Orthodox and Evangelical

Ortho-Pente in Ethiopia

2011-12-10T11:25:00.000Z

The other day an Ethiopian friend told me about a movement that was partly Protestant and partly Orthodox called "ortho-pente". I cannot find much on it, but I did find this. There is alot going on in Ethiopia that should be paid attention to by people who are aware of the need for Orthodox and Evangelicals to work together.

http://www.ethiocross.com/

Christian Solidarity Worldwide conference in London

2011-12-01T11:26:00.000Z

the respected human rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) put on a conference last weekend in the Westminster section of London. CSW is a class outfit that does work that compliments other similar groups such as Barnabas Fund and Open Doors. CSW's work has a legal and policy edge to it that distinguishes it from the other groups, at least in my take. How does what I saw there relate to my current blog theme?

I was so please at the way that the Evangelicals related to the Coptic bishop. Bishop Angelos of the UK Coptic Orthodox Church gave a very impressive talk in which he urged us not to feel sorry for Egyptian Christians but to pray for them and for all of Egypt. Having just finished Brother Andrew's book Secret Believers: What Happens when Muslims come to Christ in Muslim Countries, which also shows cooperation between Evangelicals and the Coptic Orthodox church (I am quite sure the main country is Egypt though it is not named as such) I am sure this is one the ways forward in this situation.

Tina Ramirez, who works in government in the US and has studied the issue of religious freedom at the academic and policy level and knows it in depth, spoke on the alarming trends of inceasing persecution of Christians in the world in the last 20 years. She, as well as an MP named Burt (whose first name I lazily can't recall without looking for it on the net) talked about how the case must be made to leaders in Muslim majority countries that respecting the rights of Christians is improvement in their society overall. There are statistical studies that have been done showing that levels of relgiously motivated violence against minorities is tied statistically to political instability. I wish I knew more about this, but someone named Brian Grim, whose name came up in Ramirez' talk, has done work on this and is part of a very intelligent discussion on these issues.

There was a church leader from Iran, whose name does not appear on the CSW website, I suppose for his protection, said that there a big changes taking place in Iran. The most conservative estimates say that there are several hundred thousand Christian converts in the country just in the last few years, and the more liberal estimates are one million. The speaker works for Elam ministries, who do very good work. He also mentioned the issue of Persian martyrs in the Iranian church before the coming of Islam. I am writing my dissertatin on the Church of the East and its formation in the Sasanian Persian empire, and this issue of maryrs is very close to my heart. If eastern orthodox and Roman catholics and the other liturgical tradtions believe in the power of martyrs, and the importance of martyrs, why do we not just stand up and say that the 50 people killed in Iraq last October and the 100 people who've been killed in Egypt this year for their faith are martyrs?

Tertullian of Carthage, one of my heroes and whom I wrote my MA thesis about some years back, wrote that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." why don't we start thinking about what this might actually mean?

My Cambride Round Church Tour

2011-07-06T13:17:00.001+01:00

Just to explain folks, I sometimes give a tour on the history of Cambridge and how that relates to religion. I sometimes do it in Mandarin and Japanese. These pics, when I show them to native speakers of those langauges, can be a good way of practing for the tour. These are some of the key spots on the tour.

Photo #1 The Round Church

Photo #2 St. Benet's (Benedict's)

Photo #3 The River Cam

Photo #4 Magdalen College court yard

photo #5 Inside Magdalen chapel

Photo #6 CS Lewis plaque

Photo #7 Colonial reformers

Photo #8 Thomas Clarkston

Photo #9 William Wilburforce

photo #10 Martin Luther

Photo #11 Trinity window/Key Reformation Figures

Photo #12 Lady Margaret Beaufort

Photo #13 John Fischer

Photo #14 Divinity School statues

Photo #15 Francis Bacon

Photo #16 King Henry VIII

Photo #17 Isaac Newton

Photo #18 Isaac Newton tree

Photo #19 Great St. Mary's

Photo #20 Senate House

Photo #21 Cambridge University Press

Photo #22 Little Germany Pub

Photo #23 Eagle Pub plaque

Photo #24 Cavendish Lab door

Photo #25 Cavendish Plaque

Photo #26 Sidney Sussex Court yard

Photo #27 Sussex Chapel

How Islamism and Secularity in the West are Related

2011-01-06T16:14:00.003Z

ISLAM - VATICAN - EGYPT
Europe and Islam in the wake of attacks against Copts in Alexandria
by Samir Khalil Samir

Absurd accusations against the Coptic community of keeping two women who converted to Islam captive. The psychosis of a country that prohibits changing of religion. Islamic attacks against Shenouda, the criticism of the imam of Al-Azhar against Benedict XVI. Europe must open up channels for cultural dialogue with Islamic countries, rejecting secularism and fundamentalism. Just like the pope said.

Rome (AsiaNews) - The attack against the Church of Saints in Alexandria, Egypt, on December 31 last, shows in an increasing harsh light the growth of Christianophobia in the Islamic world (and beyond). It is important to denounce this violence, but also to find practical steps to counter it.

First, the facts: Muslims accuse the Egyptian Coptic Church and Patriarch Shenouda III, of holding two women who converted to Islam captive against their will in convents in Egypt. This accusation, which is completely false, was repeated on the very same day of the attack, on December 31. In the mosque 200 meters from the church attacked at midnight, following his imam’s sermon, there was a demonstration of Muslims calling for the release of these two women and all others.

This story has been dragging on for four years. It claims that the two women, Wafa 'Constantine and Camelia Shehata, who are married to two priests, had marital problems, that they then converted to Islam and were kidnapped and hidden by the Church. It is true that women had marital problems, but it is not true that they converted. In fact the late leader of Al-Azhar, Tantawi, decreed that there is no evidence of their conversion. The two women were then brought to the Church, who for fear of their possible kidnapping by Islamist movements, gave them refuge in convents. But the story keeps coming back to the surface. Even after the attack on the Syrian Catholic church in Baghdad on October 31 last year, the group that claimed responsibility for the terrorist act, cited the case of these two women, to justify attacks against Christians in Egypt.

All of this is absurd. Yesterday, I participated in an online forum of an Islamic newspaper, al-Mesreyya, discussing the attack on the church in Alexandria. Instead of expressing their condolences for the Christian victims, their horror at the attack, etc.. Everyone - at least 60 comments- said that "it is the Copts fault," and cited the story of the two women; that the attack on the church was organized by Copts themselves "to make us look bad in front of the rest of the world"; or something that was organized by the U.S. and Mossad. I posted a short comment, but it was not published. In the few lines I wrote, I asked what right is there to force a conversion? Conversions are in stifled in Egypt, that is, conversion to Islam is facilitated but those from Islam to another religion are strongly hindered.

The imam of Al-Azhar

In this situation the reaction of Ahmed al-Tayyeb, the current Imam of Al-Azhar, is understandable. He paid a visit to the Coptic Patriarch Shenouda III to express his condolences. In Egypt, these visits are a formality every time there is an attack, they imply “we always understand each other”, and "we should not destroy national unity." Thousands of Christians were demonstrating in front of the patriarchate to ask for more security and protection for Christians. The faithful reacted by shouting slogans and throwing stones at the car of the Muslim representative. But we must also take into consideration what Muslims do. Over the past three months several times a picture Shenouda was trampled upon and destroyed, and the names of 200 Copts are on a death list, with the patriarch in first place. Among them are 100 names of Canadian, German, Austrian and European Copts, and "shedding their blood – reads the list - is lawful." In this case too, the obsession with conversions is at the root of the violence.

The Egyptian government says that the attack on the church of Alexandria was carried out by foreigners. And in a way it's true: the Iraqi group linked to Al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for the Church attack in Baghdad on Oct. 31, threatened further violence if the two Egyptian women were not handed over to the Islamic community. Al Qaeda, whose leader is al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, is in fact a widespread terrorist mafia with international branches.

The imam of Al-Azhar has criticized the pope for asking world governments to defend Christians and claims he does not care about Muslims killed in Iraq. That a figurehead such as he, considered a very learned and moderate man - he knows several languages and studied in Paris – should say such things against the pope is unacceptable: he has criticized the pope without really knowing anything, by simply repeating what he has read in the headlines[1].

In fact there is nothing to criticise in the Pope's address. Benedict XVI only recalled that violence against man is against the will of God. Of course he asked for help for Christians, seeing that he was referring to recent events. But even if he asked for increased security for Christians, is that really a scandal? If the governments of the Middle East are not able to defend them, because they do not want to or because they are not capable of doing so, then the world must do something, otherwise what's the UN or other international bodies for?

It is also ridiculous to say - as the imam of Ahzar did - that the pope has never defended the Muslims of Iraq. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI ever approved of the American intervention of Iraq, nor believe that it was lawful. It must be said then that Muslims are often targeted and killed by other Muslims. The pope can condemn violence and say that we must defeat intolerance, and stop justifying violence in the name of God, but the pope has done this countless times.

The destiny of Europe and the Middle East

Some analysts warn against attempts by the West to exploit all this violence against Christians. In fact, however, in many European countries, Muslims continue to increase their demands, presenting them as their "rights"; they do unusual things and nobody says anything. For example, in France and Italy, Friday Muslim prayer takes place in public spaces, on the streets, blocking traffic.

Islam in Europe is becoming increasing more demanding and governments do not know how to react to it; some impede integration; the relationship between governments and Muslim immigrants is among the most difficult.

Of course, the vast majority of Muslims want peace, want to integrate, but among them there are people who have another project: we in Europe have the right to have our law, Shariah, and you prevent us from having this. A few years ago in Milan, the head of the Viale Jenner mosque, responding to a questions about conversions to Christianity in Egypt said “you simply have to apply the law”, which means the death of those who have converted. And if you condemn the application of the law then you are holding back our freedom of religion. This position is creating problems in France, Italy, Sweden, etc. ..

It is possible that European governments use violence against Christians to block Islamic emigration. Just as is it possible that Israel uses this violence to justify an ever more apparent racism in Israeli society. But violence against Christians is something that happens every day and has as its aim to rid the Middle East of the Christian presence. Bombings and killings are a constant reality in Egypt.

Dialogue to defeat fundamentalism and secularism

For this reason, some European countries are beginning to say "enough". There is the growing realization that something must be done. It is true that other attacks on the religious freedom of Christians in China or Vietnam or in Laos, are condemned, if only, sporadically. The fact is that the Middle East is closely tied to Europe and the problem of coexistence with Islam is a European problem. I am pleased with the unanimous response of the international community on the attack on the Copts in Egypt. What is striking in this case is the absolute innocence of the Copts: What have they done to deserve such a murderous attack? In other parts - Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon ... - there are acts of war, but there is none of this here in Egypt, it is a violent, gratuitous attack motivated only by "conversions" and just as we all ask for freedom religion, as in the pope's message for World Day of Peace.

The episode in Alexandria in Egypt is an act against religious freedom. But Muslims in the name of Shariah, are not able to understand the value of human rights. Human rights must come before all tradition and all laws, even sharia.

It must be said that this violence also involves the West. The pope, in his speech on 1 January, said that it concrete actions are needed and not just words. I think we need pay particular attention to the Middle Eastern or Islamic countries, or wherever violence against religious freedom occurs. It is no good putting pressure on these nations, because they see it as too much interference. The American proposal for collaboration with Islam, made by Barack Obama, does not arouse enthusiasm because the U.S. proposals then lapse into a form of colonialism.

The point is that the relationship with these countries must become not exclusively economic but also cultural. One of the main points of this dialogue is the need to take the fundamentalists criticism of Western civilization, which they see as atheist, seriously. The fundamentalists are full of critical errors, but they are based in reality. They see that the West promotes an irreligious culture. In fact, the West is either neutral or indifferent, or even contrary to religion. While fundamentalists promote Islamic religious culture.

We have to take the middle road between two extremes: the secularist West, in which there is no room for religion, or Islamic fundamentalist way in which religion penetrates, through force, all areas of life : prayer, work, sex, family, etc. ...
In the Angelus of January 1, the pope said: "Today we are witnessing two opposite trends, both negative, both extremes: on one hand, secularism, which often in a very deceitful way, marginalizes religion to confine it to the private sphere and on the other fundamentalism, which instead wants to impose it by force. " I really think the pope is right. We must reject both secularism and fundamentalism.

[1] Ahmed al-Tayyeb, the imam of Al Azhar, criticized the pope for – in his opinion - having only appealed for greater protection for Christians in his homily on 1 January. "I do not agree - he said - with the position of the pope and wonder why the pope did not ask for protection when they were killing Muslims in Iraq." In fact, the pope's words were: "Faced with the threatening tensions of the moment, especially in the face of religious discrimination, abuses and intolerance, which today affect Christians in particular (cf. ibid., 1), once again I address this urgent appeal to not give in to despair and resignation. I urge everyone to pray that the efforts undertaken by several parties to promote and build peace in the world come to fruition". It is true however, that many media have published headlines like "Pope calls on governments to protect Christians," with a clear reduction of the message.

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Europe-and-Islam-in-the-wake-of-attacks-against-Copts-in-Alexandria-20410.html

Tina Beattie on "The New Athiests"

2010-09-24T10:01:00.003+01:00

Cultural Sadomasochism and Religion in Britain: A Review of Tina Beattie’s The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason & and the War on Religion

There is always a danger in making a book review blatantly autobiographical, as I am going to do here. But since I am writing purely for enjoyment and only to explore my own thoughts about Tina Beattie’s book The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason & and the War on Religion, I am not only going to dispense with this common wisdom but go against it zestily. I discovered Beattie’s book only some two days ago and read it cover to cover over a period of 24 hours. As an American living in England working on a post graduate degree in Religious History over the past six months, and having been an English teacher in Saudi Arabia and having thought a lot about Islam during that time before coming to England, I found Beattie’s spoke to my experience of the religious scene in Britain on a number of levels. I admit to not having read Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ scathing discussions of religion, which along with Sam Harris and some of the recent apologists for religion in the wake of Hitchens and Dawkins are the focus of Beattie’s book. But we hear so much about them here in Britain (I have in fact seen Harris lecture on cable television in the U.S.) and Beattie gives ample illustration of their discussions in the book, that it is not necessary—the need always to read an author in their own words notwithstanding.

Before talking about how it speaks to my perception of the religious mood of Britain at the present time, let me state what I believe Beattie is aiming to do. Here she aims to show: 1) how the new atheism is situated culturally and historically, and 2) how the new atheism and its rhetorical strategies, especially with regard to Dawkins, shows a basic disregard for civility and intolerance for rational debate at a time when they are desperately needed. These two themes are interrelated. For example, Beattie shows that the new atheists’ proclivity for finding a single rationality to which all of western civilization and beyond should ascribe, one which can only operate fully if the “superstitions” of religion are sloughed off, is similar to colonialist, imperialist and male-dominated types of thinking seen in the 18th and 19th century. There “men of science” attempted to rationalize colonial rule in Africa and Asia and clear it of any local and unincorporated conceptual and political impediments, as Beattie shows in some detail in the first few chapters.

There are other types of basic brush clearing done in the early chapter and where Beattie goes through typical assertions made by the new atheists in order to nuance the debate and bring civility to it. I particularly liked chapter 4 in which Beattie countered the notion found in new atheist writing that religion is a predominant cause of war throughout history. She shows that in the last 3000 years of history religion has been a cause in relatively few wars; the First and Second World War had nothing to do with religion; and if anything Nazism and the Cold War had much to do with Germany and Russia’s having broken away from their cultures’ Christian past. Beattie also shows that witch hunts of 17th century Europe had as much to do with the rise of scientific thinking and the desire to root out “superstition” and control women’s bodies and female subjectivity as it did with religion. The Spanish Inquisition was also counseled against by religious authority (124).

But more interesting for me is how Beattie speaks to what I am now sensing in my six-month-long stay in England with regards to how religion is regarded society-wide in Britain. Generalizing grossly about British views on religion (never a good thing to do), I believe it is fair to say that British society exhibits a set of tensions around religion which is as follows. On the one hand, there is a declining resonance between the British public and The Church of England, occurring for a number of reasons, one of which it its perceived attachment to colonialism and its being the established church. On the other hand we find an anti-Muslim sentiment population-wide, or at least an ambiguity toward Islam because of 9/11 and 7/7 fueled by strife within the British Muslim immigrant community. These frictions are fueled also by the perception that Britain was dragged foolishly into war in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States, a country whose Christianity is seen as part of the problem, which positions me in interesting ways as part of the landscape being described here. The way to deal with these interrelated problems in British society, it appears to many, is to slough off any attachment to religion, Christian or Muslim or other, a notion found not only among the new atheists.

While the above is my take on the issue, Beattie does not deny these tensions either. She shows us furthermore how these tensions are fed by secular impulses in British society which were rejected in the 7/7 attacks. I would add that there are some conversions to Islam among the British population, some 30,000 or so, who I would argue have been led to Islam because it is seen, at least partly, as way of being countercultural and counter-hegemonic, also part of the rejection of British secularism seen among British Muslisms of Islamic heritage. Conversion to Islam in Britain is also part of the declining numbers in Church of England attendance because of its perceived lack of cultural relevance, which is again part of an impulse which feeds and has been fed by the new atheism and its counterpart in the new fundamentalism in its Christian guises (see 137). Teenage pregnancy, Beattie points out, is among the highest in Europe (146). This and the Freudian influenced sexuality-expressed-will-make-you-free secularism has also contributed to conversions to Islam and to its militancy, or at least its stridency, among the British Islamic community, the female among whom are much more zealous in wearing the hijab in public as a statement of their rejection of this secularism than they were in years past.

Whether or not we need to remedy the current situation depends on where you stand. But that the social landscape sketched about is not civil and is tense on the ground here is beyond question. While I have taken my discussion in a direction different form the main direction charted by Beattie, these concerns are not absent in Beattie’s treatment. Nor do we differ on how they might be treated. Beattie does not use the term “cultural sadomasochism” as I do (to define a strain within the new atheism and paradoxically another strand of society thinking that Islam is counter cultural and anti-imperial) but she does, for example, discuss the way in which Christian roots can be pointed to for European modernity and scientific reason and the placing of the individual at the center of history, therefore suggesting that ignoring these roots is tantamount to cultural masochism. Beattie also mentions thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre who advocate a return to the Aristotelian and Christian views of rationality of the Middle Ages (144). This could not only be a way of forming common ground with Muslims and Jews, both of whom share in the Medieval Aristotelian heritage which the West inherited from the Levant (116), but also a way of finding common ground between religion and science. On this score as well, Beattie has a fascinating discussion of the new physics how it might relate to this medieval and sacramental view of the world. She also mentions how the Protestant Reformers, having come to see human nature as corrupted and grace being divorced from nature, also played a role in the overly narrow version of rationality and the science and theology split we find in the new atheism (58).

