Jesus Prayer rosary

As usual, my high aspirations for improving my practice of prayer during Lent haven’t lived up to expectations. Still, I recently picked up a small book called The Jesus Prayer Rosary by the late Fr. Michael Cleary that I’ve found helpful. Although I’m wary of mix ‘n’ match approaches to spirituality, I love the Rosary and have been looking for a way to incorporate the Jesus Prayer into my practice of prayer beyond ad hoc use.

In the introduction, Fr. Cleary says that he wrote the book precisely to bring these two traditions together. Particularly, he suggests it could be a valuable way of praying for those who are uncomfortable with the Marian prayers of the traditional Rosary.

The Jesus Prayer Rosary differs from the traditional (Dominican) Rosary in about the ways you might expect. Here’s what the structure looks like:

On the cross pray

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you.
Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

and

Holy God,
Holy and strong,
Holy and immortal,
have mercy on us.

On the first large bead pray the Lord’s Prayer.

On the three small beads pray

i. Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.
ii. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
iii. Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Pray the “Glory Be…”

On the next large bead, announce the first “mystery” or meditation and pray the Lord’s Prayer.

On each of the ten following beads, pray the Jesus Prayer.

After the ten beads, pray the “Glory Be…” and the Concluding prayer for each meditation.

Repeat this for all five decades; on the centerpiece pray one of the concluding prayers (the book offers several, including the traditional Lukan canticles).

Pray a concluding prayer.

The book offers a series of Bible passages and meditations that correspond roughly to the traditional mysteries of the Rosary: Meditations on the Infancy of Jesus, the Ministry of Jesus, the Passion, and “Life in Christ,” which include the Resurrection, Ascension, the Holy Spirit, the Life of Grace, and the New Jerusalem.

For each meditation, the book also provides a clause to use when praying the Jesus Prayer that resonates with the mystery being meditated upon. For instance, the form of the Jesus Prayer given for the meditation on the Last Supper is

Jesus, Lord and Christ,
Son and Word of the Living God:
you make yourself known to us
in the breaking of bread,
have mercy (on us).

I’ve only used this form of the Rosary a couple of times so far, but I’ve found it to be conducive to focusing on Jesus, which, according to Fr. Cleary, is what it’s for:

Concentrating on Jesus is what this little work is all about. It’s also a pretty good description of what Christians down the years have called ‘meditation.’ Making it possible for people to do so, in a way that changes their lives, what they have called ‘evangelization.’ At least, that’s the way St. Paul understood it: ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4.6). And, staying focused on that face is for the apostle the secret of the spiritual life, the life of transforming grace: ‘beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3.18). (pp. ix-x)

I’m not at all uncomfortable with the traditional Marian rosary, but I do find this version’s more intensely Christological focus to be appealing.

Sen. Jim Webb tackles prison reform

Good for him. I hope something substantive comes of this.

Do crustaceans feel pain?

Two new studies suggest they do (via).

The bar of reason

Marvin reproduced an interesting quote from Gary Dorrien, who Google tells me is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. Dorrien offers this definition of a “liberal approach” to theology:

theology should be based on reason and critically interpreted religious experience, not external authority.

Depending on how key terms are defined, I’d have to say that I substantially agree with this.

A lot of 20th-century philosophy has taught us to mistrust appeals to “reason” and “experience;” we’re told that they are context-dependent, tradition-bound, and embedded in language.

While these are all valid points, the core of what Dorrien seems to be saying here seems unaffected.

“Reason” doesn’t need to be thought of as a kind of infallible algorithm for arriving at truth, or a means of shedding all our existing cultural, social, and linguistic baggage to adopt a “God’s-eye” view of the world (or, a “view from nowhere” as Thomas Nagel puts it).

And “experience” is not an unmediated apprehension of the world as it is independent of any subjective elements we may bring to bear.

I doubt Dorrien, or any critical thinker in the 21st century, would be making such claims.

But there are understandings of reason and experience that are relevant to testing theological (or any other) truth claims.

When some claim is presented for my belief, one thing I might do is consider whether it is reasonable and whether it comports with my experience. “Reasonable” here needn’t refer to some a priori faculty for arriving at truth; it can simply mean that it is consistent with the laws of logic and with widely-known and accepted truths about the world.

