is not that religion is delusional by nature, nor that the individual, beyond present-day religion, rediscovers his most suspect psychological origins.  But religious delusion is a function of the secularization of culture: religion may be the object of delusional belief insofar as the culture of a group no longer permits the assimilation of religious or mystical beliefs in the present context of experience.”[1]

            Jeremy R. Carrette edits a compellation of Michel Foucault’s essays he titles, Religion and Culture, and this quote stands alone on the first page of print.  Many readings of this passage confirmed my suspicions – Foucault’s words displaced my religious convictions.  Does contemporary secularization silence the ‘religious’ portions of my experience?  Am I delusional or a victim or both?  What was I to make of my religious encounters?  Am I truly living in a world that has rejected mystery for scientific certainty and spirituality for secular self-actualization?  Is it probable that my beliefs are impossibilities and my magic is delusion?

My thinking about religion is full of incompleteness, aporias, difficulties, wonderings.  I experience degrees of clarity and I recognize that some methods of exploration are better than others.  The above questions guide my attempt to understand religious discourse, its power in my life and the inheritances I call my own.  The more research I consume the greater my conviction (religious conviction?) that no final certainty exists, that no method has a monopoly on ‘truth’.  I recognize that within experimentally defined domains ‘certainty’ will appear certain, but subjected to the immensities of time and the variability of perspective every piece of certainty is only a momentary glimpse of adequate understanding. It has been said that no matter how noble a person may become, in someone else’s story they will always play the villain.

This paper will be a candid attempt to think perspective especially as it relates to the impossibility of certainty and the practice of method – my method of approaching the subject.  It is a hope and appeal for permission to have religion – its risk, love and power, its historical traditions, revelations and sacred encounters, even its Gods – “in the present context of experiences.”[2]  If permission for religiosity has been forbidden by secular culture then this paper seeks to betray; it will break/rupture/dislodge stable narratives of religiosity, history and self.

It will begin with the power of criticism.  I argue that ‘religion’ as a stable category of knowledge is always already problematic and potentially impossible; my position challenges any methodology that approaches the ‘subject’ of religion as a pure ‘object.’  The critique grows more powerful through anthropological analysis, cultural materialism, and scientific rigor before it implodes to again affirm its instability.  Dis-stabled, precarious, and possible the category of ‘religion’ is alleviated from the struggle to be something its not.  It is freed from clear and distinct statements – it frees religion from the false pretences of science.  This approach, if it is a method, opens toward more contingencies and radical relationships; it notices difference.  It thinks the boundaries between the delusion and the really real; it is feminist, personal, historical, and convicted (with the weight its history demands) that participatory practices can be both medicine and hope.  If processes of secularization are productive of ‘delusion,’ it also facilitates discernment and sobriety, personal revelation and reevaluation, autobiographical transparency, new kinship knowledges, hope-to-come, hope for God.  As religion is freed from methods that deny experience and opens itself to methods that allow for adequate accounts of experience it becomes dangerously capable of what Jean Gebser, cultural historian and anthropologist, calls “verition,” – being-in-truth or living as truth.

Powers of Criticism

How do we think about the ‘truth’ of religious perspectives given the radical contingencies that shape religious discourse?  How does one understand the ‘phenomenon of religion’ given the predispositions to mis-represent, displace, ignore, and fragment applicable and relevant knowledge?  Are there interpretations, analysis, or methods for approaching the study of religion that lead to more ‘truth’?  My contention (conviction) is that there is no stable category of ‘religion’.  Religion is multifaceted, polymerase, playful and provocative.  Students of religion encounter a myriad of ‘facts’ concerning ‘religion’ – contending, contested, meshing, contingent; these facts shape the object of religion.  Great scholarship has shown the ‘object’ of religion to be bound by structures of power; built to discipline, subject, extract confession, obedience, conviction.[3]  Talal Asad, in Genealogies of Religion, teaches the student to read power behind the ‘truth’ of religious discourse.  Asad describes the meaning of religious phenomenon operating as “products of historically distinctive disciplines and forces.”[4]  These social powers shape the particular ways that worship, ritual, religious institutions and belief function to control, normalize, and systematize life.  Asad argues that, “there cannot be universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.”[5]

Too often the discourses which think the category of religion are already prioritizing a relationship to ‘truth’.  Any commitment to ‘truth’ must be reviewed and critiqued; its ties to power illuminated for the sake of justice, emancipation and transformation.  Every answer to ‘truth’ always already validates a specific history, present attitude, and future need.  Thus, the question of methodologies must first commit to some questions over others, some worlds and not others.  Not “What is True?” rather “How does this ‘truth’ live?”  “What does this ‘truth’ do?”