Beattie’s final salvo in my view begins with a discussion of Nietzsche and his thoughts on language and power (150). This is made part of an argument suggesting that if the language of or about God is to once again speak to contemporary Westerners it must be part of a renewed campaign for civility, one not afraid to campaign against church abuses as well (such as the Vatican’s failure to prosecute its own with links to Nazism). Nietzsche and the Postmoderns have shown us that language is part of its context: if this God language will once again have meaning, we must be once again good to one another. Literature, Narrative Theology and Holocaust thinkers such as Eli Weisel also show us how to move “beyond thinking of God as a philosophical conundrum” as is the case in the new atheism (152).
Beattie shows us in the last two chapters of the book how the relationship between God, humanity and contemporary history itself seemingly can be thought of as a literary character that stands free from the mind of its author as it speaks its truth and comes to life. This section stands as a dénouement to a postcolonial feminist Catholic analysis that may or not be able to stem the tide of cultural sadomasochism I see in Britain as it moves further away form the Christian tradition that partly built Europe and it. But if the heart of the Christian message is one of civility and integrative complexity, one where science and religion are allowed to inform one another and become subsumed within a rationality which allows for dialogue and organic growth among the social body where it is found, then the cultural sadomasochism that I see in contemporary British liberalism as well as Western liberalism as a whole might be able to be addressed, and addressed by some of the ideas found in this book. The ideas about Narrative Theology found here as well as those about the New Physics resonate with the Emerging Church movement, now worldwide, and with the Sojourners magazine inspired Social Gospel Christianity stemming from the United States.

An Emerging Remnant

2010-03-07T07:48:00.004Z

"Take a jar and put a piece of manna in it. Then place it before the lord to be kept for the generations to come" (Ex 16:33)

There are lots of references to "the remnant" in the Hebrew bible, and this is not necessarily one of them. But it's in the same ball park.

I haven't posted in nearly a year and a half here. And it's taken me weeks to find a new title for the blog that fits where my head is at now such as to allow me to post again. I think I've found it.

A "remnant" is what I feel like my religion is for me at this point. It's also a good way of referring to how my religion exists within the British culture, at least as far as I see it, in which I find myself living at the moment. The Emerging Church movement can I believe be a way of fanning the flames in which this remnant once lived, and on occasion very much still lives, in myself and in this culture.

St Ephraim, "Evil Doers," and Global Ecumenicism

2008-09-24T10:53:00.012+01:00

I refer to St. Ephraim when it is largely no longer customary to refer to Patristic writers as saints. The reason for this, as it was once told to me, was that “they were all saints” and “they all referred to each other this way.” I suspect there may be a little Catholic vs. Protestant in stripping these saints of their former titles. I believe restoring the title in the case of St. Ephraim is warranted for two reasons: 1) he simply deserves it, reasons why stated below 2) there were so many people and places named Ephraim in antiquity, especially Semitic antiquity, that it is a useful way of distinguishing among them. 3) I happen to like the overdetermined nature of term and signifier and the uneasiness it causes. That having been said, I may on occasion slip and call him simply Ephraim because it is easier.

Ephraim the Syrian (another of his appellations) wrote over five hundred hymns and theological treatises in the middle of the fourth century. One way of celebrating his importance, and there are several, is by turning to the relationships between theology and "interfaith" practice seen in his writings. It is said that Ephraim did not turn to hymn writing until he saw the importance of it in the Manichean church under the influence of Bardaisan in the region in which both he and Ephraim lived. Edessa was the capitol of once Byzantine controlled Syria which had recently come under the control of Persia. Stanley Hauerwas says that "one reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend." In Ephraim’s Edessa, where Persian and Byzatine political influence interacted with religious ideas stemming from the followers of Nicean orthodoxy, Manichean schools of thought and practice and various shades of Gnostic influence and all of these competed with on another, Haeurwas’ observation was as true then as it is today.

In the First Discourse Against The False Teachers, a theological treatise in the form of a letter, which Ephraim wrote to a follower of Bardaisan named Hypatius, we find ideas that speak to the present day. In my view, the most important ecumenical question of our day is not how Christian denominations can find common groud, indeed an important question, but how religions can find common ground to talk to one another. A subset of this is how to maintain and celebrate differences while still entering into dialog. The “clash of civilzations,” in Samuel Huntington’s phraeology, which did not exist in any way before 9/11 like it did after it, is something which has broght Christian denominations closer to one another at the same that it has pushed Christians and Muslims apart. This has nullified old needs but created new ones.

In this text St. Ephraim is urging accord between followers of Nicean orthodoxy and Manichean teacher Bardaisan. He is also attacking the doctrine of determinism that stems from Bardaisan and arguing instead for an understanding of Free Will. I could not help but see connections between President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, his references to “evil doers,” and current conflicts between the at least nominaly Christian world (which extends arguably from California eastward through the U.S. Europe and on to South Korea) and the Muslim world (which covers at least swaths of almost everthing else minus China and India). Bush’s worldview has more than once been called “Manichaean.”

Ephraim’s advice to the Manicheans of his day and those in ours is the following. Speaking of an ontological mixture of good and evil in the world and in our own souls is not only a denial of free will, it is blasphemous, he says. Doing so denies our ability to change and redirect our lives, as well as our ability to see this in others. “Whoever denies that there is Freewill utters a great blasphemy in that he hastens to ascribe his vices to God”(sec 24). “How was He who was unable to give Freewill able to give a Law when there was no Freewill? But if He gave the Law, the righteousness which is in His Law censures our Freewill, for he rewards it according to its works.” (sec 27)

While one may suggest that the decidely Christian character of Ephraim’s First Discourse would be offensive to Muslims, I would aruge that Ephraim’s world-view is sufficiently Abrhamaic and stemming from the ancient Semitic Patrarchs to allow it to speak to Muslims. The notion that God’s law interacts with and is impossible without human freewill is found in Islam and Judaism. St. Ephraim says God’s multivariate body (an ecumenical image if there ever was one) is like Mt. Sinai with Moses standing at its top. “All those who are like Moses are near to his holiness like Moses, and form one body ..and by means of that body, too,which our Lord was raised, all bodies have received a pledge that they will be raised in like manner.” (sec 5). There are a number of other helpful ecumencial images in this work of Ephraim, but none are as helpful as the idea that our souls and bodies are basically pure. While evil exists along with those who do evil, it is the will of these individuals which is the cause of this rather than the structure of the cosmos or the human psyche. This is a useful thing to keep in mind as Pakistan attempts to deal with political unrest and a new Prime Minister, and we realize it was not “the surge” alone that caused a drop in violence in Iraq recently, but rather individuals assocaited with the Awakening Councils along with Muqtadar AlSadr’s militians who decided to stop the violence they chose to engage in rather than ontological violence stemming from their non-Christian souls.

Obama on the economy

2008-09-22T08:53:00.002+01:00

I stole this off the net, but this person probably did the same. That is how the net works. Let's spread useful, in this case VERY useful information. Obama gave this economic speech on March 27th. See anything that indicates foresight?

Obama:

But the American experiment has worked in large part because we have guided the market's invisible hand with a higher principle. Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That is why we have put in place rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest. We have done this not to stifle - but rather to advance prosperity and liberty. As I said at NASDAQ last September: the core of our economic success is the fundamental truth that each American does better when all Americans do better; that the well being of American business, its capital markets, and the American people are aligned.

I think all of us here today would acknowledge that we've lost that sense of shared prosperity.

This loss has not happened by accident. It's because of decisions made in boardrooms, on trading floors and in Washington. Under Republican and Democratic Administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both...

I do not believe that government should stand in the way of innovation, or turn back the clock to an older era of regulation. But I do believe that government has a role to play in advancing our common prosperity: by providing stable macroeconomic and financial conditions for sustained growth; by demanding transparency; and by ensuring fair competition in the marketplace.

Our history should give us confidence that we don't have to choose between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells us we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. But we can do so only if we restore confidence in our markets. Only if we rebuild trust between investors and lenders. And only if we renew that common interest between Wall Street and Main Street that is the key to our success...

We need to regulate institutions for what they do, not what they are. Over the last few years, commercial banks and thrift institutions were subject to guidelines on subprime mortgages that did not apply to mortgage brokers and companies. It makes no sense for the Fed to tighten mortgage guidelines for banks when two-thirds of subprime mortgages don't originate from banks. This regulatory framework has failed to protect homeowners, and it is now clear that it made no sense for our financial system. When it comes to protecting the American people, it should make no difference what kind of institution they are dealing with.

This seems to be the right argument for regulation. I'm on record as proclaiming the death of Reaganomics. The notion that government is the problem has been proven false. Without proper government oversight, the markets run wild, salaries for the wealthiest explode, and the cost of basic needs (gas, food, housing, health insurance) soar.

Let's hope America wakes up and gives the dunces who have fostered this style of economics for the past 30 years the boot.

Not facing Mecca, or Washington, but the Body

2008-09-20T14:14:00.005+01:00

I want to follow up on the Yoga post I made the other day and Seane Corn's thoughts on Yoga. She says, as I quoted her, that we cannot approach God through the head but have to do it through the body. This gets us into feeling and feeling gets us to surrender.

Since I have been in Saudi Arabia I have done Yoga hundreds of times. But every time I do it I face away from the direction of Mecca and instead face the east, the land of the Buddha and the Dharma. This is partly a revolt against Islam. But it is also a taking on of their practices too, since some Yoga poses, such as Down Dogs, clearly involve prostration and a kind of submission. So am I moving toward Islam or away from it? Both, probably. I believe I am on the verge of something here and simply wanted to say that this is probably Seane Corn territory.

Speaking of the body as an avenue away from and to God, lately I have been very irritated at Republicans in my country and their embrace of Sara Palin. I get so angry with Republicans that I loose all perspective. I have begun recently to give this to my yoga practice and dedicate it to all those who I know who feel the same way. New Age silliness you say? Suggesting that it is not is this verse from Matthew which jumped out at me the other day. You may not think the body can be thought of as a kind of altar upon which we lay our junk, but we have several major world traditions saying something contrary. It also suggests that Yoga may be a way of facing neither Mecca, nor Washington but the body and that place where "we move and have our being."

Matthew 5:21-26

21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother [15] will be liable to judgment; whoever insults [16] his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell [17] of fire. 23 So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. 26 Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. [18]

Yoga, Seane Corn, Christianity

2008-09-18T13:43:00.005+01:00

Since hardly anyone reads this blog on any regular basis, you won't know that I occassionaly brag about NPR's Speaking of Faith Program. But I do. I am not whining, it's true. I don't care if anyone reads this blog. I am writing for me and that reader of writers in me.

SOF ran an excellent program this week on Yoga with yoga teacher Seane Corn. You really need to hear this one, and can't see how genuine and on the money she is from this excerpt from the transcript. But I put a couple of sections from the interview with her in order show how Christianity and Yoga can work together. It was a highly revealing interview for me.

There are some 20 million people across the U.S. that are doing yoga on a regular bassis, and there are far more outside that country. If we can't connect Christianity with some of the gems that are coming to us and through the issues talked about here, then we are missing a major opportunity. I am quoting way more than I should here, but just sort of can't help it. And you should hear what she says about working with junkie and prostitute teenagers, which I have not put here. Gotta' go online for that, which is here http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/

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Ms. Tippett: Let's talk about some of the words that you use in the context of yoga that in fact are spiritual words, like "grace." Talk about invoking the energy of grace in a yoga practice. I don't think that would make sense to many people.
Ms. Corn: I think that there's a lot of ways. I think first I need to define my relationship with God. I talk about God all the time in class, and I'm pretty confident in my relationship with God. And therefore, I'm comfortable using the word. But when I define spirit, it's that which exists within that's of truth and love. And so when I refer to grace or to spirit or to God, I'm talking of truth and love.
Ms. Tippett: And so, I mean, again, and this is kind of the same theme, when you say that the heart of the practice of yoga is love, you know, what do you mean by that?
Ms. Corn: Yeah.
Ms. Tippett: How can love be the heart of this practice of a series of physical poses and breathing?
Ms. Corn: It comes down to this for me: You can't get to God through your head, at least in my experience. I might come back in 20 years and say, you know, "Remember everything I was saying at 41? I was totally wrong." But how I've experienced it is that you can't get to God through your head, because it's determined by your five senses, so therefore we're limited to what we know, what we see, what we've experienced here on earth. For me, I've only been able to get to God through my heart, not through what I know but through what I feel because feelings lead to surrender. Surrender allows you to step into that unknown state where there's a different level of acceptance to what is rather than what you're choosing it to be. So for me, you release the tension, it opens you up to feelings, feelings connect you to surrender, and suddenly you're hearing with a new ear that moves beyond human interpretation but to spiritual perception which is infinite and limitless.

Ms. Corn: Yeah. Yeah. Another aspect is actually using your body to pray.
Ms. Tippett: Well, talk to me about that. Body prayer is something you do.
Ms. Corn: Yeah. Well, again, it all connects ultimately back to service, which is also, you know, kind of the evolution of the work that I've done. But using your body to pray. I trust that if I do my yoga practice, I'm going to get stronger and more flexible. If I stay in alignment, if I don't push, if I don't force, then my body will organically open in time. I know that if I breathe deeply, I'll oxygenate my body. It has an influence on my nervous system. These things are fixed and I know to be true. But I also recognize that it's a mystical practice, and you can use your body as an expression of your devotion. So the way that you place your hands, the ways that you step a foot forward or back, everything is done as an offering. I offer the movements to someone I love or to the healing of the planet. And so if I'm moving from a state of love and my heart is open to that connection between myself and another person or myself and the universe, it becomes an active form of prayer, of meditation, of grace.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Ms. Tippett: I want to ask you if these experiences of yours, these insights, and especially the work you do with child prostitutes, there's also this shadow side of this observation that mind, body, and spirit are linked. We know that when there is sexual violence, when there is rape or, you know, when there's sexual abuse, it's not just bodies that suffer; it's the soul.
Ms. Corn: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: How has yoga helped you understand that more deeply?
Ms. Corn: Well, again, it goes back into my own history, and it all lines — you know, it's all interdependent and connected and that's where I see the god. My first experience of betrayal, perhaps, was molestation at six years old. And I'm very public with this. I've talked about this frequently because it's led me to where I am today. It's where I find so much gratitude, and I marvel at how one thing can become something else. When you're a child, you have no — I had no sense of sexuality, of course, yet I experienced both panic and pleasure. And I didn't know what pleasure was, so I felt ashamed and guilty. And, again, this is not something I was conscious about. I was very aware of the molestation, but I wasn't as conscious of the intricacies that I'm sharing with you.
Ms. Tippett: Right. Right.
Ms. Corn: That came later. And so when I went through my own journey to the understanding that these events have happened, now what am I going to do with it? Am I going to continue pointing the finger back to my life and saying, "You did this to me and therefore I get to spend the rest of my life in inappropriate relationships, afraid of the world, because of what you did"? Or can I say, like, "No. That was done. Here's how it disconnected me to spirit. Here's how I can reclaim this. And now look what I get to do with it, not in spite of the experience, but because of it." And suddenly this thing that was so bad actually became a gift. And that gift not only changes my heart, but maybe can impact someone else's.
Ms. Tippett: You also in that practice of body prayer, I think it was there, you talked about — let me just look at my notes — about thinking about, dedicating your practice and channeling that energy that you experience and tap into and take in and release in yoga, even towards the people who have, you know, not just towards the people you love and the things you're grateful for, but the people you're not grateful for. Right? That the people who've hurt you.
Ms. Corn: I have to.
Ms. Tippett: And what happens when you do that? I mean, what —
Ms. Corn: Part of me gets irritated, but that's just my ego. That's the part of me that just doesn't know better. But my heart opens. The people who have hurt or harmed me were also my teachers. They provided fierce lessons that brought me closer to myself and then therefore God, and also taught me about life. I always pray for the people who have hurt and harmed me, and just when I think I've forgiven them, I forgive them again, because always that energy will rear its head, and I have to make sure that I'm constantly keeping myself clean. Otherwise, I'm holding onto that shadow of anger, and the inability to forgive, they say, is a poison you take hoping someone else will die. And, again, it keeps us disconnected from God.
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Ms. Tippett: You know, as we've said, there are so many people doing yoga now. There are yoga centers springing up on every street corner in every city and not just yoga centers, but classes and YMCAs. And I'm sure you're aware within Christian circles there is some resistance to that, some wariness, because there is this sacred aspect to the tradition of yoga, the sacred history. And, you know, there is some movement to replace some of the Hindu phrases or the Sanskrit phrases with Christian vocabulary and words. I'm just curious about your response to that, how you think about that.
Ms. Corn: You know, again, yoga has been happening for thousands of years, and it's certainly a continually evolving practice. I like to think that yoga itself is bigger than any one tradition and that it has its place in all the different traditions. And if a Christian needs to bring in — I mean, when I go into the Bible Belt, for example, and using prayer in the class, I will always mention Jesus Christ because I want to invoke into the space a sense of the sacred that's going to be familiar and comfortable to the practitioners that I'm working with so that they feel at home and they feel welcomed. So I don't really have a problem with it.
That's probably not a popular decision or opinion, but there is room for yoga and Christianity. There's room for yoga and Judaism. There's room for yoga in all the different traditions. What it comes down to, what you can't take away is that yoga means we are all one, and so it's fine by me. If that's what's going to take these religions to get everyone breathing together, moving together, releasing tension together, and being more available to authentic prayer — not prayer from your head, but prayer from your heart — that's more unified, then I welcome it.

9/11 Vegetarianism

2008-09-13T14:54:00.006+01:00

I feel really pretentious saying anything about 9/11, especially on 9/11, but on any day for that matter. But on this 9/11 I became a vegetarian. So instead of saying something corny on 9/11 I am doing something for myself and possibly, just ever so possibly, for the world too.

