natalie's narrative

The exurbs

The Chicago Tribune has a feature on a young family that is moving out to the far western suburbs of Chicago, so far away that many have deemed these areas "exurbs." The comments section highlights the fact that mass migration to the suburbs and beyond brings up a few important issues: Are we thinking about our resources, such as water and oil, when we develop land that far out? The mother in the family featured has a 40+ mile, 2-hour commute each day to Chicago. Secondly, are we living above our means? The article states:

"From 1970 to 2005, the number of newly built homes with four bedrooms rose to 39 percent from 24 percent, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The average interior space went to 2,434 square feet from 1,500 square feet, a 62 percent increase. The percentage of homes having a two- or three-car garage went to 84 percent from 39 percent."

The article mentions that the average family size is getting smaller, although I wonder if that statistic takes into account growing immigrant families. Regardless of how big our families are, do we really need that much space?

I'll admit, it is truly difficult to find affordable housing in many parts of the Chicago area, which is pushing more people out west. I've heard that there will soon be a crisis in Chicago and surrounding areas, since housing costs are so high. I just wish there was a better, wiser alternative to the four-bedroom, 4-car garage cookie cutter homes and big box stores that are cropping up.

The least of these

Growing up, when I learned about slavery in the US and the later civil rights movement, I always wondered how I would react if I had lived during those times. I didn’t necessarily question the fact that I wouldn’t be compassionate in a face-to-face encounter with people who were being oppressed, but instead wondered how far I would really go to protest and to break the law. In college, learning about colonialism brought the same questions.

I also wondered what issue today would be equivalent to slavery, civil rights, and colonialism. What issue would be a challenge to step up for today? For what would I be willing to perform civil disobedience—in the face of my church and community’s supporting the status quo?

I strongly believe that immigration is one of those challenging issues. In Oklahoma, it is now a felony for U.S. citizens (knowingly) to provide shelter, transportation, or employment to undocumented immigrants. This is where following Scripture and obeying the laws of my country come head to head. Which one will the church choose? Will Christians continue to parrot the line that breaking the law is un-Christian while remaining uncritical of the fact that laws can be unjust? Literally enslaving another human being was once within the parameters of US law.

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For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:35-40

Loving God with our mind in a mindless age

I’m reading a book called The Culturally Savvy Christian by Dick Staub—had never heard of it before but it’s been mostly good so far. I don’t agree with some things that Staub says, but it does bring an incisive critique to both US American culture and evangelical Christian subculture.

Staub draws from the Biblical theme that every human is created in God’s image; we have intellectual, creative, and relational capacities. Therefore, our culture and faith’s superficiality will not truly satisfy us. What are we to do in the face of a “Christian community that has degenerated into an intellectually and artistically anemic subculture,” while the general public pursues “mindless, soulless, spiritually delusional” things? Staub notes that thoughtful Christians may feel trapped between a “popular culture attempting to build art without God and a religious culture that believes in a God disinterested in art” (xi). It is very similar to Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but a critique of American culture is included along with the critique of evangelicalism. It would be weird, anyways, to think of Mark Noll throwing in mentions of “Fight Club” and weed in his books!

Since we are made in the image of God, we are not being fully human if we do not fulfill these capacities that God has granted us and that Jesus has redeemed for us. Staub quotes Christian art historian Hans Rookmaaker: “Jesus did not come to make us Christian; Jesus came to make us fully human” (xv). To be fully human is to utilize what God gave us and to intentionally involve ourselves in our community. We’re commanded to love God with all of our minds and to love others, but this can be a challenge in our consumerist, shallow, info-tainment society. In the middle of our high-speed internet, i-phones, plasma TVs, and the latest Britney/O.J./missing blonde woman drama, we are pulled away from important truths, such as:

“consumption does not satisfy, that the differential between wealth and poverty is unjust, that our neighbor is in need, and that the appropriate human response to people in need is sleeves-rolled-up service, not simply watching” (7).

Plus, what does it say about ourselves if we know more about the personal lives of celebrities and politicians that the goings-on—or even suffering—of people in our own neighborhood, church, and family?

When I read this, I thought I was doing pretty well with avoiding the superficiality of our pop culture (okay, I do indulge in E! Entertainment Television occasionally, but whatever.) I mean, I read a lot, keep up with what’s going on in the world, and couldn’t care less about celebrity couples. I’ve realized the effects of our culture can run pretty deep, though. With the rise of television and the emphasis on visual images, we may have lost some pretty important conceptual tools. Staub cites E.B. White to illustrate that the visual may replace words: “TV has taken a big bite out of the written word. But words still count with me” (8). 

Words paint pictures of ideas, and these ideas in turn employ and engage our minds. Being immersed in a culture that devalues words will eventually make it harder for us to follow a line of thought, to reason, to make sense of complex ideas, to synthesize concepts. Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, remarks: “An image-based society, on the other hand, dispenses with all these [reasoning, synthesizing] because images do not demand them. How much logical discipline does one need to recognize a picture?” (8).

Staub includes a telling quotation from the founding chairman of MTV: “What we’ve introduced is non-narrative form; we rely on mood and emotion. We make you feel a certain way as opposed to you walking away with any particular knowledge” (8). What you feel, sense, and see essentially replaces critical thought. 

