On Learning

There are ways of learning that are less like gathering up glittery little bits of data than they are like feeling your way through darkness until you come upon something that you recognize.

It's easy to forget the things that you try to implant in your brain--little shards that seem to be a part of something bigger, although you may never know what that bigger something is.  But you cannot so easily forget that which suddenly illumines your path and helps you realize that what you were looking for needed only to be uncovered.

With each step through the darkness, I find more that I can recognize.  And, even when I feel completely lost and abandoned, I can appreciate the stars, the smell of nighttime, and the comforting stillness of the air.

The View from My Window: Rapidly Increasing Religious Diversity

My office window faces an alley where a local artist, Michael Brown, is renovating a mural that he originally painted some 20 years ago.  It had faded and peeled, so he's putting on a fresh coat of paint--and also making a few changes in detail to modernize the work.

The woman with the academic gown and cap had been holding a Latin book, but now seems to be texting.  And the woman carrying the large stack of books was originally depicted with free flowing curly locks, but now she has donned a Muslim headscarf.  The world is changing before my eyes!

However, when I look up, I notice that the spire of the University United Methodist Church remains unchanged:

Disembodied Reason, Embodied Experience and the Hebrew Bible

In his book Faith without Certainty, Paul Rasor identifies as a liberal "myth" the idea that moral stands are (or can be) arrived at purely through disembodied reason. In other words, liberals tend to do things because we have decided as the result of a rational process that these things are right to do.

But, Rasor points out, "moral stands can be understood as moral only within the context of a defining community." And that's where things start getting messy because the world has become increasingly complex and interconnected in new ways, which means that we are all members of multiple communities that overlap in various ways.

And when the going gets messy, liberals tend to get skittish. (As opposed to conservatives, for example who tend to get mean.) It's difficult to balance the reality of ourselves as social beings interacting with other social beings with the fact that we are also products of our own culture, even when we are critics of that culture.

But I think that this is the point at which an emphasis on embodied experience becomes really useful.  When you bring a sense of community down to the fundamentals, you're left, I think, with something to which most of us can feel connected.

I understand the need for food and water and a warm place to sleep.  And that's where real community begins. And that's where justice begins--when we recognize viscerally that many of us do not have adequate food, water and shelter.

Poverty and oppression are not abstractions when we live in deep community with others--not just a community of "like-minded" individuals, but a community that is really and truly radically inclusive.

And what does all this have to do with the Hebrew Bible?  Most of what I've read in the Hebrew scriptures thus far has something to do with direct embodied experience.  Think of the many provisions for those who are in the greatest need and the wayfarers (not to mention the obsession with bodily fluids).

Think, too, of the passage from Deuteronomy I quoted in another post about how the word is in our mouths and in our hearts.  Moses didn't say the word dwelt in our minds, but in our mouths and hearts--right where we live.