I was sitting in an Indian restaurant and it just hit me; that is what I needed to do. Some people become vegetarians for health reasons. Others do it for spiritual reasons, as did I. I want to let go of more suffering and be more open to people. 9/11 seemed to be a good day to do this. I also want to better train myself to manage my moods and not succumb to negative thoughts. The kind of thing the practice of Buddhist meditation that has sloppily been part of my life for ten years now is about. But how can I do this when I consume the flesh of beings who have been raised for the slaugher? Would not 9/11 be the perfect day for committing more thoroughly to letting go of suffering in myself and stopping the imputation of it to others? From now on the only flesh I consume is that of Jesus and fish (I am not going to cut out eggs either). Since Jesus is represented by a fish, and the sea is place of vast nutritional resources just as the cosmos is--what the Chinese heritage Buddhists would call "the ten-thousand things"--I see no contradiction there.

I found the following 9/11 reflection on Sojourners website. It was written by Brian Mclaren, a guy who keeps popping into my life more and more. So, I post it here. I believe he's put his finger on a way to honor 9/11 but also work through it and build from it.

From Sojourner's website, Thursday, September 11, 2008
Holding 9/11's Emotions Up to the Light of God (by Brian McLaren)

All of us remember this day, where we were when we heard the news, our feelings, our fears. There has been a lot of controversy about how the memory of this day has been or is being used or misused for political purposes, but I always come back to one of my life mottoes: the best antidote to misuse is not disuse -- it is proper use.

In many ways we have run from the feelings of that day ... grief, grievance, unity, confusion, dislocation, vulnerability and solidarity. In many ways, we quickly transmuted those emotions into ones that we are more familiar with, ones we know how to "work with" -- anger, lust for revenge, blame, scapegoating, offended pride, even hate.

But maybe now, seven years later, we are able to return to the feelings of that day and in some way learn from them now what we may not have been able to learn from them back then.

Grief -- we lost so much that day. Loved ones. A sense of invulnerability. A sense of transcendence over the rest of the world for whom violence is so much a part of daily life. Ungrieved grief makes us sick, and so it is good, today, to grieve.

Grievance -- we knew instantly that the people who were suffering were not guilty of the violence they were experiencing, and this sense of having been wronged filled us all. Something healthy happens in our souls when we hold that feeling up to the light -- without letting it toxify into bitterness and revenge.

Unity -- we knew that we needed each other and needed to stand together. Now, in the midst of a bitterly fought election, can we recall that understanding of our standing together?

Confusion -- we realized that the world was more complex than we realized, that there were forces at work we weren't attending to, and of the pain in being pushed from the category of knowers to seekers. Not understanding is humbling, and again, it is good to hold ourselves in that humility without relieving ourselves of it by pretending we have everything figured out according to our various ideologies and slogans.

Vulnerability -- our confidence in our own power shaken, we faced that there were other powers that must be reckoned with. We felt that we are more like our neighbors around the world than we realized: that our lives can be interrupted by those with grievances, pain, confusion, and fear of their own ... that we are connected with those who have grievances against us, and we must share the world with them, and they with us.

Solidarity -- many said that the whole world was American that day, but it was also true that we in America felt solidarity with the rest of our war-torn, violence scarred world that day. I believe at some deep level, the Holy Spirit was warming each of our hearts with a longing for shalom/salaam/peace ... since we so acutely felt its absence.

If you just read over each of these emotions, and hold them up in your heart to the light of God, you will see the ways in which these emotions can open us towards the living God of love. Then, perhaps, consider the alternatives -- anger, lust for revenge, blame, scapegoating, even hate -- and think of the effect these feelings can have on your spiritual life, how they can be "sacralized" and baptized and camouflaged under religious language. Perhaps, if you see this dark process at work in you and us, that will move you to repentance and prayer.

If you have a few more minutes, listen to this podcast from my friend Fred Burnham, who was across the street from ground zero, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the towers fell. His story exemplifies how we can let the experience of 9/11 be a sanctifying one in our lives, individually and together. May it be so.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. He serves as board chair for Sojourners.

David VS Goliath, the Emergent Paradigm takes on the right

2008-09-09T09:01:00.008+01:00

I have been fighting with a guy on a particular website in a forum devoted to Emergent Christianity. I have been so grabbed intellectually (and spiritually) by this exchange that I feel the need to post bits of it here. I have changed the names to protect the identities of those involved. It all began with a very insightful list of characterizations of the emergent movement, which I will post here. The question was: which of the items on this list do you like? Which do you not like? Why? Here is the list: The emergents seem to espouse:
1. An awareness of and attempt to reach those in the changing postmodern culture.
2. An attempt to use technology, i.e., video, slide shows, internet.
3. A broader approach to worship using candles, icons, images, sounds, smells, etc.
4. An inclusive approach to various, sometimes contradictory belief systems.
5. An emphasis on experience and feelings over absolutes.
6. Concentration on relationship building over proclamation of the gospel.
7. Shunning stale traditionalism in worship, church seating, music, etc.
8. A de-emphasis on absolutes and doctrinal creeds
9. A re-evaluation of the place of the Christian church in society.
10. A re-examination of the Bible and its teachings.
11. A re-evaluation of traditionally held doctrines.
12. A re-evaluation of the place of Christianity in the world.
I'm sure there are many more. Do you like some of the things on the list?

Jane Doe said:

This non-distinction is tough to relate to you when you have grown up in a Christian community that loves to dichotomize and separate sacred from secular. I think for the EC, it isn't so much that "they" are non-Christians "out there" and "we" are Christians "in here," but rather we are all in the world together. Furthermore, as I interact with people whom I perhaps may have written off as not-yet-believers, I may find that they are much closer to God than I had thought, perhaps even closer than I am! So as radical as it sounds, many in the EC are not looking to create converts, not trying to get non-Christians to become Christians, but like you said, growing in the knowledge of Jesus Christ as savior. These can be two different things - although it sounds weird at first. A person can grow in the kingdom of God without having to convert to Christianity. And a person may be very close to God without having the title of "Christian." In short, emergents are willing to find Christ even in the non-Christian.

____________________

John Doe responded:

WHAT? "A person can grow in the kingdom of God without having to convert to Christianity." Isn't this really just a post-modern offshoot of Universalism - everyone is "saved."

I may sound critical, but how do you interpret Jesus' words - I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) One MUST become a follower of Christ (read - Christian) in order to become a part of the Kingdom.

One point of agreement though - I do think that some may "grow into" Christianity as they are on the journey. They may be a lot deeper than we OR they know. Because we are all made in the image of God, we can see Christ in others. Regardless, we must be clear that the only way is through Christ.

Malcom XYZ says: "but how do you interpret Jesus' words - I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)"

As a way of interpreting this, we might want to ask what it means to come through the father through Jesus? does it mean we have to beat people into submission and say that until they accept our version of reality and yell to the hilltops that they are indeed a Christian? Does it mean they have to consume the symbols of Christ in the Eurcharist? or might it mean that we take seriously Jesus statement that he came so that we could have life and have it more abundantly? There is a way of living implied in Jesus' words and sayings and in what he did. There is an openness there that is far beyond the dogma that we must make card-carrying Christians out of everyone we encounter. If I find someone who has that openness, whether they be Buddhist, Muslim or agnostic, they are coming to the father through Jesus whether they know it or not.

John's gospel was written in the last years of the first century, almost 60 years after Jesus had left us. This was a time when the theology of the early church had changed and become more Christocentric. Jesus might not have even said this and just because John says he did does not mean that he did. Once again, human values and good common sense need to win out over narrow dogmatic (and I am tempted to say Evangelical) interpretations.

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John Doe says: Wow. I thought I'd met some people who took things out of context, but I guess my circle is pretty small. I'm trying to reply respectfully, but wow... I'm amazed at some of your audacious statements.

""Jesus might not have said this and just because John says he did does not mean that he did." That's a bold statement. Do you think Jesus said anything? How do you choose to pick what you believe He said?"

Do you seriously apply that same philosophy to other historical literature (Plato for example) or is it only to Christianity and the Bible? There are two reputable stances to the dating of the Gospel. One places it pre-fall of Jerusalem; one places it after. How did you choose your dating? In addition, do you throw out the oral traditions and practices of the Jewish people? Are you ignoring all of the historical context of the writers?

As far as your "openness" theology, the teachings of Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, agnosticism, etc.. contradict one another in many places. With contradicting philosophies regarding "human values and good common sense," how you reach your dogmatic conclusions?

your philosophy of living out Christ's command to love and live out faith is EXCELLENT. But please don't throw out or water down the things in the Bible that may be more difficult than "being nice." That is not an honest approach to history, scholarship and faith.

With respect, I have yet to beat anyone into submission or force anyone to do anything they do not believe. I know I don't have everything perfect. But I am willing to learn, read, study, listen, etc.

__________________________________

Hi John Doe,

Let me quote you as I respond to your post.

You wrote:
""Jesus might not have said this and just because John says he did does not mean that he did." That's a bold statement. Do you think Jesus said anything? How do you choose to pick what you believe He said?"

We have to ask if it squares with Q or if it is in Q. The highly Christological Gospel of John, which I happen to like but because of John himself rather than the idea that he interviewed Jesus with a mic and a notepad, mostly does not square with Q. Most scholars date it around the turn of the first century. That makes it post fall of Jerusalem. It was also written in Asia Minor, Ephesus to be exact, and far away from the Galilean context in which the movement of Jesus the prophet, social reformer and conduit to God, rather than God himself, began. I take very seriously this context. I read Aramaic and Greek. But I do not believe that Jesus said that the only way to salvation and Enlightenment in the early twenty-first century was by renouncing the intellectual and spiritual worth of the world’s treasure trove of traditions and those who are uncomfortable with the label Christian.

You wrote:
"As far as your "openness" theology, the teachings of Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, agnosticism, etc.. contradict one another in many places. With contradicting philosophies regarding "human values and good common sense," how you reach your dogmatic conclusions?"

I am not sure which dogmatic conclusions you are referring to, but if you mean the notion that there is value in these other traditions and that they deserve our respect, but not blind acceptance, then I suppose it was my darned liberal and pluralistic education that helped me reach that one.

You wrote:
"please don't throw out or water down the things in the Bible that may be more difficult than "being nice." That is not an honest approach to history, scholarship and faith."

I believe that Jesus taught us ultimately to be nice, and that anything less is not worthy of his legacy. There are only two laws after all, one is to love God with all our heart, and the other is to love our neighbor as our selves. Jesus did not know of the other traditions. God has many names now. The Christocentric overlay that developed after the fall of Jerusalem and within the uncertainties of Christian life in a Roman empire which required this at the time is no longer needed. The world is now a very different place. Jesus’ movement is about affirming the world, about justice, and living in accordance with God. The notion that we condemn other traditions outright is simply contrary to this AND is intellectually and spiritually dishonest.

If you can think of ways that I could be more intellectually and religiously honest, then please let me know what that is. This is serious stuff we are discussing here. And you and I both take it very seriously. Forgive me if I seem gruff. But I have spent 30 years overcoming my Evangelical upbringing and I am not about to give an inch. There is an open and non-dogmatic Christianity our there and worth fighting for. It is also a real Christianity. Not the fake you want to make it out to be.

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Hi Malcom XYZ,

Thanks for your reply. This does not appear to be the appropriate place for this type of discussion, but I'm glad you take the time to read and truly think. Tragically, I don't think there is enough of that in our world and many problems would be resolved if people would consider these things with thoughtfulness and grace.

I can't compare anything to "Q" because it has not been found. While I have read information relating to the reasons people think it exists, it has not been found nor do I think it will be because I don't think it exists.

The dating for John has two very excellent groups of scholars who disagree. From my study of Greek (no Aramaic - sorry!), I understand the word in John 5:2 that refers to the pool that "is" there rather than the pool that "was" there. While John's tense may have been off, this seems a more accurate source than Clement (whom many scholars cite).

I too went through a number of years of searching to (successfully) free myself from the teachings of my childhood. Therefore, I researched the teachings and writings of others. Perhaps not as extensively as you, but I have read other perspectives with respect and a willingness to learn. In my travels to Central America and Europe, I observed various religions. From it all, I consistently walked away with the understanding that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. Archaeology and study continue to back up the Bible's statements as true and accurate. It appears to be the minds of men that find ways to declare it as untrue.

NOW back to the group - The reason I joined this group was to learn and discuss the emerging perspective on the church and faith. I'm a little shocked you would state that I am propagating a "fake" Christianity.

Again, I'm glad you have taken the time to study, but - to be 100% honest - it appears that you have reached personal conclusions and your heels are dug in.

Therefore, while I love discussing theology, religion and faith, I will respectfully bow out of this one. While I would love to continue, it appears (with complete respect) that you will simply throw out anything I state from Scripture or any source that is not on your "approved" list. The Bible is the foundation of my faith and practice.

May God bless you in your walk.
Pax,

___________________________________

Hi again John Doe,

I too think we are not going to get very much further in this discussion and think we should discontinue it. But let me say that I am glad there are sincere and good-hearted Christians out there who take their faith seriously. I have encountered many many Christians in my years who simply cannot come to terms with the idea that we can be open to other faiths and still be Christian. In my view, and in the view of much of the emergent movement, it is much more important to be talking about the kind of raised consciousness, sensitivity to injustice and God centered-ness that Jesus talked about rather than spending all our time focusing on him as a person. The notion that he was the suffering servant and redeemer of humanity is taken from ideas also found in Isaiah, written hundreds of years before Jesus and interpolated into the tradition by those who experienced God and their ability to be in the world in a new way with the help of Jesus. Scholars in Jerusalem have recently found other texts indicating there was another messiah, this one named Simon, who was deemed to die and be raised from the dead in three days. Google that. My point is that we need to be focusing on how Jesus showed us we can live in the world with our neighbors and enact the kingdom that is already here rather than focusing on the man who showed us these things. If one does not, it is as if we are jumping up and down and saying "look at my new car, how shiny and bright it is" rather than getting in it and driving it anywhere. Let's go and stop worrying about the particular brand name, color and serial number of the car that we are driving.

you also said "I'm a little shocked you would state that I am propagating a "fake" Christianity." But if you look back at what I wrote you will see that I said that you were saying these things of my version of Jesus' message. I would not say this of your version of things. There is a sizable portion of the American electorate who does think the way you do. They are called the religious right. Unfortunately they support war, claim to be pro-life but actually support capital punishment, and are actually responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths (some pro-life stance there folks. Kudos!). They have also completely forgotten about Jesus' teachings on the poor and on wealth. They have also completely forgotten "blessed are the peacemakers" and "those who live by the sword will die by the sword."I am not totally sure you identify with the religious right. But you appear to. If I am wrong about that I am sorry. But that I feel so strongly that this version of Christianity is a betrayal of Jesus' message is the reason I am so adamant about this. This is a forum for emergent Christianity, no the religious right. Surely you see that my point of view is in line with that paradigm and not that of the religious right, the one you appear to be espousing, but correct me if I am wrong on that..

And as for the existence of Q, I defer to the greatest minds in twentieth century European and American scholarship on that. For these minds it exists, and for the hundreds of thousands of students who have studied under them in the colleges and universities outside of conservative seminaries and colleges, it exists as well. God did not call us to leave our intellects at the door of our houses of worship.

Hello again,
First of all, I started a new discussion thread. I'd like to take a step back and cover the "emerging" versus "emergent" definitions. I think they are two different things.
As I see them defined:
Emerging refers to those who would consider themselves to be (to at least a degree of the traditional definition) evangelical Christians. Perhaps "Biblical" Christians would be a better term? They hold to the "essentials" of the Christian faith, but believe there is a stream (you would probably call them the "religious right") that has taken Christianity away from what was intended. I'm in this camp of those who want to live out a Christian faith based on God's Word - not on politics.
Emergent refers to those who would consider themselves to be "open" to various streams of faith and what they have to offer the global religious perspective. While I don't hold any antagonism against emergent individuals, I don't think they should be defined the same way. Forgive me if I am incorrect, but I believe you are in this camp.

There is a big difference between the two.

I wouldn't call either "fake." They are two completely different things though in my opinion.

And, last but not least (because I can't seem to stop myself),
- If you are mentioning Simon bar Giora mentioned in Josephus, that is a totally different situation from the historical texts. They were literally digging under the wall to escape. If you are referring to someone else, please let me know.
- Q will continue to be debated by many, many "great minds." While I am obviously not one of those great minds, I respect the opinions of both sides. As one who does try to think sometimes, I would put myself in the camp of those who don't put credence in a document that became "factual" by a process of reverse development. Aristotle's law of contradiction is an interesting contemplation here. Q either exists or it doesn't.

Anyway - Please consider responding to the other discussion thread.

Pax, John Doe
_____________________________
Hi John Doe,

I must confess that a lot of what I know about the EC comes from my reading on the internet. I have ordered MacLaren's first book and books by Stanley Haurwaus, Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. Since the internet and new media is such a big part of EC, I think having learned of it there and in blogs and continuing to learn of it in these places is not such a bad thing. It may be the best way in fact. It seems to be the case that the terms "emergent" and "emerging" are interchangeable. What I would like to hear a good explanation of is how the use of these terms relates to the phrase "emergent properties" which we often hear bandied about in Systems Theory and Neuroscience. Is this a useful designation, however cool and interesting it may sound? I believe it is, but I am still coming to terms with it. I do think new forms of christian community and evangelizaton are appearing because of the internet, the cutting edge of technology and the way the globe is being brought together by it, represent something very new and exciting. Keep in mind that I am in Saudi Arabia, one of the strictest Muslim countries on earth, as we debate some of the important things happening in the church. That is not a pat on my back but an indication of how the world is changing.

Getting a bit into a response to the content of your last post, and into the question of where the political dimension lies in the EC "conversation", I just clipped this out of the wikipedia entry on EC. I highly encourage folks to do searches in wiki on emerging church, emergent church, emerging christianity and emergent community. Lots of rich stuff here. but basically there is a core, and which is captured in this:

"The emerging church (sometimes referred to as the emergent church movement) is a Christian movement whose participants seek to live their faith in modern society by emulating Jesus Christ irrespective of Christian religious traditions. Proponents of this movement call it a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature as well as its emphasis on interfaith dialogue rather than one-way evangelism. Members of emerging communities may be disillusioned with the organized and institutional church and often support the deconstruction of modern Christian dogma. The movement often favors the use of simple story and narrative, occasionally incorporating mysticism. Members of the emerging movement place high value on good works or social activism, sometimes including missional living or new monasticism; while Evangelicals may emphasize eternal salvation, many in the emerging movement emphasize the here and now and the need to create a kingdom of heaven on Earth."