So there’s some dangerous elements in our culture that we need to watch out for. What’s scary to me is that the church uncritically accepts many things from the broader culture. We as the church are not members of an intentional, shared-possessions community; rather, we are consumers who are marketed-to, just like in the broader culture. In the context of worship, images are important and are not a negative thing. But, if a church service appeals entirely to the visual and aural senses and resembles entertainment, how can the challenging, upside-down message of the Gospel get through? It would be difficult to preach “it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” when your church’s weekly budget exceeds $30,000 (I almost choked when I read that in a booklet—distributed by Willow Creek—that I’m using for a small group. I guess I contributed to that bloated budget by using the free booklet…). Those flashy, entertaining videos, brochures, lighting effects, etc. aren't cheap. It would also be difficult to preach the message of loving God with our mind when we have no challenge to do so from within the church.

Tagged

"As the meme goes, I believe, I’m supposed to recommend several blogs that I think more people should be reading. Most of these I’ve been reading for some time now; I don’t think that they’d qualify as lesser-known as per the original meme, but I think all of them are worth adding to your feed reader if you haven’t already:"

I was recommended as one of these blogs (Thanks Todd!) so I wanted to share my picks, too. These may be more popular than I know, but here's a few I look forward to reading:

Journeys in Insanity - Nicole's working on her doctorate in psychology.

Levellers - Michael Westmoreland-White always has great posts on peace, faith, and social justice.

Streak's Blog - Keeps me informed about Bush and his administration's (wrong)doings, and unfortunately making my blood pressure rise in the process!

The Margins - Discovered her through Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog, and so glad I did! She and her young family are living incarnationally in South Central LA.

Thinking christianly about the body

Two articles arrived in my email last week that complemented each other well. The Martin Marty Center’s November 1st Sightings was a contribution from Kevin Boyd: “Giving the Body its Due.” Recent scientific experiments caused participants to undergo an out-of-body experience, which, Boyd suggests, may reshape modern Western theological notions of “self.”

According to Western conceptions, we understand ourselves—the “I”—as being apart from our bodily form; our minds and self-consciousness are separate from the physical body. Boyd refers to a work, built on a lot of neurobiological data, by Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Eakin proposes that we should think of ourselves as “less an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process.” Such a self-conception is moving away from the modern Western construction of self.

We are not taking the body seriously enough if it is merely what the “I” comes packaged in. Eakin claims that the body can “alter the very manner in which the 'I' understands itself.” We can explain things that happen in our lives or how we think/operate not merely by using concepts like “consciousness” and the “unconscious,” but also the corporeal. Eakin uses the example of blind children’s delayed development of their idea of self. They learn the “I” and “you” pronouns much later than children who are not blind.

Many within theology are already asking the question, “Are bodies something that we have or something that we are?” Those who fail to think through a theology of the body may be missing out on important pieces of the puzzle when it comes to sexuality, health, abuse, and women’s issues. Boyd notes,

“The disembodied position, that which views the body as something that we merely have, can too easily lead to theological positions that gloss over the tensions, attractions, and repulsions that come with lived human experience. The failure of such theological systems to take seriously the notion of embodiment leads not only to theological impoverishment, but to the dangerous potential for a variety of abuses. These include the potential to abuse one's own body, but also the potential to fail to honor the value and worth of the body of the other. Violence is empowered by systems of thought that refuse to acknowledge, with integrity, the rights of other bodies.”

Reading this article made me think in more concrete terms, what our Christian faith has to say, if anything, about overeating/obesity and just generally keeping ourselves healthy. Also, what would change about abstinence education if Christians acknowledged the power of teenagers’ (and other age groups’) bodies, or rather the chemicals within our bodies? What about women’s body image? What does the pressure to be thin, to have great skin, big breasts, nice hair, and a pretty face really do to women?

Lauren Winner has a piece in Books and Culture for November/December 2007, titled “The Trouble with Bodies.” Winner discusses Beth Felker Jones’ Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Resurrection, which is “an alternative story for a culture that is at once obsessed with and repulsed by bodies, a culture in which the most worrying bodily practices, from liposuction to cutting, are disproportionately taken up by women.”

The brokenness of our bodies should be confronted by the gospel, by what God is reworking us into:

“Christian theology has often gotten the body wrong: Jones diagnoses a kind of gendered Gnosticism that equates masculinity with holiness, underestimates ‘the sinfulness and disorder of male bodies,’ and assumes that female bodies are aberrations, problems that must be fixed. She seeks a theology in which we do not identify material bodies as the source of our troubles; rather, she wants Christians to conceive of ‘the trouble with bodies’ as a disorder that can and will be redeemed."

According to Jones, “redemption happens through the body.” This makes sense, considering that Jesus performed a very physical, bodily act through his crucifixion and resurrection. I thought the two articles were a great juxtaposition, since Winner—by using Jones’ book—seems to answer a question posed by Boyd’s Sightings piece. Both of the books cited draw from feminist theology, as well. I would love to hone in on Winner’s mention that our resurrected bodies will be gendered and the implications of that belief…