In his attempt to ‘name the game’ Marvin Harris provides a good starting point to think about these questions, “ONE TEMPTING answer to Pontius Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ has always been that truth is whatever people can be persuaded to believe.  If we stop to ponder the further question ‘What persuades people to believe?’ sooner or later some impatient soul will answer ‘Power.’”[6]  Power is the answer to how ‘truth’ lives, what methods do what and for whom.  The ‘truth’ of our answers to religious questions shape worlds through the production material effects – ‘truth’ communicates relationships to power.  Indeed, in many instances ‘truth’ is a just a bad name for power.”[7]

The history of religious studies has constituted a great deal of inspiration on the part of ‘truth’.  Approaching the study of religion with a critical eye attentive to mechanisms of power offers this thinker more clarity and interpretive flexibility.  Critical thinking is not targeted against inspiration, revelation, or the sacred encounter.  Critical theory stands against the propagation of ‘truth’ that distances and masks methods of knowledge production that materialize the relationships of production and consumption, political exploitation, and social inequalities.[8]  Marvin Harris in Cultural Materialism, reminds the religious thinker to consider the legacy of Marx before producing religious theory.  Marx, like Darwin, taught that what was formally understood as ‘given’, ‘inscrutable’, or ‘a direct emanation of deity’ could be understood materially and demonstrated scientifically.[9]  For Marx, culture, religion, institutions, and wealth could all be methodologically tied to the material mode of production in a society.  Harris directs his methodology – “cultural materialism” – as a challenge to the tendency of anthropological theory to critique science as a culturally embedded product by exposing its development within the Modern Western world.  “Cultural materialism grants that scientific truth is a social product, but it denies that the corpus of scientific theory necessarily differs from culture to culture…”[10]

Harris’ rigor challenges many attempts to study religious phenomenon.  Ascending the steps of critical thought seeking adequate methods for knowing the ‘object’ of religion finally faces comparison with scientific knowledge.  If the study of religion seeks those degrees of clear and distinct knowledge that grace the scientific disciplines it must risk a great deal.

Karl Popper, a 20^th century philosopher of science, sought to distinguish between science and pseudo-science.  He was convinced that many ‘social-sciences’ attempted to use empirical methods but they still failed to meet the standards that science set.  He compares Einstein’s theory of relativity with Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s theory of psycho-analysis and Alfred Adler’s so-called ‘individual psychology’ and I would insist on adding Asad’s theory of religion as an anthropological category.  He asked what was wrong with Marx and Freud.  I encountered their theory and underwent a sort of conversion:  “The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated.  Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verification of the theory.  Whatever happened always confirmed it…”[11]

Easy to verify and confirm, Marxism supplied a framework wherein every case presented could be interpreted in the light of its theory.  This precise circumstance, Popper notes, is its weakness.  “It was precisely this fact—that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed—which in the eyes of their admires constituted the strongest argument in favor of these theories…that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.”[12]

Einstein’s theory is of a strikingly different order.  His theory risks so greatly the possibility of error that when confirmed it remains verifiable to the point of certainty.  “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.  Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice…Every genuine test of the theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it.  Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others: they take, as it were, greater risks.”[13]

The critique is one that Karl Popper posts as a philosopher of science.  Any theory must be able to be tested – if a theory takes no risks in allowing itself to be wrong then that is its weakness.  In a word: Falsification.  If the conditions of testability aren’t present then there is never room to maneuver outside of its field, a theory then stands the danger of becoming dogma.  This is a rigorous challenge if applied to the study of religion.  It is a rigorous challenge and a great ill, a disservice.