I do not want to demonize those who feel comfortable with the label evangelical. This is because I feel EC is basically a "conversation" between the left and right sides of the church. Without both talking to one another, we've got nothing. But the EC movement's energy clearly seems to be coming from those on the side opposite the evangelicals and who embrace post modernism and the hodgepodge of ideas connected to it (and entire thread needs to be devoted to that, what we think it is and how it should be seen and treated).

You will note that the view towards other traditions I was espousing is represented in the quote above. I will concede however, that there is only so far we can go with this and still remain Christian. I am a Christian and do not feel that a Buddhist or a Muslim, no matter how many wonderful hours we spend in ecumenical dialog, can just walk in off the street and partake in the Eucharist. There is a long process of commitment that needs to take place before this, let alone a baptism. So you and I are on the same page to an extent. I am just not concerned over whether or not they are going to the of heaven of Jesus, or some vague notion thereof. I have Buddhists in my family and I have felt too powerfully their sacred and have spent too much time in the Muslim world to think they need to embrace Jesus to go to heaven or think this is the right way to approach our shared lives, our shared religious lives, on this planet.

This is an article on the messiah named Simon that has been recently found. It is previously unknown and is not referred to in Josephus. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

what this all means is another story. But i have given my take on it. but I would not suggest that i am the last word here, by any means.

as for the existence of Q. There are major chunks of text in the three synoptic gospels that are so similar it would suggest that the three writers were either showing each other what they wrote and making a conscious effort to be uniform almost to the very word. But the three texts represent different communities and so this seems unlikely. Or, there were circulating oral traditions and sayings of Jesus that predated the three gospels. Mark may have been part of what circulated too. The gospel of Thomas, which is often unfairly called "Gnostic," as if that is the end of the story, is dated very early by some scholars. Thomas should be called Coptic Christian rather than Gnostic in my view so that it is not so easily dismissed. It circulated in a sayings format that bears remarkable resemblance to the core texts that are found in the synoptics. What we think of the theology of Thomas aside, to me it is a bit mystical and fringe too, to me it looks there was a set of oral tradtions, memory and a set of sayings that predated the synoptics. I call this Q until I am swayed in another direction. Feel free to show me where I am wrong.

thanks for this conversation, M XYZ

Solitude in Saudi

2008-09-07T11:47:00.001+01:00

A couple of months ago as I was reading one of Thomas Merton's final journals before his tragic death, I came across a sentence about his life being about, among other things, the practice of solitude. That was not the first time it had dawned on me the profound interconnection between the life I am leading in Saudi Arabia and that most ex-pats lead here and that of the monastic. In some ways the Islamic world has taken the experience of the monastery and imposed onto enitre countries. For an ex-pat, it can literally drive you mad. But we can also learn to cultivate it too. Here are some remarks about solitude and how to cultivate it that I pulled off of beliefnet that I felt might be of use to me and others.

1. Learn to Befriend Solitude
Solitude has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as a lonely state. Nothing can be further from the truth. We need the rich soil of solitude to grow into ourselves. Spend a few minutes each day in solitude. Turn off your cell phone and TV and just let yourself be in stillness. Gradually, as you befriend solitude, rather than flee from it, you will begin to hear the voice of your own authentic self.

2. Stay Patient
To be in solitude takes patience. Patience allows us to stay in the present so that we can reflect and change. Most of us are feverishly impatient. We want change and we want it now. Being in solitude takes patience so that we have time to rest, reflect, and restore ourselves. That's when we start to listen to ourselves so that true change can happen.

3. Start Where You Are
In solitude, you start where you are, with whatever feelings you have, not where you want to be. Expect that at first all sorts of raw emotions will come up, like fear, anger, frustration, shame or guilt. They belong to the old voices that tell us how we should be and what we ought to do. Question every should and ought that crosses your path. Know that you are on the right path--your path--when you feel your own voice kicking inside you like a babe in the womb.

4. Begin Your Sorting Process
In fairy tales, the princess is often given the task of sorting before she can begin to weave her new life. Solitude gives us the same opportunity. We sort and separate out the old voices from our own personal voice, the old story from the new story, which is about us, what we desire, and how to get it.

5. Take Time for Self-Blessing
A blessing is an act of reverence that bestows protection, holiness, and love on the benefactor. But the deepest blessing is the one you bestow on yourself. As we enter solitude, we let ourselves breathe deeply and quietly. Then we need to bless ourselves and our journey so that we might gain, or renew, a sense of our own loveliness.

6. Close the "Knowing vs. Living" Gap
We all know many things we want to nurture ourselves. Yet we often don't give those things to ourselves because the 'gap' feels too wide. Know that it is not. In solitude, chose one thing you want to nurture your growth and give it to yourself as your gift.

7. Remember the Small Moments
Wonder and joy are almost always found in the small moments that make up our lives: listening to the sound of a seashell, walking through the woods, knitting a new scarf, baking bread, listening to a bird sing. Solitude teaches us to pay attention to these small moments and realize that they are the jewels of our life.

8. Reconnect to the Sacred
As you take time to be in solitude, you will learn that it is food for the deprived self. We enter solitude for many reasons: to rest, to nurse our grief, to ease the strain of giving others more than we give ourselves, to hear the sound of our own voice, to nurture our creative energies, and for many of us, to honor our search for a spiritual life.

9. Step Into Your Own Life
Stepping out is an act, a self-assertion, a movement beyond whatever steps you have taken before. It means something different to each of us. Solitude, however, is a dynamic state that will in time lead you to where you want to be. Suddenly, without knowing exactly how or why, you will find yourself ready to be, or act, in ways you never could before.

10. Be There for Others
Solitude teaches us that we are both alone and all one. As we grow stronger in ourselves, we find that we have more to give to others-our partners, children, friends, but also the larger community of which we are a part. Spend some time to be with those who have been deprived of love and mentoring and desperately need it.

Emergent Church

2008-08-31T11:42:00.002+01:00

On Shelfari there is an Emergent Church discussion group. The person who started the group asked participants, of which I am one, to introduce themselves and say what they liked about the EC movement, which books linked to the movement that they liked, and what any possible dangers they saw connected with the movement. I spent a heck of a lot of time on my response, and so I repost it here.

I live in Saudi Arabia as an English teacher at a college. I consider myself deeply Christian but felt the need to come experience the Muslim world first hand. So I went "straight into the beast" as one friend said. I am a very committed Episcopalian, but now do the daily office (the prayer and sacred reading cycle) in conjunction with the Muslim prayer times. I regularly enter dialog with Muslim clerics and am planning on pod casting some of my recordings. I believe there is something "emergent" about what I am doing, but who really cares about a label that will probably have disappeared in a few decades?

I was very much influenced by the Catholic Worker movement and the call for Social Justice and what is known as personalism in that movement, all of which strikes me as very much in line with the EC movement. I have also read Shane Claibourne's books. I also have been reading Ebo Patel's Acts of Faith, which is spectacular, as is what he is doing. I wish I could get my hands on books by McLaren, Stanley Haurwaus or Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. But it's not easy in Saudi Arabia to find Christian books.

What really gets me excited about what I see in connection with EC movement, and keep in mind that I am a bit out of the loop because of where I live, is two things. One is a movement away from what we see with Evangelicals that the only historical Christianity worthy of our attention is what happened in the first century (or our image of what happened there) and the century in which Luther and Calvin lived. The deeply spiritual medieval period, not just in the Roman Catholic sense but also the Greek, Syrian and Coptic Orthodox churches, which are still alive and thriving today, have something, a lot actually, to teach us folks. Second, and following from the first, is an embrace, because of post modern relativistic (and that can be a good word) epistemology. A Christianity that cannot admit we have very very valuable things in common with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims is simply not a Christianity that I want any part of. I think I see some thawing of the ice here. This might not be because of the EC movement, but I think the EC movement is feeding off of these currents and is offering a way to find new avenues for more and better interfaith dialog

Dangers stemming from the EC idea? As has said before, we cannot gain the world only to lose our own souls. Interfaith dialog and an embrace of relativistic epistemologies require a spiritual maturity and self awareness that can be very dangerous without knowing who we are first before we attempt to embrace the world. I could make some suggestions, but that might take about nine more paragraphs.

But let me just say that to anyone who has spent time in academia, and especially in the Humanities and social sciences, you will know that the ways of talking and thinking that have come out of Postmodernism and Cultural History have become so prevalent that you can hardly escape them, or in my case and many others', even think without them. In the late 19th century when Hegel was all the rage, every Christian theologian worth his salt had to come up with a version of reality that dealt with Hegel. Hegel, and a few other thinkers, were so prevalent that Christians could hardly think without them anymore. But those days have passed, for the most part. I imagine the same thing will happen with EC. That is not to say this isn't an important part, a crucial part, of the evolution of our faith.

Pax/salam

Karen Armstrong on Muslim and Christian Dialogue

2008-05-09T21:53:00.003+01:00

Folks taking a look at what I am interested in here on my blog will note that Christianity's and Christians' relations with two other major traditions: Islam and Buddhism, is important to me. I heard this a few moments ago in an interview Speaking of Faith conducted with Karen Armstrong. I thought it said rather profound things about what we are up against in trying to understand where fundamentalisms come from. Since we may all harbor some of its dross in our bosom and since meaningful inter-religious dialogue cannot begin until we address this head on, it's best to go straight at it, which I believe this anecdote offers us the possibility of doing.

Ms. Tippett: I wonder if you would tell a story that you told when you and I were on a panel together several months ago. It was a simple story, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. You described being on another — part of another discussion and a fundamentalist Christian, I believe, beginning to rant and rave. Do you remember this?
Ms. Armstrong: Yes. I was at Oregon State University and it was a conference called "God 2000" and it was a wonderful conference. We had lectures from Jews, a rabbi, a Muslim scholar, and we were all asked to say what we had learned about God, and it was wonderful. People were asking profound questions about the nature of prayer, spirituality, listening to very, very religious ideas. Very pluralistic ideas were coming out that nobody thought that their tradition alone had the right answer, the monopoly of truth.
And then when we were on the final panel, suddenly erupted in the hall a fundamentalist who started to shriek at us incoherently. What I could make out was that he was saying that Jews and Muslims denied Jesus and therefore they were going to hell, and all of those of us who sided with Jews and Muslims were also going to hell, and this was evil. And you couldn't hear much because he was so incoherent with rage and despair. What I could hear, however, was the note of pain in his voice. This was not just some loony. This was somebody who was suffering and in pain, and felt profoundly threatened by what we were saying.
And the point is that we, seven of us on this panel — we're all articulate people, we'd all been talking nonstop to each other and to the audience for the last two days. We were utterly struck dumb. None of us could say a word. We felt utterly winded by this assault. Even me, and I should have known better because I'd just finished my book on fundamentalism. I couldn't think of anything to say. Eventually this man was hustled out, and the moderator said, "Well, I wish we could have talked to him, because he is part of the conference of God, 'Where Is God at 2000?' He's part of this conversation." But somehow we couldn't talk with one another. He was incoherent, we were struck dumb and useless, and this is the problem that we're facing.

Ms. Tippett: It's also — it says something about the limits of words and dialog.

Ms. Armstrong: Yes, it does, and I think what we've got to do is listen to the pain of the other. You could hear the note of pain, and you can hear the distress in it. When we look, say, at fundamentalist doctrine, we've got to see what pain and fear lies at the root of this because, as we've learned to our cost, they're trying to express — often very badly and in noxious ways — anxieties and fears that no society, no government, can safely ignore. And so our future, I think, depends on learning to listen. Now, it's maybe too late because I don't hear a great deal of pain and fear in Osama bin Laden. I think that this has moved on now and has stopped being fear and distress in some parts of the world, only in a tiny minority, but we can see — we saw on September the 11th that it only takes a very few people to commit immense havoc these days.

Ms. Tippett: And you're really back at that virtue of compassion again.

Ms. Armstrong: Yes. It means "to feel with." "To feel with." Not to feel sorry for, but to say, "If I were in his position, maybe I would feel the same."

2008-05-02T10:21:00.003+01:00

"Victimhood: it's just not what it's cracked up to be"

---Me

Daily Buddhist Wisdom

2008-04-30T04:19:00.001+01:00

"People must realize that even with all these comforts, all this money and a GNP that increases every year, they are still not happy. They need to understand that the real culprits are our unceasing desires. Our wants have no end."

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Imagine All the People"

Christian-Dharma

2008-04-28T06:46:00.005+01:00

Um, check this out people.

γρηγορειτε και προσεθχεσθε, ινα μη ελθητε εις πειρασμον, το μεν πνευμα προθυμον η δε σαρξ ασθενης.

This is Mark 14:38. It says "watch and pray, so that you do not fall into trouble: on the one hand the spirit is ready, but the flesh weak." Some of us out here are concerned with the possibility of bringing Buddhism and Christianity together. And so just a quick note here on one little verse that jumped out at me as I was doing my Greek homework. Keeping watch, as it says here, is practiced in most of the Buddhist sects I know. Zen made much, and continues to make much if it is authentic Zen, of simply sitting and observing and learning how create distance between what is happening to you and with you. This distance, as neurologists and brain researchers are now figuring out, takes place in your frontal lobe where the brain does its long range planning and finds control for all of its operations. Questions about possible conflicts over what it means to pray and what it means to meditate are nullified here. Watch AND pray! Just do it and forget about whether its Christian of Buddhist. Your brain needs it. You need it.

"the flesh is weak but the spirit willing" to me sounds like one of the four noble truths. Suffering exists, it is all pervasive in fact. But it can be overcome. That little running-back back there behind the line of scrimmage just needs one good block and he's gone. That was an idiot analogy. Yes. But a potentially life transforming opetation, provided we watch and pray long enough and jump into it with both feet.

Jubail "Church"

2008-04-27T20:06:00.006+01:00

You'd be forgiven if you thought my blog had been lame of late. Reason? I got nuttin'. Well, I love the Buddhist quotes Beliefnet sends me, and at times they have to go up here simply so I can ponder them more and pass them on like the need to be passed on. But, yes, I have been sucky lackluster recently.

So here is where is where it picks up, sort of. There is this supposed church near Jubail Saudi Arabia. Story goes that some guy ran across it in the 1980s when his car got stuck in the sand next to it. Story is that he got put in jail for this: nothing worse than a Saudi exposing Saudi's non-muslim past. But I am not willing to believe this happed either. So the chruch supposedly dates from the period before Islam. How do we know this? Because story is that there were crosses around the structure, whch soon disappeared when the government got wind of what had happend.

Well, thing is, I have not seen the crosses. I have not seen any coins or pottery shards that date the place. I went the other day and took a look for myself. The structure overall is pretty unimpressive. There are these kind of Hellensitic/Roman looking decorations on either side of one of the tiny rooms. But does this mean this is a Nestorian structure? Dunno! Maybe it was built by portugues traders in the 16th or 16th century, or by non-Muslim Arabs, or even by Muslim Arabs a few hundred years ago.

It is too bad that the Saudi government is not interested in history and deny that was any history here before Islam. The fact that they do not seem to want to acknowledge this place exists tempts the mind in the direction that the place may have some non-Muslim connections. But the fact that it has not been demolished tempts in the either direction as well. So for now, we do not know who built this and if we can really call it a church. I am not taking the risk of getting shot by the Bedouins who live next door to find out either.

Saudi Blogger freed from Jail

2008-04-27T07:40:00.000+01:00

(CNN) -- A Saudi Arabian blogger detained in December, ostensibly because he supported reform advocates accused by the Saudi government of backing terrorism, has been released, a fellow blogger posted Saturday.

Web sites like this one pushed for Fouad al-Farhan's release.

Ahmed al-Omran said on his blog, saudijeans.org, and later told CNN that he was awakened by a text message from the wife of Fouad al-Farhan, saying he had been released and was at home with his family.
"That's great news, and this is just how I wanted to start my morning," al-Omran wrote.
He said he later spoke with al-Farhan for several minutes on the telephone.
"He sounded fine; he seems to be in good spirits," al-Omran said. "He said he would have more to talk about later but not at this point. He said now he'd like to take some time to spend with his family, with his children that he hasn't seen for so long." Watch al-Omran describe his conversation with al-Farhan »
A Web site set up to call for al-Farhan's release said, "Fouad is free. He is back home in Jeddah after 137 days in custody."
The Saudi Interior Ministry said it had no immediate comment on the reports.
In January, a ministry spokesman said al-Farhan was arrested December 10 "because he violated the regulations of the kingdom."
But in an e-mail posted on al-Farhan's Web site after his arrest, he told friends that he faced arrest for supporting 10 reform advocates the Saudi government accused of backing terrorism. In the e-mail, al-Farhan said a senior Interior Ministry official promised that he would remain in custody for three days at most if he agreed to sign a letter of apology.
"I'm not sure if I'm ready to do that," he wrote. "An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government is [a] liar when they accused those guys of supporting terrorism?"
Al-Farhan, who blogs at alfarhan.org, is one of the few Saudi Web commentators to use his own name, according to the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
In January, the Bush administration expressed its concerns to the Saudi government regarding al-Farhan's detention at "a relatively senior level," U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
"The U.S. stands for freedom of expression," McCormack said at the time. "Wherever people are seeking to express themselves, via the Internet or via other areas, whether in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the world, we stand with that freedom of expression, and that was our message to the Saudi government."
The American Islamic Congress, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, launched an online letter-writing campaign aimed at freeing al-Farhan, whom it called "the godfather of Saudi blogging."
"All he did was express his opinions in a very obvious way, and he didn't threaten anyone," al-Omran said. "He was advocating against violence and terrorism."
Al-Omran said al-Farhan had stopped blogging for a few months in late 2006, after the Interior Ministry ordered him to take down a blog he was operating, but he began again at a new site.
He said al-Farhan told him he was treated well in jail. He also called al-Farhan's release a turning point for the blogging community in Saudi Arabia.
"It showed the community of bloggers in Saudi Arabia can come together and support this cause -- support his freedom of speech -- even those who didn't agree with some of the things he wrote," he said

Emyo

2008-04-26T20:36:00.001+01:00

"If you wish to understand yourself, you must succeed in doing so in the midst of all kinds of confusions and upsets. Don't make the mistake of sitting dead in the cold ashes of a withered tree.

-Emyo

Why Bonaventure Rocks!

2008-04-25T16:39:00.001+01:00

"But if you wish to know how things come about, desire not understanding: ask for grace instead of instruction, the groaning of prayer not reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but fire"

St. Bonaventure, The Soul's Journey to God

Knowing Hearts

2008-04-20T10:07:00.001+01:00

your heart still beats
and so does mine
and so as long as that is the case
and we draw breath
we are obligated
to do all we can
to pay back this precious gift:
heart must be repaid with heart
so wherever you go
go there with all your heart

Deserted Poem #2

2008-02-21T16:05:00.003Z

"Go off into a deserted place and rest awhile" said Jesus.*
so I took the long way home again today
down by the beach
during another sandstorm
where Persian winds
shake Arab sands
and where visibility
although limited
solitude
sees far and is far from lonely

*Mark 6:31

Classroom Research on Polygamy

2008-02-19T08:42:00.004Z

In some ways my job is fascinating. In others, it sucks. I suppose most of us could say the same thing about what we are doing with the rare exception of a few of us out there.

I have been sitting on this one for a while, but since today is my birthday I suppose I should get around to posting this really interesting classroom research I did a couple of weeks ago on polygamy. I asked my class of male students (I am not allowed to teach female students here in "the Kingdom") this series of questions and had them write on them.

Q1: In your view, what percentage of marriages in Saudi Arabia are polygamous?

Q2: In your view, what decides whether or not a man will take more than one wife? i.e. why would he decide to do it or not do it?

Q3: When you are able to get married, do you think you will have more than one wife? why or why not?

Q4: Some people criticize the idea of polygamous marriage, what would you say to these people?

I will expand this a bit more later, but a quick look at the data showed me this.

Q1: most said about 5%
Q2: whether or not he has the money to do it and can treat both (or more) wives fairly (howo would this be checked by anyone besides him? you may ask)
Q3: I was surprised by the number of students who said they would not do this because it would be unfair to the wives. more later
Q4: Several students actually said they agreed with the criticism. others said they did not care what others think because this is condoned in the Qur'an. more later.

2008-02-16T02:24:00.000Z

"Don't cling to your own understanding. Even if you do understand something, you should ask yourself if there might be something you have not fully resolved, or if there may be some higher meaning yet."

-Dogen

Live Red, Live Proud!

2008-02-14T06:01:00.002Z

from http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/12/saudi.valentine/index.html

(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia has asked florists and gift shops to remove all red items until after Valentine's Day, calling the celebration of such a holiday a sin, local media reported Monday.

With a ban on red gift items over Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia, a black market in red roses has flowered.

"As Muslims we shouldn't celebrate a non-Muslim celebration, especially this one that encourages immoral relations between unmarried men and women, " Sheikh Khaled Al-Dossari, a scholar in Islamic studies, told the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper.
Every year, officials with the conservative Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice clamp down on shops a few days before February 14, instructing them to remove red roses, red wrapping paper, gift boxes and teddy bears. On the eve of the holiday, they raid stores and seize symbols of love.
The virtue and vice squad is a police force of several thousand charged with, among other things, enforcing dress codes and segregating the sexes. Saudi Arabia, which follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism, punishes unrelated women and men who mingle in public.
Ahmed Al-Omran, a university student in Riyadh, told CNN that the government decision will give the international media another reason to make fun of the Saudis "but I think that we got used to that by now."
"I think what they are doing is ridiculous," said Al-Omran, who maintains the blog 'Saudi Jeans.' "What the conservatives in this country need to learn is something called 'tolerance.' If they don't see the permissibility of celebrating such an occasion, then fine -- they should not celebrate it. But they have to know they have no right to impose their point of view on others."
Because of the ban on red roses, a black market has flowered ahead of Valentine's Day. Roses that normally go for five Saudi riyal ($1.30) fetch up to 30 riyal ($8) on February 14, the Saudi Gazette said.
"Sometimes we deliver the bouquets in the middle of the night or early morning, to avoid suspicion," one florist told the paper.

Aeolian Harpsichord

2008-02-13T10:56:00.003Z

continually wrested
from laziness and complaceny
spring winds
furious and alive
drive sands over the roads and sidewalks
and waves move parallel to
rather than straight at
the beach
all is alive and renewed
with God's breath

Evangelicals Are Starting to Get it!

2008-02-06T10:16:00.000Z

I stole this from here. But feel stealing is certainly justified in this case.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/the_unexpected_monks/

The unexpected monks

Some evangelicals turn to monasticism, suggesting unease with megachurch religion - and the stirrings of rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church.

Members of the Rutba House in Durham, N.C., gather for meals and morning and evening prayer. (Globe / Davis Turner)

Email|Print| Text size – + By Molly Worthen February 3, 2008

S.G. PRESTON IS a Knight of Prayer. Each morning at his Vancouver, Wash., home, he wakes up and prays one of the 50-odd psalms he has committed to memory, sometimes donning a Kelly green monk's habit. In Durham, N.C., Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and fellow members of Rutba House gather for common meals as well as morning and evening prayer based on the Benedictine divine office. Zach Roberts, founder of the Dogwood Abbey in Winston-Salem, meets regularly with a Trappist monk to talk about how to contemplate God. Roman Catholic monastic traditions loom large in their daily routines - yet all three men are evangelical Protestants.

Why Ahmad Deedat is an Idiot

2008-02-05T08:19:00.000Z

Ahmad Deedat is a South African who is well known for his "debates" with Christians. He is no longer with us and passed away just a couple of years ago, but Saudis and others in the Muslim world remember him well, think well of him, and often hand his materials to us English teachers and refer to him in our classes.

Well, the guy is an idiot. Sorry to put it so bluntly and crudely. But he is not a creator of dialog by any means. He comes at Muslim-Christian discussion in a very disrespectful way, in something of the way that Christian creationists "debate" evolutionary biologists. I just watched some of a six-part DVD series of his talks and I found him saying one stupid thing after another but things the Muslims in the audiences were all agreeing with.

This kind of guy is also dangerous. Here is only some of why. He starts off the DVD series with a tall called "The Qur'an: Miracle of Miracles. It is basically a slam against the Christian and Jewish "corrupted" and "multi-authored" texts as opposed to the singly authored Qur'an. The problem is that Deedat is unfortunately not willing to admit, as do the majority of Muslims, that the text of the Qur'an has a history and that the so-called miracle of an illiterate trader reciting a book in the most refined Arabic of the day and showing the most sophisticated theology of the day is, while perhaps not a total fiction, not as pure and straightforward as Muslims hold. There were other texts of the early Qur'an. And Mohammad was surrounded by people steeped in sophisticated versions of Jewish and Christian theology and who aided the redaction of the text. The text also has a political and economic context that shaped the text that is rendered out of the picture by Muslims as well. As Gerd-R. Puin puts it
"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad...Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants."

Patricia Crone adds: "The Koran is a scripture with a history like any other—except that we don't know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from Westerners, but Westerners feel deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy? But we Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone's faith." (see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199901/koran)

But I want to keep the focus on Deedat here, however fascinating the subject of Qur'anic origins is. One huge thing Deedat totally misses is that most people in the western world are not walking around thinking: "hmmmm, which religion should I go with, Islam or Christianity?" Instead, many of them are thinking that both Islam and Christianity are religions of violence and that modern people cannot honestly follow either of them and still be intellectually and ethically honest with themselves. Deedat made many attacks on the secular and scientific understanding of the world, and attacked Christians for having what he says is an inadequate set of expressions for God by using familial, biological and bodily images (God the father, son etc) to express this. But instead of finding common ground with Christians and looking into what they actually think and finding common ground with those more comfortable with thinking of the numinous in the idiom of science (which is often a kind of religion too), he does nothing but pander to the goons in his audiences and the tit-for-tat mentality that way too is the only way these discussions take place. Notice how said takes place in this youtuber. Not sure why this video comes in threes and not the one video I scooped it from (XYZ?) .

Beautiful Things in Saudi

2008-01-29T05:09:00.000Z

There are Westerners and other foreigners who come to Saudi Arabia and find it an intensely ugly place. There are many who'd never set foot in the country who think similarly. I have said as much many times myself: there are few trees here, you hardly see a woman's face, the cities are something from the third world for the most part, and beautification and ornament is something against Saudi's conservative version of Islam in principle; how could you think otherwise, right?

But when you are an English teacher in Saudi there are beautiful things like the following which appear before you when you least expect it (or learn to cultivate it?) . A couple of days ago, because all the material in our book had been covered and the semester was basically over, I got my writing class back on my favorite topic (and the whole reason I came to Saudi): U.S.-Arab relations and Christian-Islamic relations. I actually covered this for a couple of days last week and asked one question each day for a couple of days running. I spent the entire period I was with them having the students work on a question and write on it.

One question I asked was this: If we wanted to improve relations between "the West" and the Islamic world, what could we do? Some students said there is nothing we can do: "Westerners just hate Islam and American wants to control everything, especially Middle Eastern oil." Others said "get rid of Bin Laden and Bush and everything will be fine." Others said "improve communication and continue to share expertise." I have all of this as I collected their responses.

Following up on the idea that communication needs to be improved, I asked them what they might tell groups of Westerners were they to meet them and talk to them directly. A couple of them said that they would stress that Islam is a religion of peace. I asked them how they would use the Qur'an itself to show and demonstrate this. They didn't know other than to stress that the very root of the word Islam means "peace." They said they would get back to me on this.

They also said they would call Christians to task for thinking of God in three parts and not one. I told them that a majority of Christians would likely not know how to respond to this with any sophistication, but that in the NT Jesus utters a proclamation that is very similar to the Islamic Shahadda that "there is no God but God," which I wrote on the board. It is basically a refrain coming out of Judaism which runs "hear, Oh Isreal, the Lord your God is one Lord, which appears in the Gospel of Mark. I also wrote on the board the two basic commandments Jesus utters towards the end of the Gospel of Mark: to love the lord your God with all of your heart, soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, which I told them they might want to remind Christians of were they to talk with them. The students told me that this was very similar to what Islam teaches. Not only was this an amazing and beautiful exchange, but the students were also furiously writing down what I had written on the board showing that it was definitely a "teachable moment" taken advantage of.

In case anyone thinks this indicates some kind of missionary zeal to convert Muslims to Christianity on my part, let me say that I repeatedly stressed to my students that I care little if they converted. I told them that I would actually prefer them not turning their backs on their own religion and to deepen their understanding of it. There is a difficult issue here as Islam sees itself as having completed the Christian revelation. It is also widely believed by Muslims that the Christian scriptures are corrupted and that Qur'an is not. Jesus is also highly venerated in Islam as he is seen as the pinnacle of the prophets before Mohammad. So we can encounter and feed their possible missionary zeal if not careful.

So were these students furiously writing down what I had written on the board because they had found another arrow to place in their quiver to be used against Christians? I think not, and think it was simply a beautiful moment in a place where beauty is best thought seen and encountered obliquely rather than directly, in subtle and still, small voices rather than in bombast and in its in-your-face...let-me-show-you-my-midriff-now variety.

Another question I asked on the following day was this: In my country (the U.S) Muslims can freely practice Islam at any time they wish and can visit a Mosque and worship with fellow Muslims freely. But in Saudi Arabia, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists are forbidden to practice their religion and thus feel a good deal of loneliness when they are here because they are cut off from their communities of faith. Is this fair?

After a couple of minutes, the only thing a few students could verbalize was a couple of different answers to the effect of "this is a Muslim land, so there can be no other religion here" and that "if we allow other religions, the Muslims here will lose their zeal for Islam and have their faith corrupted." One student told me he could say what he thought but he might go to jail for it because he knows people who are in jail presently for expressing similar opinions. But in the end the students told me they simply could not put this into language, either Arabic or English, because they had simply never thought of it before. I told them that if they could not verbalize an answer, then there must be something wrong with this...or not?

Another beautiful moment, I'd say, although one I could be fired for. Oh well! Let's hope that doesn't happen..."In sha Allah."

Something for Arabic readers

2008-01-21T04:24:00.000Z

أنا من أمريكا. لكن الآن أنا أسكن في المملكة العربية السعودية. أدّرس اللغة الانكليزية هنا. الجميع يعرفون السعودية بلد غني. لكنهم ربما لا يعرفون أن المجتمع السعودي ممتلئ بالمتناقضات الاجتماعية. في الواقع أن الغنى يسبب متناقضات في المجتمع السعودي. و هذه مقالات قصيرة سوف أحدثكم عن بعض منها.

مثلاً الأغلبية من السعوديين كسالي جداً. عندما أقول هذا أنا لست متكبر.لكن لو قارنا طالب اللغة الانكليزية في شرق آسيا وبين طالب لغة أجنبية من أمريكا ثم طالب السعودية نجد أن طالب السعودية كسلان جدّا. عند تعلّم اللغة الأجنبية يحتاج الطالب إلى حافز. للأسف نجد أن السبب الرئيسي للالتحاق بالجامعات لدي كثير من الطلاب السعوديين هو لأن حكومة السعودية تدفع لهم مبالغ مالية شهرية طيلة فترة الدراسة.

متناقض آخر في المجتمع السعودي عن الأجانب والعمل. عموماً نجد أن السعوديون لا يحبون الأجانب. لكنهم أيضاً لا يريدوا أن يعملوا بأنفسهم.

Why non-native Arabic speakers should not say "yanii"

2008-01-19T07:55:00.000Z

Every language has its fillers. In American English it's "um," "hmmm" "let me see". In Japanese it's "eee-tooo" and anybody who gets beyond the basics in Japanese and spends anytime at all in the country learns how useful this phrase can be when you are trying to think of what to say while keeping your listener attuned to your flow of speech. In French there is something called "the boff" which is a kind of puffiness with the lips and a bit of air you release when you want to think out loud. When you get fairly decent at French you find it coming out of your mouth automatically.

In Modern Standard Arabic the linguistic utterance that best equates here is "yanii." It literally means "it/that means." And you use it sort of like this. "So, Ahmad is coming over today and bringing an entire carton of Pepsi. So, that means we will not need to buy any now since the issue of drinks has been taken care of." There would be nothing wrong with the interlocutor (the other of the two or more speakers) in that conversation saying "yanii we need to pay Ahmad when he gets here then right?" because the phrase is used in Arabic far more than "it means" is used in English. It' almost like "so" in English and is uttered countless times a day by MSA speakers.

Native Arabic speakers also often use yanii when they are speaking English. It happens so often with some people that you just get used to it. However, there is a woman at the female branch where I teach who is a native speaker of English and who uses yanii in her English. She uses it just to sound like she is acculturated. She also uses phrases such as the very annoying "al himdu Illa" (thanks be to God) and "In sha Allah" just about as much as native Arabic speakers do as well, especially Saudis. The thing is, the latter two phrases are acceptable in the way that saying "gambaru" ("going for it") is when you are in Japan even when you are speaking English. But yanii comes from second language interference and is not an acceptable sign of acculturation and respect for Muslim mores.

I can do a bit of empirical research on this to prove it. Give me some time on this, but I guarantee that if I ask some native Arabic speakers if they think this is acceptable they will agree that it sounds retarded.. yanii like somebody trying to sound cool and taking a cheap shot at doing so.

Muslim Doors and the Spacing of Gender

2008-01-16T04:21:00.000Z

It is often said that Muslims are very private people. An example of this, as well often pointed to, is that in the Muslim world houses are surrounded by walls. Being in Saudi I can attest to this: you will not find a house without walls here as long as it is a domestic structure (i.e. where women [and inevitbaly children] live).

Another angle to this is that, as every ex-pat who comes to Saudi for any length of time knows, there is a huge difference between the housing provided married people and that provided to single males. The housing provided to the hordes of single men from south Asia who come here to work in construction and as laborers is like a bunch of rabbit hutches. Sometimes there are dozen guys stuffed into a single room/barracks. These guys are bused around to the job sites and seen in the backs of huge trucks like cattle. The housing provided married people, often from places other than south Asia, is palatial by comparison.

I spent three months in a housing structure we like all seem to call "guantanomo bay." It was built in the 1960s or 70s for single foreign males working in the oil industry in this area. Then it might have been considered nice. It is not bad now either. It's just that it feels like a cross between the hotel Jack Nicholson's character's stayed in with his family in The Shining and an old abandoned 1970s Ramada Inn. The fact there is hardly anyone there, maybe one out of ten of the rooms in the four structures is occupied, and that the floors are hard, cold, dusty marble and this weird decorated concrete, adds to this ambience.

After my wife arrived in Saudi to join me at the end of the summer we moved into "family" housing. The place is four or five notches above Guantanamo Bay at the very least. One interesting thing about the place is the number of doors in it. The apartment only has four rooms: a large "family" room/sitting area, a kitchen with a laundry area, a bedroom and a bathroom. The thing is, there are ten doors in this little 35 X 20 ft structure (sorry, I think in feet but can do meters when I have to, i.e. not now). My wife pointed out to me that this is because the entire structure can be instantly converted/bifurcated into a space that dichotomizes the public and the private. There is a separate bathroom for times when men are present. There is a series of doors that allows the kitchen and master-bedroom bathroom to be accessible from the kitchen, like something out of the Tale of Genji. That makes ten doors in a structure that in my country would have about five. So, does the state pervade society here or does the private engulf everything in its wake? And is this not something Saudis are taught to do inside before they take it outdoors?

It's a Greek thing: you might not understand, but then again might

2008-01-13T12:39:00.000Z

People from the West who find themselves living in the middle east because of 9-11 and their discontent with U.S. neo-colonialism are people's whose cultural roots are the pre-Islamic Middle East. This means that they often undergoe a double shift--with an interest in Arabic language and culture as well as an interest in this area's shared cultural roots. I am one of those people.

Thus:

Donald Mastronarde, An Introduction to Attic Greek (Berkeley: U of Cal press, 1998) p 127. sec 2. 1-5

1. ο των Ελληνων στρατηγος εν εκεινη τη χωρα δεκα ημερας μενει και χρηματα λαμβανει παρα των βαρβαρων οι επι τη θαλαττη οικοθσιν. εφοβουντο δ’ οι γεροντες και αι μητερες υπερ των παιδων, αλλ’ οπλιται τινες αγαθοι τους ναυτας κακον τι ποιεν εκεινους εκωλυον.

Trans: The general of the Athenians stays in that land ten days and takes money from the barbarians who live by the river. And both the old men and the mothers fear for the children, but some noble warriors prevented them doing any bad.

2. μετα ταυτα η στρατια ελαυνει επτα στραδια και αφικνειται εις ποταμον Χαλον ονομα και εις γεφυραν τιν αρχαιαν ην εφυλαττε πληθος ανδρων ισχυρων.

Trans: after these things the army marches seven stades and arrives at a river named Chalon and a certain ancient bridge which was guarded by a lot of fierce men.