Like so many social sciences, the study of religion suffers from physical envy.[14]  Science assumes that it studies a stable, unchanging object.  The object is rigidly physical, like a rock, and it can be relied upon to be consistently there, unflinchingly timeless.  The stuff (study) of religion transcends the comfort of material and suggests that the immaterial must be studied and perfected; as the specialized sciences aim to perfect material management so should religion perfect, justify, and protect those immaterial forces of religious significance.  Even Popper admits that science also errs and pseudo-science stumbles on truth.  Still, I refer the reader to the conviction and critique A. N. Whitehead makes concerning philosophy (here fully applicable to the study of religion): “Philosophy (religion) has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of though.”[15]

In this case, if I do not intend on releasing ‘religion’ to the leveling scientific reductionist critique in need of certain domains and degrees of distinctness then I find my allies elsewhere – literally removed and removing illegitimate claims of stability and weak objectivity.  Efforts to construct ‘stronger objectivity,’ as Donna Haraway insists, refuse to narrow analysis in the way Popper’s convictions sought while remaining loyal to situated knowledge, perspective and reciprocal relationship.  Thinking with the feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding, Haraway adopts/re-births her genius as she subjects objectivity to strength:  “A stronger, more adequate notion of objectivity would require methods for systematically examining all of the social values shaping a particular research process, not just those that happen to differ between members of a scientific community…”[16]  What this means is that Popper’s ideal science is never simply that – its allowed to live in specific ways, linked to specific worlds, producing specific results, for specific people.  Here ‘strong objectivity’ does not dodge is implicatedness, contingency or context.  It becomes messy by affirming some worlds and not others – looking for justice, attentive to the moral dimension.  In this way it becomes useful as a contributor for understanding religious matters; it allows the study of religion to be what it is – unstable, flighty, precarious, polluting…selfish, absent, inheriting and the continuing part of human history concerned with compassion, care, hospitality, revelation, justice and love.

The power of attraction is a universal phenomena. It is known my many names. We peer into the world of gravity – a power of attraction that moves tides, shapes worlds; it is a fundamental interaction of existence. Attraction is a living dynamic quality of electromagnetism. It is also a resonance emanating from the human heart.

Attraction is the power between worlds whether that be planetary worlds or psychic worlds. The antidote is here…

SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 03: Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants celebrates during the Giants' vicotry parade on November 3, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Thousands of Giants fans lined the streets of San Francisco to watch the San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2010 World Series victory over the Texas Rangers. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

I have been living in the power of attraction. I have been encountering the point where my internal intentions are manifest in the material world – where my ideas, visions, faith enters a life of its own. It is evidential, an inlet of flow. My fascination with attraction resides with many of my recent experiences.

This all begin with my decision to move toward a sober life. This was not an easy deliverance. Every tooth and nail spent, every effort of will torn down, down, down where the bottom becomes the platform and sanctuary of suffocation - only at the bottom of the pool with no breath to draw is the way made crystal clear. “Oh… I have swim before. Now is the time I push off the bottom back to the surface, toward air and safety, toward life.”

The power of attraction had everything to do with complete resolve. I remember when it switched. It was not exceptional; it was a decision. It was a journey of intensity, a mounting magnitude… until shift – phase change. (also a principle of physical existence – all things are involved in a process of maximum grade, temperature or velocity until a critical point is met and change occurs…) For me, it was from the moment I begin to attend meetings in AA. I begin to feel empowered in a way that astounded me. I was attracting my own healing. From that moment till now I have journey with this power. All my dreams have lived only as far as my own mind. Now, I am finding an ability to articulate them. To speak them, attract them, carry them, manifest them.

Living into the power of attraction has been like discovering a magic or “skillfulness” – if your a Buddhist. For me, as a subject involved in the Christian tradition broadly, I am thinking always of God’s involvement – a divine favor.

I am attracting. Isn’t that the name of a plate at Cafe Gratitude? There is a huge difference between ordering a overpriced raw, vegan dish and living into the unfiltered, emerson that is the universal power of attraction. And as an individual to know it – I know I am not alone. So many others have spoken of this power of manifestation – the power to attract. It is available. It seems to have everything to do with my wellbeing. I am a willingness, a vessel of humility. I accept power.

Countless millions have been “born again” through a process of acceptance that Christ is their Lord and Savior.