3.κατηγορει μεν ο διδασκαλος, εφευγε δ’ ο κλωψ, εδικαζον δ’ οι πλουσιοι.
Trans: on the one hand the teacher accuses, and the thief flees the charge; but the majority adjudicate.
4. το μεν προτερον βουλευμα ουτως γιγνεται, το δ’ υστερον ωδε—το πλητηος τω Δημοσθενει επειθετο.
On the one hand the former plan comes to be in this way; on the other hand the latter plan in this way: the majority gave it to Demosthenes (to decide).

5. εζητουν οι γεροντες αρχαια γραμματα, αλλ’ υπο παιδων τινων εκρθπτετο.
The old men sought the ancient letters, but they were hidden by certain children.

Why Mahayana Rocks!

2008-01-13T12:07:00.000Z

Considering the harm others do to you

As created by your former deeds, do not anger.

Act such that further suffering will not be created.

And your own faults will disappear.

---Nagarjuna

On Friendship

2008-01-10T05:58:00.000Z

People who are not friendly toward you

Are not your friends

The same can be said about you vis-ά-vis them

Mastronarde Chpt 16, p.119, 3.1

2008-01-08T15:38:00.000Z

1. ὲνθάδε οί μὲν καλοὶ ἀγαθοὶ τὴν πατρίδα βλάπτειν καὶ πλουτον λαμβάνειν οὐκ ἤθελον, ἀλλὰ μὴ ἀδικεισθαι ὑπὸ των πονηρων εβουλοντο . τοις δε πυνηροις, οι αει αρχης τε και πλουτου επεθυμουν, τοτε εξην τησδε της χωρας κρατειν. Τους μεν γαρ στρατηγους αποκτεινουσι, τους δε ῥήτορας εις το ιερον απαγουσι και εκει φυλαττουσιν. επειτα το πληθος περι των πραγματων βοuλευεσθαι εκωλουν.

trans: there were, on the one hand, those good and noble ones who were not willing to take the wealth and harm the country, but they were planning not to be done wrong by the base and evil ones. For these were the evil ones who always wanted wealth and power (and opposed the good and noble ones). And it was thus possible that the evil ones to rule the land, to kill the generals, and take the rhetoricians and lock them in the temple. Thus the masses blocked (even) the planning of these things (before they happened).

2. ταυτα τα δεινα εκ του γεροντος αι του Δημοσθενους θυγατερες ακουουσι και αυτικα τους νεανιας ἤτουν ηγεισθαι εκ της χωρας εκεινης, εν ἠ ησαν θηρες τε και ορνιθες βλαβεροι.

trans: The daughters of Demosthenes heard these terrible things from the old man and at once asked the young men to lead him out of that land—into a land where there were wild beasts and birds.

3. ἔπειτα ὁ Παυσανίας τοις Αθνηαίς παρεκελεύετο κήρυκας πέμπειν περὶ της εἰρνης---οι δε επειθοντο.

trans: then Pausanias urged heralds be sent to the Athenians concerning peace—and they were believed.

4. επει δε ησαν επι ταις θυραις ταις Τισσαφερνους, οι μεν στρατηγοι εις την σκηνην ἔρχονται, οι δε στρατιωται επι ταις θυραις ἔμενον. Μετα δε ου μακρον χρονον εκεινοι τε ηρουντο και οθτοι εκπτοντο. Επειτα δε οι βαρβαροι δια του πεδιου ηλαυνον και τους Ελληνας απεκτεινον.
trans: when they were at the doors of Tissapherenes (a Persian ruler) the generals went into the tent, but the soldiers remained at the doors. After a long while the former were seized and the latter were pummeled. Then the Barbarians (Persians) drove across the plain and killed the Greeks.

Mastronarde Chpt 15

2008-01-05T14:34:00.000Z

1. τίς ἐστιν ὁ ῥητωρ; Δημοσθένης, ὃς τὸ πλῆθος πείθει τὰς τριήρεις τοῖς πλουσίοις ἐπιτρέπειν καὶ τέλη εἰσφέρειν.
2.τι χρη ποιειν; οι μεν γαρ των Ελληνων εν τη των βαρβαρων χωρα μαχεςθαι φοβουνται, οι δε τω των Αθηναιων στρατηγω πειθεσθαι ουκ εθελοθσιν
3.ο πατηρ και η ματηρ την τε θυγατερα και υπ εκεινης φιλουνται.
4. τιν αγωνα παρασκευαζουσιν οι κριται: τινες νεαναι γερα φερονται;
5. ανοσιον εστι μη εχειν χαριν των αγαθων εργων α υπερ της δημοκρατιας εκενοι πραττουσιν.

1. who is the rhetor? Demosthenes, who urges the masses to turn over the war ships to the majority and to public service.
2. what should one do? On the one hand the Greeks fear being battled in the land of the Barbarians; on the other they do not desire to be commanded by the general of the Athenians.
3. the mother and father love the daughter and are loved by her.
4. which contest are the judges preparing for? Which youths (will) win prizes?
5. it is profane not to grasp the favor of good deeds which under democracy the latter provides for.

Greek with Mastronarde

2008-01-04T10:19:00.000Z

I am certain that not many care, but I am working my way back through Mastronarde's An Introduction To Attic Greek (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). I have decided to put on my blog the translations I make for the "sentences for reading" for the chapters I am doing. Why? 1) Mmaybe somebody has a similar interest. 2) I like to start what I finish. And by putting these transations up here it gives me one more reason to keep pushing on through this book. I have made it public, in a sense; and if I don't stick to it I will lose face (at least that how I hope the motivating illusion will work).

oh yeah, and if anybody knows how to type the accents in Unicode (which may not be possible since it seems to be a program desigined for for modern Greek) then please let me know.

chapter 14, p 105. Section III.

1. δια τας καλος ορνιθας ου φοβουμεθα τον προς εκεινος πολεμον.

2. κακον λειπειν την ασπιδα, αλλ’ αγαθον σωζειν την ψυχην.

3. μετα ταυτα υδωρ φεροθσιν οι γεροντες τοις νεανιας οι υπερ της πατριδος μαχονται.

4. οι φυλακες ους οι πολεμιοι αιροθσιν αποθνησκουσιν.

5. δει τον Ηρακλεα κρατειν τον τ’εν Νεμεα λεοντα τους τε γιγαντες τα τε καθ’ Ελλαδα τερατα.

translation

1. Because of the good omen we do not fear war against them.
2. The bad abandon hope, but the good preserve life.
3. Because of these things, the old men carry water to the young men who make war on behalf of the country.
4. The guards seize the enemies who are dying.
5. It is necessary for Heracles to control the lions in Nemea as well as the giants and monsters of Greece.

Patristic Tradition, Protestants and Polemos

2007-12-23T07:51:00.000Z

Hi folks. This is a list of talking points on church tradition and how it is possibly viewed differently betweetn Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox. It may be representative, or not. I invite you to comment on that and to say how and to what extent. It is not always clear where the writer of these points is coming from, but he is definitely Protestant. Saying more than that is, as I've said, a job for my hoped-for readers and commenters. Let's talk about it in the comments section below the post. This is the original url, for those who might be interested. it seems this guy likes stirring up trouble. http://www.bible.ca/sola-scriptura-tradition-top-10-list.htm

"Top ten list of why the Roman Catholic and Orthodox take the wrong view of tradition"

1. Scripture itself is called "apostolic tradition" both in the Bible and the Church Fathers. It is wrong to assume every time the fathers used the word "tradition", that they are referring exclusively to "oral tradition" and not scripture.

2.The Church Fathers continued to quote scripture to refute the Gnostics and the Arians even after they misquoted scriptures of their own. The idea that the early church gave up on "proof-texting" to fight heresy and began to rely upon tradition is utterly false.

3.The "Rule of Faith" creeds drafted by the post apostolic church were 100% based upon scripture phrase by phrase. The idea that they had their origin in extra-biblical oral tradition is utterly false.

4.It is wrong to view creeds, like the Nicene creed, as proof that oral tradition continues today, since these creeds were in fact written down and being written, were no longer "oral" traditions!
5. When the Church Fathers made reference to a "oral apostolic tradition" separate from scripture, they always viewed such tradition as duplicating what the apostles later revealed in scripture as a parallel witness. In other words, all doctrines that originated from apostolic oral traditions were finally recorded in the text of scripture. The substance of Oral tradition doctrines is identical with scripture.

6. When the Church Fathers made reference to liturgical "traditions" that were not taught in scripture, they were optional and unnecessary things like drinking milk mixed with honey after being baptized, making the sign of the cross on the forehead, and never kneeling in worship. Although sola Scriptura advocates can confidently say the fathers mistakenly viewed such "traditions" as binding, Roman Catholic and Orthodox "tradition advocates" have no choice but to also take them as binding. Yet in theological schizophrenia, they claim the "tradition of the Church Fathers" must be followed, but then refuse to follow the specific traditions that the Church Fathers recorded.

7. Virtually all the apostolic fathers viewed a progressive sequence of revelation passing through three stages: 1. Oral teachings of Christ to his apostles. 2. Oral teachings of the apostles based upon Christ’s oral tradition and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for new information Christ never discussed. 3. All of Christ’s and the apostles teachings were recorded in scripture. The early post-apostolic church viewed scripture as the final process of complete revelation.

8. The Church Fathers viewed the scriptures as all sufficient and complete.

9. The Church Fathers believed what Paul said in Eph 3:3-5, that the scripture could be understood by merely reading it. They indicated that the scriptures themselves were clear, so clear, they even criticized the heretics for getting it wrong. If those outside the church and common pew dwellers are unable to understand the Bible themselves as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches teach, then why did the church expect the heretics to understand the Bible with their own human skills? (Tertullian, The Flesh of Christ, ch 20), (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 56), (Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, Book 1, 35), (Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, Book 7, 16)

10. When Basil and the Arians both claimed their tradition was correct, Basil said, "let God-inspired Scripture decide between us; and on whichever side be found doctrines in harmony with the word of God, in favour of that side will be cast the vote of truth." (Basil, Letter 189, 3) This proves that scripture was viewed by the Church Fathers as the supreme court of determining truth, when traditions contradict each other. Today, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches each claim their tradition is the "true apostolic tradition". They would do well to follow the advice of Basil and let scripture decide!

(originally written) By Steve Rudd

Rumi Show Transcript S.O.F.

2007-12-23T05:53:00.001Z

people, this is the entire transcript from the Rumi show done by my favorite NPR radio program: Speaking of Faith, which I mentioned in my last post. It seems like a perfect fit for the Rumi kick I have been on since I went to Turkey. So, I put it here for your (possibly whirling and ecstatic) reading pleasure.

Krista Tippett, host: I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi." The 13th-century mystic Rumi left behind lyric poetry that has long shaped Muslims around the world and has now become popular in the West. This hour we'll delve into Rumi's world and its echoes in our own. He created a new language of love within the Islamic spiritual tradition of Sufism. Rumi also inspired the whirling dervishes. He sought a way to stay centered while moving.

Ms. Fatemeh Keshavarz: If you don't plow the earth, it's going to get so hard nothing grows in it. You just plow the earth of yourself. You just get moving. And even don't ask exactly what's going to happen. You allow yourself to move around, and then you will see the benefit.

Ms. Tippett: This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us. [Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This hour we'll enter the exuberant world of Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet. Now a best seller in the West, Rumi's words and ideas have long influenced Islamic spirituality. But Rumi's Muslim identity is often lost in translation. We'll explore that, and we'll hear the lyrical words Rumi put to the common human search for meaning. He understood searching and restlessness as a kind of arrival. He saw every form of human love as a mirror of the divine.

Mr. Soleyman Vaseghi: (Lines of Rumi poetry recited in Persian)

Ms. Keshavarz: (translating) Wherever you are, whatever you do, be in love.

Ms. Tippett: From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi." In his lifetime, the poet known in the West as Rumi was called Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Balkhi al-Rumi. He was born in 1207 near the city of Balkh in what is now Afghanistan. When he was a child, his family fled Mongol invaders and settled in Konya in present-day Turkey. Rumi wrote in Persian, the literary and spiritual lingua franca of a civilization that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to India. To most of the people who read him today from Tajikistan to Iran, he is known as Mevlana or Mawlana, our master. Rumi left behind a vast body of lyric poetry, metaphysical writings, lectures, and letters which have influenced Persian, Urdu, and Turkish literature across the centuries. Rumi also inspired the whirling dervishes, ascetics who base their practices on Rumi, including the dancing meditation that was part of his spiritual life. And in the late 20th century, Rumi's thought and poetry swept the United States in English translation. Lines from Rumi became widely quoted in diverse settings, lines such as "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Those who enjoyed such words often knew little about the man behind them or his Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism. My guest today, Fatemeh Keshavarz, calls Rumi a world-class thinker, relevant to our painfully compartmentalized world.

Ms. Keshavarz: One of the reasons why he addresses the issues that are of concern to us so much today is because he belongs to a tradition, the Sufi tradition or the mystical tradition within Islam, which has always been concerned with the way human beings view themselves and each other and are able to relate to each other.

Ms. Tippett: Fatemeh Keshavarz will be our guide as we explore some of the large themes of Rumi's spirituality that may be only partially understood even as they echo in modern culture. She is chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a poet and often sets Rumi's words to music. She grew up speaking the Persian in which Rumi wrote, in the Iranian city of Shiraz.

Ms. Keshavarz: I grew up in a family in which people played chess, read poetry, or argued about poetry. That was basically — only after I left Iran I realized that that's probably not what everyone else does all the time.

Ms. Tippett: So in this landscape where poetry of all kinds, including poetry woven into religious sensibility, I mean, what did Rumi mean in that landscape? How was he part of the spiritual sensibility of that world you grew up in? Ms. Keshavarz: Well, he was a voice that echoed something that was, on one level, very familiar because a lot of other people had talked about it, but on another level, it was completely new because of the way he played with it, the way he made it his own game. And I mean "game" because playing is very serious for him. Laughing and playing are the most serious things in his poetry. So for me, he came into the picture as someone who said, 'OK, you've read the text. You know the words. You've looked at the history. Now transcend all that. Put it aside and live it. Encounter it.' If you ask me to think of a few words that, for me, describe his poetry, one of them is it's an encounter. You come face to face with something. I never forget, I was once reading a ghazal that described a beautiful bird. You know, he said…

Ms. Tippett: The ghazals are odes, what we would translate as something a little bit different than a poem, right?

Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. Ghazal is about eight to 10, 12 lines normally, although his could be much shorter or much longer, and the main theme is love and these are like flashes of ideas as that come.
Ms. Tippett: OK.

Ms. Keshavarz: So I was reading one of those and he was describing these beautiful birds. You know, some can sing, some are colorful, and so forth. And I was, you know, enjoying this, walking the aviary, and he suddenly said, 'Well, what kind of a bird are you?' All of a sudden I realize I can't stay on the margins. You have to join in. And I think, in a way, the whirling is exactly a reflection of that. So he kind of comes into the tradition with all the intellectual legacy, but he says that's not enough, you have to do something else with it. Face it, play with it, dance it, bring it into your everyday life.

Ms. Tippett: You know, something that strikes me, there are a lot of themes in his writing, in his poetry, that you might call ascetic. You know, he's very aware of the limits of the physical and of the importance of the spiritual in that equation. And yet there's something incredibly sensual at the same time when you mention the whirling, the weeping of the whirling dervishes. There's dance and music.

Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. I would say that it's all on the same continuum of human experience. We are not divided into body and soul in a way, although he does talk about body and soul and there's no question about the fact that the soul is exalted. Ultimately the goal is to purify the soul and so on and so forth. But we don't have to think about the rest of ourselves as base or as not — in fact, it's a tool. It's a part of us that's very important. He does say — in one verse, he says, 'Love, whether of this kind or that kind' — and obviously it's either, you know, the kind of divine, spiritual, or the human-to-human love — 'ultimately leads you to the same king.' The body is not an obstacle on the way of the soul. It's a tool to be used for that journey.

Ms. Tippett: Rumi scholar and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz. After Rumi's death, some of his followers founded the Mevlevi order, commonly known as the community of the whirling dervishes. "Dervish" is a Persian word which described wandering Muslim ascetics of the medieval Persian Empire. Dervishes were and are Sufis, part of the Islamic mystical tradition that emerged as a spiritual renewal movement after the death of the prophet Mohammed. Rumi imprinted that movement with a vividly sensual and poetic practice of spirituality that has been provocative and controversial across the ages. He crafted some of his most religious ideas in the form of erotically toned love poetry which seems at once addressed to Allah or God and to an earthly beloved. Rumi inspired the practice of the whirling dervishes by spinning around a column as he recited his poems.

Ms. Tippett: Something you wrote about whirling that was so gripping to me said, for Rumi, the whirling is one way to stay centered while moving.

Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. And, you know, I do some speculation in my work: Does this have something to do with the fact that he traveled so young when he went all the way westward from the province of Khorasan to where is the city of Konya today, present-day Turkey, and the journey lasted about two years. He must have encountered so many different people and cultures and incidents, so it may have something to do with that. But he's certainly very appreciative of the ability to change your vantage point. At some point in his discourses he said, 'If you don't plow the earth, it's going to get so hard nothing grows in it. You just plow the earth of yourself. You just get moving. And even don't ask exactly what's going to happen. You allow yourself to move around, and then you will see the benefit.'

Ms. Tippett: Is there also something in the whirling that strikes you as very compatible with Islamic theology in general, or with Sufi theology, that might not be apparent to an outsider?

Ms. Keshavarz: Well, I think you could say that everything in the universe is whirling, is quickened with the force of love. That fits with the Sufi theology. We are like planets. We have to appreciate that, and in order to appreciate that, you have to join the dance. But there are also — there are interpretations. We can now look at whirling and say things like — for example, one hand is pointed towards the sky and the other one to the earth, so that's usually interpreted as bringing the heaven and the earth together, like staying connected with the two. Or the dervishes wear a black robe and a white robe underneath, and then they disrobe the black robe and they dance in the white. That's interpreted as the shedding of the ego. But then the master standing in the center doesn't have to do it because he supposedly has tamed his ego. But all of these things have been interpretations later, done of the activity of whirling. Beyond that, you know, to me, it comes across as something much broader and more universal than Islam or any other religion. It's a kind of getting in tune with the moving earth.

Ms. Tippett: You've spoken a lot about love and love as the core of this spirituality. I think that also in the Persian culture in which you grew up, and Rumi as well, there is a connection between love poetry and imagery of the beloved and lovers, with religious ideas, which again you kind of have to introduce a Westerner into.