This is an interesting way to frame liberation – Jesus as the bridge between man and God… My

Christ Mormon (Photo credit: More Good Foundation)

commitments do not reject this divine experience. What I grow to love – which is different – is the embracing power of Christ’s message that, “ye are Gods” and “the kingdom of heaven is within you.” Christ taught us how to pray – “our father in heaven…” It was as if he believed in us… to stand on our own before God – as sons and daughters in whom God also speaks, “These are my children in whom I am well pleased.” This is the message of Alan Watts and countless others whose vision crossed the threshold of humanity to embrace our latent divinity. Allen Watts actually titled a chapter in his book, The Cultural of Counter Culture, “On Being God.”

Jesus’ message was an extension of his own identity, and he taught us how to follow him. His message is his call – to live in belonging, to live our divine inheritance, to live the full revelation of Christ’s life, and the radical conclusion of the Reformation – “YE ARE GODS!”

Mediation through Christ is a historical and valid process of sacred communion with God. We do live within a divine family; we are not alone – that we live within the security of divine/human fraternity must always be affirmed. Still, all things enter phases of independency or individualization. The revelation of Martin Luther was another step toward the emancipation of consciousness. The power of the Reformation was to establish independence from the Catholic Church and especially the authority the priesthood to grant the remission of sins. Martin Luther argued for the “priesthood of the believer” granting all people a direct line to God that bypassed the authority of the Catholic priesthood. Embedded within the Renaissance of the West the Protestant Reformation was a watershed period of conscious evolution as it both challenged the authority of Church and contributed to individual empowerment. My assumption is that the Reformation remains a process conscious work; it still travels an ark of freedom toward the Christ experience – to let God live us, to embrace and live Christ’s message to us that “ye ARE GODS.”

The trinitarian view is a bold message and its language emanates a conscious contact with God. Still, my feminism is a rising flood of empowerment that points to the absence of the feminine within this discourse; my post-imperialist commitments insists that Christ’s experience of divinity, His Oneness with God, was more than an ideal religious affiliation of strategic imperial benefit. Not only that but the spirit of Martin Luther’s Reformation was anti-imperialist.

Christ message is the certainty of God, without God, without Christ. We know that Christ died on the cross. God is dead. Now we must know how to let go and grow into the resurrected God living us – as Christ first modeled – this is the power of the Christian story. It is a resurrection of life, of the kingdom of heaven within us.

Today is Good Friday. I have been thinking of Easter this week. I will hide Easter eggs tomorrow for the kids at Glide Church. I’m genuinely excited about this. I’ve also been joking with friends that this is the day Christians connect with their form of Zombie – ism.

There’s more though. I have been glancing at my notes from Baudrillard – Jean Baudrillard, d. March 6, 2007, was a French intellectual, activist, and writer. His writing has always captured me. I think its the combination of philosophy and ascetics that really attracted me to his perspectives – the craving for postmodern insight and wit. Perhaps I’m just another American intellectual with an affinity for my French brethren – the kind who end up writing commentaries on America – anything to remind me how full of shit I am while at the same time admitting my exceptionalism. Not to mention the philosophical contribution the Wachowski Brother’s (former brothers – hasn’t one of them undergone a sex change?) drew from to create the watershed film – The Matrix. Oh, Baudrillard…

Only in the postmodern age do we hide Easter Eggs to remind our children that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the grave on the third day. It is not anything but postmodern. It is not religion. It is not endearing or even an interesting myth. It is simulacrum. It is a copy of a copy. It is nihilism at its best. Perhaps this sounds a bit exaggerated. I’ll admit I’m wrong. Though, perhaps it is better to encounter perspectives that dislocate common understand. I’m suggesting you follow me here – over here. Where the real becomes the revelation of the hyperreal.

It is torture that we are talking about. With Easter the hyperreal unfolds; it is the magnitude of mourning, the force of loss and disappearance; it is the death of a God; the irredeemable absence for which an enduring people establish rights of passage, forms of liturgy, organization of Church, confession of sin, and in the end a magic of successive, complying symbloage – a simularum.

In the material age our culture sacrifices and effaces the real. It erects its symbol and consumes its repetition.   Now we have the heart of Christ’s message – the gift of love, of grace means death is valid, irrevocable, worthy, necessary. It is the simulation and the simulacrum. And in our current age it is, as Baudrillard writes:  the phantasm of revolution.”[1]

A bit more:

“Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself…leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences…a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”[1]

There seems to be a sacrificial allurement embedded in our culture. The Easter momentum. The history of Christianity summarized as a memorial and fulfillment of passover. Today is the day that the Lord has made. The lingering resonance of an event I invested time in believing. A central symbol, whose meaning has become unreal.