Ms. Keshavarz: The imagery is very often almost identical with profane, you know, mundane love poetry. By this, I don't mean to give any negative connotation to it, but love that is purely sensual and emotional, human love. To me, I think it's a statement by poets like Rumi and others like him, that there isn't really a boundary between the two. It's the same thing. It's the same human experience. And there is another medieval Sufi, actually a bit later than Rumi, who says that you can't look at the sun directly, but you can look at its reflection in the water. Our humanly experience of love is that reflection in the water of our senses, and it's God's way of teaching us and guiding us from this to the actual looking at the sun when you have gained the ability. I was just thinking of a particular ghazal as I was saying that and, you know…

Ms. Tippett: Yes, I wanted to ask you if you had anything you would read or recite, yes.

Ms. Keshavarz: Yeah, I think that that actually could help see how one would lead to the other and actually the ambiguity between the two. It's a source of great poetic force.
Ms. Tippett: And you mean one — and the other would be human love and divine love.

Ms. Keshavarz: Human love and divine love, exactly.

Mr. Soleyman Vaseghi: (Lines of Rumi poetry recited in Persian) Ms. Keshavarz:
(translating) If anyone asks you about the houris, show your face, say: like this. If anyone asks you about the moon, climb up on the roof, say: "Like this." If anyone seeks a fairy, let them see your countenance. If anyone talks about the aroma of musk, untie your hair and say: "Like this." If anyone asks: "How do the clouds uncover the moon?" untie the front of your robe, knot by knot, say: "Like this." If anyone asks: "How did Jesus raise the dead?' kiss me on the lips, say: "Like this." If anyone asks: "What are those killed by love like?" direct him to me, say: "Like this." If anyone kindly asks you how tall I am, show him your arched eyebrows, say: "Like this."
Ms. Keshavarz: So the whole ghazal is a description of the physical beauty of the lover, but at the same time, it's a fairly long poem. At the end, it leads us to blind with envy the one who says, "How can a human being reach God?" Give each of us a candle of purity, say: "Like this." In the end, human beings can get to that candle of purity and reach God, and all human beings can do that.
Ms. Tippett: It is also an act of pointing at what is now — right? — what is physical and human, as you say, as the only way we have of imagining.
Ms. Keshavarz: Exactly. Exactly. There's a famous Sufi tale that this young disciple approached the master to enter the order day after day. And finally the master said, 'Have you ever fallen in love with a woman?' He said, 'No, not yet. I'm only 18.' He said, 'Well, go try that first.'

Ms. Tippett: Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz. Our Web site, speakingoffaith.org, shows images and explanations of the whirling dervishes. I'm Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today we're dipping into the ideas and spiritual background of Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim mystic whose poetry is celebrated by an array of modern readers. In the song of the reed, Rumi reflects on the human spirit through the metaphor of the ancient reed flute or ney that is popular in middle-eastern music. This poem opened the Masnavi, Rumi's compendium of rhyming couplets that explored issues of Sufi theology and the spiritual journey.
Ms. Keshavarz: Listen to the story told by the reed of being separated. Since I was cut from the reed bed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. At any gathering, I'm there, lingering and laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit out from body, no concealing that mixing. But it's not given us to see, so the reed flute is fire, not wind. Leave that empty.
Ms. Tippett: There's a theme that is part of that, that runs all the way through, about separation and longing as part of — well, not just the spiritual life, but being human, and also a kind of sense that the separation and the longing themselves are a kind of arrival. Ms. Keshavarz: On one level, you have to get on the road. You have to get started, you know, just like the earth that, you know, have to plow the earth, you have to get moving. On another level, time and again he reminds us that the destination is the journey itself. So there isn't a point where you say, 'OK, I'm here, I've reached, I'm done, I'm perfect. I don't need to do anything anymore.' In the incompleteness of that, the need to move forward is inherent in that incompleteness, in the process of going forward that you make yourself better and better and you, in a way, never reach. So the separation is the powerful force that keeps you going. If you ever felt that I have arrived I've reached, this is it, then you wouldn't go any further.

Ms. Tippett: You know, and I think it is counterintuitive in our culture — not that we necessarily think this through very often, but we think of desires and longings as something that we need to find something to meet, right?
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes, yes. And we want to meet it really fast.
Ms. Tippett: Yes.
Ms. Keshavarz: Exactly.
Ms. Tippett: Because somehow the feeling of longing and separation from whatever it is, especially if we don't know what it is we want, that that is unsatisfying and there's something wrong with that. And yet what Rumi is saying is that, you know, the longing itself is redemptive and is progress, kind of.
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. And the longing itself — and also not to understand exactly what that longing is, in itself, is very productive. I think one idea or major concept that the Sufi tradition and Rumi in particular have to contribute to our current culture is value in perplexity, the fact that not knowing is a source of learning, something that propels us forward into finding out. Longing, perplexity, these are all very valuable things. We want to unravel things and get answers and be done, but as far as he's concerned, it's a continual process. We can't be done. And that's good.
Ms. Tippett: I also have a feeling that Rumi is saying we also, though, at the same time need to be intentional about what we choose to be perplexed by. Does that make sense? I mean there's this poem: "Stay bewildered in God and only that. Those of you who are scattered, simplify your worrying lives. There is one righteousness. Water the fruit trees and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentery and knotted-up tumors. Don't feed both sides of yourself equally. The spirit and the body carry different loads and require different attentions."
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. Yes. I think the energy can't go in all directions completely in control and you have to choose because you have one life. You have to spend it wisely. So absolutely, he would say choose, be selective, recognize your own value. At another point he says, 'You are an astrolabe to God, you know, don't use yourself for things that are not worthwhile.' But I want to linger a little bit on that idea of being scattered because that's a key concept in Sufi thought. And actually it's something that the Buddhists also talk about a lot. And that is our mind just jumps from one thing to the other and, you know, the Sufis call it the onrush of ideas into our minds. And in some ways, if we allow it, it takes us over, you know. You know, what am I going to do about that credit card? You know, how am I going to--what do I do about this student paper, you know, whatever else is that you're concerned with, my family, my kids, my future. So it all invades your life and so in a way you're pulled in all directions. You're scattered. So one of the purposes of his poetry and one of the concepts the Sufis talk about is to collect that scatteredness.
Ms. Tippett: Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz. Here is one of Rumi's ghazals, which she translated and recites with the Liän Ensemble, a group that often sets Rumi's words to Persian music.
Mr. Houman Pourmehdi: (Lines of Rumi poetry recited in Persian)
Ms. Keshavarz: (translating) When pain arrives side by side with your love, I promise not to flee. When you ask me for my life, I promise not to fight. I'm holding a cup in my hand but, God, if you do not come till the end of time, I promise not to pour out the wine nor to drink a sip. Your bright face is my day. Your dark curls bring the night. If you do not let me near you, I promise not to go to sleep nor rise. Your magnificence has made me a wonder. Your charm has taught me the way of love. I am the progeny of Abraham. I'll find my way through fire.
Ms. Tippett: What do you hear in that? What do you reflect on in that?
Ms. Keshavarz: It's about steadfastness, about staying centered and keeping your eye on the goal. But at the same time, very much being in love and allowing the ecstasy of love take over. You see, he is very aware of the fact that, as human beings, we are limited. We have our limits. We just are not able to do everything that we desire to do. Our rationality is there, is very helpful. It does its job in questioning things and showing the way, but that has its limits, too. What opens the way beyond that is love. What enables us to feel the pain and still go forth in the face of all of that, is experiencing that love. And if you look at our lives, you know, people who produce great works of art, who are creative, who do something that goes beyond day-to-day activity, have that kind of steadfastness, that kind of devotion that lets them go through. What I see in that poem is that I promise to have that, but that comes from you. It's your magnificence, your love that gives me that energy, that power to stay, and I promise to hold onto it.

Ms. Tippett: And "you" is — the beloved is God, is Allah.
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes, and that's where
the ambiguity comes in, of course, because you should be able to relate to it as a human being in love with another human being. That would be your entry into the poem. Ms. Tippett: It's also probably important to note that Rumi had a great turning point with a friendship, with Shams, a Sufi master. I think it is actually helpful that the love relationship out of which Rumi drew so many of his analogies, you know, is not a romantic love relationship. And what you're saying to me is that love is the core, but to think about the many forms that love takes in our lives. I mean, there's also the passionate love that we have for our children.

Ms. Keshavarz: Yes, and so they are a blessing and they all have their own place. And in the end, we don't replace them with the divine. It's like warming up, in a way, like getting you ready for a major exercise, a physical activity. You warm up gradually. You get yourself to a state where you can do it, test your abilities, see your problems and issues, ask your questions, quarrel with yourself, and get ready for it. And I think all these forms of experience of attachment with other human beings are various ways of experiencing that.
Ms. Tippett: Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz this is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, how Rumi might speak to the spirit of Islam, past and present. Our award-winning Web site, speakingoffaith.org, reveals the world of Rumi from many directions. You can see a video performance of our guest, Fatemeh Keshavarz, and the Liän Ensemble, with Rumi's poetry set to the ney, santur, and other classic Persian instruments. And we've selected some of Rumi's poems for you to hear and to read. Also, sign up for our weekly e-mail newsletter with my journal. Subscribe to our podcast — an iTunes' Best of 2006 selection — which offers a free download of our weekly program. Our podcast now includes selected audio clips from my new book, Speaking of Faith. Listen when you want, where you want. Discover something new at speakingoffaith.org. I'm Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media. [Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi," the 13th-century Persian poet and mystic. In recent years, English translations of Rumi's poetry by the American poet Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies in the U.S. UNESCO has declared 2007 International Rumi Year to honor the 800th anniversary of his birth. Rumi has been the subject of creative work by contemporary artists from composer Philip Glass to pop icon Madonna. But such popular renditions of Rumi often give little hint of his Islamic identity. He was the son of a Muslim teacher, born in the center of Persian Islamic civilization. He spent time as the head of a madrassa, religious schools which were centers of great learning, at the same time that Western Europe had fallen into the dark ages. Rumi's themes of separation and longing come straight from the heart of Islamic theology. There is no idea of original sin, but rather of a human tendency to forget and thus become separated from Allah or God. Islam imagines faith as zikr or remembrance of a knowledge that is embedded in human beings. My guest, Fatemeh Keshavarz, finds resonance in Rumi for the deepest challenges before the world and Islam today.
Ms. Tippett: I'd like to talk about Rumi's Islamic grounding and identity. That gets lost in 21st-century translations. Ms. Keshavarz: Absolutely. Ms. Tippett: Coleman Barks' translations are the ones that many people have read, that became popular, I assume. I was reading his introduction to The Essential Rumi. You know, he suggested that with a mystical writer like this, you know, he suggested that placing this person in historical and cultural context is simply not a central task. And he wrote, "My more grandiose project is to free his text into its essence." Ms. Keshavarz: I think one thing that Coleman Barks has done, he has written Rumi's ideas in the American poetic idiom. He's made it accessible to the broad readership, and that should definitely be valued. And, you know, don't hear me saying anything else on that. But I don't think you can free people from the context in which they live, and I don't think even if you try to do that, that that serves a useful purpose. I don't see Rumi as detached from the Islamic context at all. In fact, I see his work as actually and completely immersed in the Islamic tradition. I tell you, it would be hard to read a single ghazal, not even the Masnavi, which is expressly a work with theological and mystical intentions, but even a ghazal, it would be hard to read a ghazal and not find quite a few illusions to Qur'anic verses, to sayings of the prophet, to practices in the Muslim world, so I don't think we need to separate him from his Islamic context. The way first I visualize this myself is that he goes through the religion, he lives it, absorbs it, and uses it in his way. So in the process, he self-births a lot of things. He changes a lot, reinterprets a lot of things, but he does not step outside of it. He lives in it. Let me give you an example. Ms. Tippett: Good. Ms. Keshavarz: You know that in his discourses — I try not to use the word "sermons" because "sermon" brings such a specific connotation that's probably not there. But the discourses are when Rumi is sitting in a local mosque, in the local gathering, talking to people. It's very interactive, it's very informal, and he kind of steps down the pulpit in a way and reaches out to the people and it's very poetic even though it's in prose and he didn't write it down. His students and, you know, people around him took it down. On one of these occasions, he quotes a Qur'anic verse, if I might quote the Arabic, is (recites Qur'anic verse in Arabic). We — this is the royal "we," God — we stand down the zikr and we will be its protector. Now, the word zikr in Arabic means "remembers" and traditionally the commentators have defined the word zikr as the Qur'an itself, and they have good reason to do so because elsewhere in the Qur'an, the Qur'an refers to itself as zikr and remembrance, in part because humanity is described as forgetful, so the Qur'an is a way of remembering. Now, he says the commentators have said that this verse refers to the Qur'an itself, that God says we have given you the Qur'an and we are — that I am the protector of it. And he said (foreign language spoken). That's fine. (Foreign language spoken), but there is this interpretation, too, that God says (foreign language spoken). "We have put in you a desire and a quest, and I, God, am the protector of that desire." That's a very different interpretation. First of all, it opens it immediately to all humanity.

Ms. Tippett: I think that there is something in Rumi's writing which is so large, so generous. I don't like the word "universal" because I think in some ways it waters things down. Ms. Keshavarz: I agree with you. "Generous" is a very good…

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. But it's easy to read this and also I think people from many different religious traditions can read this poetry or his discourses, or people who are not people of faith can read it and feel themselves addressed and feel their spiritual lives addressed.

Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. And I think sometimes people feel that if they take away or overlook the Islamic flavor of it, maybe that makes him more accessible, more theirs. I think generosity and openness is a very good way of putting it. If you're not rooted in the specific and in the small, in the local, you can never see the broader vision. You have to love a tradition and to be completely immersed in it before you can subvert it and transcend it. You have to…

Ms. Tippett: Before you can subvert it from the inside.

Ms. Keshavarz: Exactly. And you have to love it for you to think that I want to open it up, I want to make it better, and then go forward with it. And, you know, you can't break laws in an acceptable way unless you know them really well and practice them with tradition. That's the only time. And that's what I think he does. He's so well rooted in the Islamic tradition, so completely aware of the nuances, that he says, you know, 'Hey guys, we can open it up here. Look. Look at this. This is what you always thought, but now look one step beyond.' And he can do that precisely because he's rooted in the tradition.

Ms. Tippett: And I think it's true also that around the same time that Rumi was entering popular imaginations by way of poetry, there were images of Islam suddenly in the news in this post-9/11 world which were so very different from that. I mean — and, you know, you've written that Rumi is a true child of an adventurous and cosmopolitan Islam. And, you know, those are not two words that you would associate with headline Islam that we've had these past years.

Ms. Keshavarz: I'm actually, you know, really glad you bring this up because I think one thing that's desperately needed at this point, to show the adventureness, the surprise, the play, the aspects of his work that now are not normally associated with that part of the world. You kind of think that, you know, people just — it's all religion, and it's religion followed in a fairly institutionalized and stylized and, you know, planned form. Not at all. I mean, he's playing with it all the time. So I think another contribution he could do for us right now, exactly in this post-9/11 environment, is to bring out that side of the Muslim culture, that contribution to the world.

Ms. Tippett: Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz. I'm Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi." Ironically, just as Rumi has been rediscovered in the U.S. and Western Europe, the Sufi brotherhood formed by his followers has been banned in periods of recent history in Turkey, where Rumi did most of his writing and where he's buried. The whirling of the whirling dervishes, which Rumi first innovated as a form of dancing meditation, have been reduced, some say, to mere entertainment. I asked Fatemeh Keshavarz about Rumi's legacy in Iran, where she grew up, the center of the Persian world of literature and culture to which Rumi also belonged.

Ms. Tippett: Rumi still as much alive in Iran now as when you were growing up? How does that look?

Ms. Keshavarz: Well, I tell you I can't keep up with the books that are published in Iran about him. Yes, absolutely. You know, there's this debate whether he was a Persian or a Turk or an Afghan. You know, it is completely really irrelevant again, but for Iranians he is just such a household name. You will have — in your house you will have the Qur'an, you will have the volume of poetry of Hafez, another great figure from the little bit later period, and the Masnavi of Rumi. And then depending, of course, like any other culture, you have people who more immersed in his work and more familiar. They know him at different levels obviously. But, yeah, I wouldn't say that the interest in him has changed or lessened at all.

Ms. Tippett: I mean, I hear in my conversations that Islam in Iran is — there's great intellectual discourse and study and, you know, that's just not a story that we hear. So I mean, I'm just curious, you know. This subversive, playful, cosmopolitan quality of — are those also part of the discourse in Iran?

Ms. Keshavarz: Absolutely. You know, I send out lists to my friends called "Windows on Iran," precisely for that. Just once a week I send out information about Iran that they don't get to see in the media. Like in the month of June, for example, there's a book fare in Iran. You know how many people visited this past book fare in June in one week? Two million people visited the book fare. You know, I send this out and then I get these messages: Wow, this is happening in Iran? Or I send pictures. I just realized afterwards that our visual vocabulary has been affected. If we think of Iran, we only have certain visions of unfortunate moments in recent history that get repeated. And our language — Rumi is so aware of that. Language can take over our lives and make us not see things. He actually has a fabulous verse, he says (Persian spoken). "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." I mean this is the most sophisticated, philosophical approach to language. Now we talk of language as being constitutive of experience, but that's exactly what he said. You know, 'get yourself a new language and then you will be able to see a new world.' And that's definitely what we need to do in relation to that part of the world, certainly with Iran, to see the dynamics. A tremendous amount is going on that we don't get to hear about.
Ms. Keshavarz: (Lines of Rumi poetry recited in Persian) (translating) To speak the same language is to share the same blood, to be related. To live with strangers is a life of captivity. Many are Hindus and Turks who share the same language. Many are Turks who may be alien to one another. The language of companionship is a unique one. To reach someone through the heart is other than reaching them through words. Besides words, illusions, and arguments, the heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak.