Practicing philosophy in the contemporary world is a daunting task. Knowledge has grown significantly in the past century. It overwhelms us. Developments in markets, media, medicine, technology, theory, data, discourse, politics, power, war, wealth, genetics, robots, chemicals, poverty, pollution, ecology and economy have exploded. Specialized disciplines have concentrated and compartmentalized their knowledge making some discoveries especially in technology, so complicated only the experts understand them. The sheer diversity of knowledge can paralyze any analyst.

The rehabilitation of paralysis is the task of philosophy. It is important to find orientation for a world ‘lost in the cosmos,’ where the danger of too much knowledge drowns the still-small voice of inspiration, of philosophy – the love of wisdom. Only in our world – saturated with knowledge – could we apprehend the immensities of space, process, and time to the point that we lose perspective.

Worlding Earth

In an age of worldview proliferation, where every view is a view, where the infinite withdraw of meaning makes both the mundane and extraordinary matters of capital, when the coupling of dementia and paralysis suffocate the soul, when insomnia and depression are treated exclusively as psychological sickness, when human population and trash are so extensive they become commodities and when problems of the whole have been levied in the “pursuit of happiness,” – our age has become a call for miraculous healing that resounds from the bows of Earthly organisms.

A majority of the world is in desperate need for active wisdom strong enough to honor past worlds and flexible enough to grow new ones. A philosophy of worlding is emerging to answer this call. It is an extension and fulfillment of integral philosophy, a practice of interdisciplinary unification and heterodoxical complexification that solves problems. Integral philosophy has always been a practice of world building. It emerged from conscious thinkers seeking to grasp reality, to make sense of life amidst thresholds and entanglement, for the benefit of all beings. Now systems and ecology merge with consciousness and wisdom to resist a culture of knowledge that has lost philosophy.

A philosophy of worlding suggests that some worlds are better than others – that we are on a ‘world’, both constituted by and constituting a ‘worlding’. Worlding is always, already an ecology. The ‘science of home’ – ecology – has become a leading framework guiding the development of integral philosophy. Home is more than self, more than a project of hominization. Home has expanded to include the whole Earth, all its living systems and the communities of organisms that constitute our experience. Home has even expanded beyond our Earthly sphere to include our solar system, our Milky Way Galaxy, and beyond. The study of living organisms and their relations to their environments is the context through which this philosophy of worlding unfolds.

I find my greatest privilege and fullest gratitude when I consider my own process of education.  I have studied under profound teachers. I have sought them out as much as they have embraced me. My dream to teach has been shaped by my teachers and their ability to ‘speak a true word.’  My entire life might be read as a practice attaining the knowledge, experience, and authority to follow my teachers – to speak true words. My concern with this essay is to briefly explain what I mean when I commit to such a goal and how that goal affirms Paulo Freire’s conviction that to speak a true word is to transform the world.

I have spent most of my life hours inside the institutions of the American educational system. In primary school the educational institution was integrated with the Christian church. My teachers were concerned with learning that embraced a spiritual inheritance. The legacy of our revolutionary leader was taken seriously. He was our ordained teacher because his words could be relied upon to be both true and transformative.

Throughout my education I have relied on liberating voices to rupture and intervene on violence, untruth, and injustice. I intend to follow those radical legacies – legacies with many names, encompassing many movements that have marked history with a passion for love, justice, and liberation.

The legacies that exist in my education are particular and commit me to a pedagogy that integrates libratory theory with just practice. This was the risk that defined the life of many of my educators – an integration of truth with transformation. It is a radical pedagogy that carries with it the remainders of inexhaustible hope and redemption; remainders that give me the strength to arrive, give, heal, comfort, endure, listen, learn, educate and let go.

This pedagogy is a hybrid of many threads. It leans on feminisms and critical theory. It is committed to intervene on oppression, silence, and inequality. It refuses strict fragmentation and multiple rigid dualisms that invade common discourse: religion/science, mind/body, male/female, human/nature, subject/object, good/bad, etc.   This pedagogy remains loyal to legacies that drift into sub-altern histories, socio-ecological techniques, evolutive dimensionality, libratory psychology and deconstructive praxis. It is a creative empiricism and a postmodern cosmology that is both pragmatic and performative.

This pedagogy draws from these configurations of theory to develop its practice. It is a practice grounded in community through deep residency, challenging group work, and Socratic dialogue. It prioritizes research that begins with participatory action (PAR) and uses ethnography, not only to understand the ‘other’ but to situate self in relation to worlds. It builds worlds that intervene on alienated subject positions and resists internalized violence.

Education is a human practice and one of our rarest gifts. The production of education becomes the work of generative praxis pursuing what Paulo Freire calls conscientiation. Freire writes, “the term conscientizacao refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.” [2] In this space education is alive, and it becomes a practice that speaks truth to power. Education becomes a generative praxis that affirms experimental risk in research because it involves itself in radical space where intimacy, political relevance, and transformational capacity is always already present.

Education becomes a practice of freedom, justice, and healing. [3] It interrupts dominant forms of oppressive power by building resistant communal bodies – marching, speaking-out, writing, healing and celebrating. Education reminds us that the gifts of the spirit will never be exhausted. It still surprises us. Education is a gift of libratory alchemy; it gives material form an opportunity for grace and expression; transformation is an experience. It is a social act that demands the creation of engaged and responsible individuals laboring for the beloved community.[4] Education is a tireless hope. It affirms its history and forges new beginnings. It forces teaching to become the practice of inspiration, discovery, and creativity. It holds space for tears, laughter, play, Eros, contemplation, confrontations, movements of images and sound, even entertainment and impossibilities. It directs its gaze toward co-extensive horizons that bridges self with world, other, and body.

Education is extremely powerful, and insofar that it produces power/knowledge configurations it remains a precarious site of exchange.[5] Legions of bodies will emerge onto the global landscape with knowledges, intents, desires, particular histories, visions and struggles. These bodies are our children ad infinitum – to the most serious limit of imagination we must consider the legacies they will encounter; legacies for which we bare measures of responsibility. It is their actions that will stand as the test our educational efforts in the present must answer.

I am a product and benefactor of globalized education. At least in part, I am the future measure of its success or failure. The full implications of its investment will continue to define my life. I am indebted to its care and the calling it sets before me. The journey that education takes in the future is not only the responsibility of institutional policy or administrative techniques but individual inspirers, risking relevant pedagogy.  This is the space where I claim ownership. This is the space where I speak true words and transform the world.

Humility is an Edge.  

Its horizons are Earth and Divinity.  

Its liminal moves constitute incarnation.

Humility is not an attribute highly praised in contemporary society. A Western age rich with pride, advance, and consuming exchange has little interests in such words. Humility is bound to religiosity. Wikipedia‘s interests extend at least this far. But in a post-enlightenment culture when religiosity, especially of the Christian type, are generally regarded as “behind the times,” stuck in superstition, and mythic consciousness the secular gaze offers little sympathies. Humility is associated with Christian piety, with connotations of servitude, lowness, and surrender – even egolessness.

Christ came to the world, humble. St. Paul‘s Letter to the Philippians 2:1-8 captures the enduring meaning: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not considier it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Humility has all the religious effect one might conjure – “obedient to the point of death…” Equal with transcendence and absurdity, the lesson humility offers seems both grandiose and desperately naive – just edgy enough to drive a 2000 year old movement of institution and belief.

Now, in age enormously critical of Christian hegemony and thoroughly disenchanted, the word, humility, offers enough edge to revitalize old soil. Humility comes from latin root, “humus,” meaning “earth” or “ground.” In agriculture humus refers to maturely composed soil rich with organic matter and stability. Humus is rich because it has undergone a process of transformation where microorganisms thrive and produce organic carbon. It is often called the “life-force” of soil. (thanks wiki)

The edge of humility is the space where religious meaning can be revitalized. We are asked to remain humble while the work of preparation continues to offer life new possibilities. The lesson of humility needs not a mere 2000 years, it is as old as the Earth itself, 4.3 billion years strong. Its soil bound between vacum and gravity, it is sure and stable; it constitutes our living memory and is boldly performing humanity – in the likeness of the hum-an.

The edge of humility is the space between the organic and the spiritual, the material and the divine. It is the “life-force” behind an incarnation, the space between God and Human. It lives us daily an an ecology of multitude. It breaths us and though we have forgot our former states, it matures us through its own convincing power.

Unto death…