Ms. Tippett: You know, I can't help but look at Rumi's life and be struck by how the poles of culture and place in terms of, you know, where he moved and where he lived and settled, are all such important poles in our world today. There's Afghanistan, there's Turkey, which is somehow becoming symbolic of the struggle to define what is Western, right, what is not. There's Persia, there's Iran. Do you ever think about that, about Rumi's legacy and where he came from and how that echoes in the world today?
Ms. Keshavarz: I consider myself tremendously lucky to be able to grow up with that language. But to tell you the truth, I think that all parts of the world have their own Rumi. I believe that we just need only to explore those traditions and look for them. So in a sense, I think he is just one other giant, you know, one other figure who is very important right now. I agree with you, it's very important to read him, to look at the vision that he has for humanity because it's so healing, it's so needed to correct some of our short-sightedness and, you know, some of the problems we have with not being able to see the larger picture. So in that sense, I agree with you. But I don't know if I want to think of that part of the world as having any kind of monopoly on this.
Ms. Tippett:
OK. Ms. Keshavarz: I think, if anything, his vision is that all humanity is pregnant with God. You know, we all in various parts of worlds and traditions. We have people like him. We just have to find them.
Ms. Tippett: You ask a question in something you've written: "How is one to nurture this God buried like a ruin in the treasure of one's being, and let it permeate all of life?" How does your encounter with Rumi — your ongoing encounter with Rumi, how does it help you live with that question, answer that question in your life?
Ms. Keshavarz: You know, the most important tool he has, which is hope, is what we need to nurture in ourselves. And hope, the energy to move, the energy to go, to never think that this is not worth it or I am done, I am tired, that's what he's given me. I can read them for hours, I can teach them for hours. I can come back to it and be surprised again. The gift is a kind of whirling that keeps your life to be a constant move on the road, and then according to your abilities, what you can see, what you can hear, what you can cherish, you get your own rewards. You put it together. Again, you give birth to your own God. Life kind of comes to life with his works.
Ms. Tippett: With Rumi's words.
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. And, you know, depending on where I am and who I am at that point and I'm doing, I get something out of it. It actually has a fascinating verse. He says (Persian spoken), says, "I am fire. If you have doubts about that, bring your hands forth." That's the dramatic flare I was talking about, you know. 'Bring your hands forth, touch me, and I'll tell you what I'm about.'
Ms. Tippett: Fatemeh Keshavarz is professor of Persian and Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She's the author of Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal Al-din Rumi and a forthcoming book, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Visit us online at speakingoffaith.org. If you've encountered Rumi's writings, tell us how they've spoken to you. What in his spirituality surprises or draws you in? Look for "Share Your Story" on our home page. While you're there, learn much more about Rumi's world and his writings, watch video of musical performances of Rumi's poetry, and listen to readings from his poetry in Persian and in English. Also, subscribe to our e-mail newsletter and podcast and never miss another program again. In addition to each week's full program, our podcast now includes excerpts from my new book, Speaking of Faith. Listen when you want, where you want. Discover something new at speakingoffaith.org. Special thanks this week to Houman Pourmehdi, Soleyman Vaseghi, the Liän Ensemble, Omid Safi, Shiraz Janjua, and Stanford University's Continuing Studies Department. The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Jody Abramson. Our online editor is Trent Gilliss. Our consulting editor is Bill Buzenberg, Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith, and I'm Krista Tippett.

Arabii in na house ya'll!!!

2007-12-18T14:36:00.000Z

If anyone reading my pages is interested in Arabic, keep reading this post. If you are as frustrated as I have been for years at how difficult Arabic is to learn (even when you have gone to the trouble of moving to a corner of the Middle East like I have), then you need to know about the Arab Academy. Despite their rather dumb-sounding name (which makes it sound like a place where you go to learn to be an Arab), it is everything an online study course should be and more. It is not expensive. It is very well done. It has lots and lots of excellent materials, study modules, exercises, online tests and even parts where you can interactive with live teachers. I discovered it about a month ago, just paid my money and signed on yesterday and cannot recommend it highly enough, especially for what it costs.

Here is the url: http://www.arabacademy.com/

Rumi's Song of the Reed

2007-12-13T16:13:00.001Z

Being from the U.S. and being a good liberal, I am used to listening to National Public Radio. Luckily, us U.S. ex-pats and other NPR fans can hear most NPR programs online these days, no matter where you are. One of my favorite NPR shows is a show called Speaking of Faith--a very well done, cosmopolitan, pluralistic, but just-Judeo-Christian-enough-to-make-it-believable-hour of discussion on "faith, meaning and values" (as I believe they put it). This week's show was a repeat of a show I heard earlier in the year on the 13th century Persian Sufi theologian and poet (he was also a jurist) Jalaladin Rumi. What a coincidence, you might say, since I have been talking about Rumi in the last couple of posts! No, I say, there are no coincidences. Rumi has appeared in my life and will reappear on this blog site today for a reason. Here's the reason.

The Rumi "poem" (azul, actually, sometimes translated as "ode") I will put here today is called "The Song of the Reed." It speaks to me now especially eloquently because I happen to be going through a period of very confusing heartbreak. An old friend who I was in love with earlier in the year finds it no longer possible, at least at the present time, to talk to me. There are not many salves for these wounds. But interestingly, in this poem Rumi talks about how longing and the ability to love, even when these feelings are not returned, can be a kind of medication for the soul when seen in the right "light." He calls the reed song "hurt and salve combining."

Anyone who has gone through such times, and this is most of us, reaches a layer of clarity when we realize we should "give ourselves a break" because, as it runs in my head, "at least we had the guts to put ourselves out there," as it were, regardless of what happend in response. How the "song of the reed" can be "intimacy and longing in one song,"as Rumi puts it, or rather how our heartbreak can become a "song of the reed," is apparent to me when we reach a second layer of clarity about how the ability to love comes from our own ability to reflect divinity, divine qualities and divine love (sorry for the theism here, but hey, it's my blog and Rumi was a medieval Muslim). The ability to love and feel love has, in my view at least, something to do with manifesting and recognizing universal qualities within ourselves and our social behavior, and not with manifesting and recognizing qualities known ONLY to our lovers.

A corrolary, hopefully, to this is that at some point in the healing process we realize that the things we thought and felt with our loved ones are real, and just as real with them as without the lover. It is at this point, in my view, that we begin to learn about the designs God has for us and learn that these designs are made just as apparent in cases of love being given and not returned as in cases of it being returned by another human. This is one way, for me at least, that unrequited love becomes the Song of the Reed.

But don't let me stop you from reading the poem itself and finding other ways. There is much packed into a Rumi poem, which is the reason he's been read and re-read constantly since the days of Aquinas and St. Francis, two more important teachers of how and why we need to love, need to love loudly and proudly, but also need to do it observantly, very observantly. On a related but scholarly (read "geeky") note, for those who know Aquinas and Christian Platonism, there is a bit of Platonic "remembrance" going on in this poem too that would make a wonderful basis for trying to compare the two contemporary thinkers. I also really like how Rumi refers to us lovers as "fish" in a sea, as surrounded by grace as fish are water, yet unaware of it. To this little piscean believer in the law of attraction, this is powerful stuff.

The Song of the Reed

Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.

At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. It's not given us to see the soul.

The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty. Hear the love fire tangled in the reed notes, as bewilderment melts into wine. The reed is a friend to all who want the fabric torn and drawn away. The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song. A disastrous surrender and a fine love, together.

The one who secretly hears this is senseless. A tongue has one customer, the ear. A sugarcane flute has such effect because it was able to make sugar in the reedbed. The sound it makes is for everyone.

Days full of wanting, let them go by without worrying that they do. Stay where you are inside such a pure, hollow note. Every thirst gets satisfied except that of these fish, the mystics, who swim a vast ocean of grace still somehow longing for it! No one lives in that without being nourished every day.

But if someone doesn't want to hear the song of the reed flute, it's best to cut conversation short, say good-bye, and leave.

Rumi on Darkness, Friends and....Blogging?

2007-12-05T01:58:00.000Z

well, since yesterday I found myself mentioning Rumi and Saudi in the same breath (something not easy to do), it seems it's time for a bit of Rumi himself. I especially like this Rumi "poem" because of what it might say about bloggers, blogger communities and other possible digital sufis.

Search the Darkness

Sit with your friends, don't go back to sleep.

Don't sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.

Surge like an ocean, don't scatter yourself like a storm.

Life's waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don't run from it.

Night travelers are full of light, and you are too: don't leave this companionship.

Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish, don't slip into the dirt like quicksilver.

The moon appears for night travelers, be watchful when the moon is full.

Sufism in Saudi?

2007-12-04T15:13:00.001Z

This topic deserves far more seriousness and time than I am going to give it here and now, but the question of where Sufism is and was in Saudi is an important one. Let me offer these cursory half-"baked" reflections.

The one Imam in Saudi Arabia I have had one-on-one visits with (for about six weeks during Arabic lessons) did not like Rumi, one of the central figures in Sufism, at all. When I asked him why he said "Rumi thinks God is in everything." He did not go on to say "there is no God but God," but he was definitely heading in this direction. But am I turning him into a charicature by stopping here? How do we contextualize what he said, do it in an intelligent manner, take it seriously, and go beyond the cliche's?

First of all we need to bring in the Wahabi sect (see Wikipedia on this if needed), a conservative version of Islam connected to, and in many ways stemming from, the two-century old religious establishment of the same name. The sect gets its name from its founder: a man named Ibn Wahab who teamed up with the House of Saud in the 18th century to found a partnership that eventually became the country. In the past, the Wahabis are said to be responsible for doing less admirable things, like destroying "idoloatrous" shrines to various Islamic saints and manifestations of popular religion, some of which did and does stem from Shi-ism, that other major Iranian religious export. Today the Wahabis are supposedly in control of Saudi education.

I must stress again that this needs to be explored further than I am doing now. The only thing I am offering is a small, tiny even, bit of insight into this society today and where the Sufis are in it. So then, what I think we can say is this: the anti-Sufism we hear, and imagine we might hear, about in Saudi is there and is alive. We can also speculate that it is part of Saudi's top madrasas or "seminaries." Why? The guy I witnessed air these views graduated from Medina university, one of the most importnat schools in the country and trainer of its religious establishment. He works for this state supported religious establishment now. And as they say, the acorn never falls far from the tree.

But what do we do about this? Does this mean Sufism does not and cannot exist here? Is this a question we should even be asking?

The only hope, I envision is in reminding ouselves of the geopolitical nexus Saudi sits in with respect to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. These places are soooo close to Saudi and the Gulf and gives it millions of workers. A third of the 20 million people in Saudi are foreign workers from south Asia. Many of them are semi-permanent residents here and in the Gulf. Another intersting tidbit is that India and what I will call "greater-Persia" are also the places where Sufism survived and thrived the most heartily in centuries past. These areas produced schools of Sufi thought and learning that survive right up to the present day and which kept the teaching alive throughout the "middle east." Why should this not be the case even now? Without doing any real research on this other than observing what I see in the small but possibly representative speck of this country's social world, I'd say the Sufi mindset could still be lurking and limping along here, but also confident of who and what it is, and that it is. How do I know? Because you, by reading this, and I, by writing it, are "brining it," even though neither one us might be "Asian."

M XYZ

The Ramadan Gestapo

2007-12-02T10:04:00.000Z

I actually wrote this during Ramadan and put it on my myspace page. nobody reads myspace blogs. So I stick it here for your reading pleasure, or not.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Ramadan and The Saudi Religious Gestapo
Category: Religion and Philosophy

It is now the month of Ramadan in the Muslim world. Ramadan is something people hear about outside of this area, but unless you've actually been here duing this time you can't quite understand what it's about. Ramadan requires all Muslims to fast from sun up until sundown. It is supposedly a time of experiencing God's mercy. I guess you take the food, sex and pleasure away during the daylight hours (even though there was not much of it here to begin with) and you appreciate it more at night. You begin to appreciate the little things I suppose, and where they supposedly come from.

But here is how this stuff works on the ground for non-Muslims living in Saudi during Ramadan. We are not allowed to be seen eating or indulging during daylight hours. Some Filipinos were arrested and jailed last year for this I heared.

A fellow teacher at the college I work at was in Khobar last weekend and was pulled over by the police being "suspected of eating." The police told him that someone had tipped them off. It is true that he had been eating. The police let him go after he showed them his passport. Luckily, he did not get the treatment those with a different skin color get here.

There is in Saudi Arabia an institution known as the Mutawwa, "religious police." They are far more prevelant and difficult to deal with in large cities such as Riyadh. I have not heard of them being a problem here. But some teachers believe there are Mutawwa students in some of our classes. I am not sure if the guys who pulled my friend over were Mutawwa or not; but even if they weren't, there is a fine line here between morality police and police qua police, which is expected in a police state.

The Lives of Saudi Women: A Sketch

2007-11-30T04:29:00.000Z

I work at the male branch of a university in Saudi Arabia. Some of us on occasion go over to the women's branch after hours when the women are gone to do various kinds of work: set up computers, deliver exams etc. A couple of months ago, one of the male teachers was at the female campus after hours one day and was setting up a computer in the computer lab. He looked down and noticed that one of the girls had left her art pad/sketch pad under one of the computers. Her name was written on the front of the pad in Roman letters. The male teacher started looking through the sketch pad and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the sketches and at how talented the girl was.

The teacher was even more surprised when in the middle of the sketch pad he saw a sketch of a man and a woman in the middle of a very engaging coital bout: in formus caninus to be precise, and drawn expertly in minute and exquisite detail. Bulging veins, sweat covered limbs, entwined torsos and faces showing bodies mired deep in the raptures of pleasure were all captured in the finest and most skilled detail.In Saudi Arabian universities for women, women are allowed to uncover their faces and take off their black cloak, known as an abayya, as long as they are indoors. The female teachers who work there tell me "it's a fashion show." And that the students are nearly always better dressed and are more fashionable than their teachers.

Are Saudi women are more normal than we think they are, and as they appear (or don't appear) in public? It seems their fantasy lives and aesthetic sense are about as well honed and active as they rest of ours are.The particular male teacher who saw this sketch was an American. There was a very pious Muslim, who happened to be Somali, standing next to him who was horrified at the picuture and immediately started ripping it out of the sketch pad and ripping it to shreds. The American asked why, and was told, wisely, that the girl's name was on the outside of the pad and that if the picuture was found by the wrong people she might find herself in a lot of trouble. So, the strictures on pleasure that exist in a conservative country like this come from all directions, and are both opposed and supported from all directions as well. While there is a lot about this place that is black and white, and very annoyingly so. But there is much that is gray as well. Salam Alaykum

Tariki and Jiriki

2007-11-29T07:37:00.000Z

In discussions of Japanese Buddhism you occassionally run across the notion of "tariki" and "jiriki." The Japanese character "ta," which is straight from Chinese actually, means "other, outiside." "Riki" means "power." "Ji," or "si" in modern Chinese, means "self." The notions tariki and jiriki have been part of Japanese Buddhist discourse since Buddhism arrived in Japan from China since the sixth century. Pure Land Buddhism, for example, is often compared to Lutheranism because of its emphasis on grace and the idea that the individual cannot save themselves and must rely upon the Buddha Amitaba to do so. Pure Land Buddhism was and is often distinguished from Zen where the emphasis was placed on individual initiative and the need for working out one's own salvation---a jiriki religion in other words.

Many of us who come to work in Saudi Arabia often see a similar distintion at work between "us" (as if we are all the same) and the Saudis. Saudis, for example, constantly utter the phrase "in sha Allah" meaning "God willing." This phrase is heard especially coming from those who might or might not do what you are asking of them. It is thus heard from bureaucrats when you want them to fix something in your government issued apartment, people in the personnel department where you work when you are waiting for them to process your immigration pepers, and from students when ask them to do some form of homework.

So are Saudis really less used to doing things for themselves than are people in the west? Judging from the Saudi students to whom I teach English and from other Saudis I encounter at my job and in the community, the answer seems to be yes. These students drive like complete maniacs on the highway and in residential areas. One of the leading causes of death in Saud Arabia is car accidents. I have not yet been here six months and have heard of three deaths among the friends or family members of my studednts. And this is only in my classes. There are other teachers I know who can vouch for similar numbers. So the reigning mindset on Saudi highways certainly seems to be a tariki one rather than a jiriki one.

The students I teach also seem to have a similar view when studying for exams or when doing homework. These students are in an institution where the entire second year is taught in English and where students will take courses in business and science and have to listen to lectures in English taught by speactialists in these disciplines. Some of the first year courses too are mathematics and computer science which are also taught completely in English. At least 60% of the students I teach (who are in the first year, or "prep year" of the program) are at a level of English that prevents them from carrying on a simple conversation in the language; yet they will not do the homework that I give them to help them improve in their handling of basic grammar structures and to acquire the needed vocabulary to communicate on basic topics in English.

So, the "tariki' mentality seems to be widespread here. But does it come from Islam (the word itself means "submission") , which stresses submission, obedience and the denial of the self and putting the family and uluma (the world of Islam) first? Or does it come from living under a welfare state run off of petro-dollars and where self-initiative is not needed? Here, much of the real work is done either by foreigners or by a small band of elite Saudis who actually posses the real skill and knowhow and run the country.

The answer, as usual, lies somewhere in between. The real contradiction however, and the saddest and most confusing thing, is that the few Saudis who do seem to realize that their instututions are set up to engender passivity are the ones who become the new elite. This elite, as far as I can tell, is the only patrioitc group of individuals here. The rest of them, however proud they are of at least thingking of themselves as Saudi, do not seem to realize how they constantly undercut the building and improving of their nation. It is for this reason that I feel like I, who have not even been here six months, am often a better Saudi than those self-understood real Saudis that I encounter everyday living out their bewildering, unconcered and "tariki" lives.

Saudi: first impressions..oh jeez!

2007-06-27T07:38:00.000+01:00

yes, living in Saudi Arabia as an English teacher totally sucks, on one level that is. It is absolutely oppressive in every way: for almost two weeks now I have not talked face to face with a woman except for the four words I exchanged with a Philipino nurse in the medical center. The Saudis look down on everybody, including other Muslims. College students are paid to attend class and are therefore more arrogant and lazy in class than they otherwise might be. There are no restaurants, movie theatres, cafes, book shops of any kind in the town I live in. There are coffee shops, books stores and restaurants in other cities, but forget movie theatres. Where I live is also a terrible place to learn Arabic, the one thing--besids a conservative version of Islam--you'd think would be in ample supply here.

But on the proverbial other hand, there are 20 million Saudis here and another batch of 8 million foreign workers, all of whom happen to be living in one of the pivotal countries of the Middle East. However difficult the Saudis may or may not be to deal with, they have been relatively cooperative and friendly in the US's project to keep it's feet in the middle east and deal with Islamic fundamentalists. They are also rather enamored of the West and with education in English speaking countries. So, even though it may be skewed at times, there are some bases for a good working relationship and one where we can learn from one another.

But I have only been here two weeks. Let's see how this looks in two months.