And experience is just that: my experience and other people’s experience of the world, including their moral, aesthetic, and religious experience.

None of this implies that reason and experience are “context independent” or “universal” in allowing an unbiased view of the world. That’s precisely why we, if we’re smart, try to widen our base of knowledge and experience by learning from other people, other cultures, traditions, religions, etc. This is a very piecemeal, fallibilist view of knowledge, but I don’t know what the alternative is.

In deciding whether to accept a certain truth claim, then, what other procedure can we follow but to see how it fits with what we know about the world and what we’ve experienced of it?

Thus any theological truth claim presented for our belief that 1. conflicts with the laws of logic (e.g., is self-contradictory); 2. contradicts well-established truths about the world (e.g., well-established findings of science); or 3. can’t make sense of widespread moral, aesthetic, or religious experience is, I submit and other things being equal, likely to be false.

On the positive side, if such a claim supports or is entailed by other knowledge, or provides a more satisfying interpretation of our experience than the alternatives, or sheds new light on previously accepted truths we have good reason (again, other things being equal) to adopt it.

Of course, as Dorrien mentions, many religions have been uncomfortable with this piecemeal sifting and testing of truth and have looked for refuge in an appeal to authority, such as the authority of an infallible church, pope, Bible, tradition or whatever.

But as we well know, this just pushes the question back a step: How am I decide which authority is infallible? The only way I can do it is by appealing to my (fallible!) knowledge (or reason) and experience. What other way is there? Again, not an abstract, universal knowledge and experience, but the knowledge and experience I actually have, supplemented by that of others.

I don’t know if this makes me a “liberal” or not by Dorrien’s standards; I consider the actual content of my theological beliefs to be fairly traditional. Food for thought.

More from Dorrien on liberal theology here.

Foie gras revisited

A writer for the Village Voice investigates the “Is foie gras torture?” question by traveling to Hudson Valley Foie Gras in New York, the nation’s largest producer. What she concludes after observing the birds is that it’s not nearly as bad as some of the images from animal rights and welfare groups suggest. (Many of these images, she suggests, come from large industrial producers in Europe or other poorly managed farms.)

Based on the evidence she provides, I don’t exactly disagree with the author’s conclusion (“If I had seen with my own eyes that Hudson Valley produced foie gras by abusing ducks, this article would have turned out very differently. But that just wasn’t the case.”). On the other hand, these birds aren’t exactly “free range.” They’re confined indoors, and further confined during the force-feeding process. “Humane” is a matter of degree. Seems easier to me just to avoid it altogether.

Why do we have pets?

A new book suggests that we get a bio-psychological reward from them. Salon interviews the author:

Touch releases oxytocin in humans and animals. Oxytocin is one of the most powerful hormones that the body makes. This is a chemical that is responsible for social bonding.

When you pat your cat, you should be getting a release of oxytocin, as should your cat, too, that slows your heart rate down, lowers your stress response. You feel this warmth and this attachment, as does the cat. So you’re getting an emotional and a physiological anti-stress response. It’s a wonderful renewable system.

Read the rest here.

Speaking of BSG…

You can watch the trailer for the prequel series “Caprica” here.

According to Wikipedia, an “extended version of the pilot will have its world premiere exclusively on DVD on April 21, 2009. In early 2010, the first season, composed of the two-hour pilot and 18 hour-long episodes, is expected to begin airing on the Sci Fi Channel in the United States.”

Two Radioheads

This is bound to brand me as old and/or lame, but I seem to be one of the few people who loved Radiohead but stopped listening to them at the end of the 90s. I loved The Bends and especially OK Computer and saw them play a terrific show at the Metropol in Pittsburgh around ’97 or ’98 (at which the band churlishly refused to play “Creep”), but completely lost interest once they moved into their more “experimental” phase. It’s funny now that there’s a whole generation of people who know them almost exclusively for the post-90s output and are just now discovering their earlier stuff. Ah well.

BSG and green anarchy

An interesting–though somewhat spoiler-y!–analysis of some of the themes in the Battlestar Galactica finale. (Via Jim Henley; also see Jim’s thoughts here.)

So much for states’ rights

In the grand tradition of Congress treating D.C. as its own personal political laboratory, Nevada’s Republican senator John Ensign has attached an amendment to the D.C. voting rights bill that would essentially gut what remains of the District’s gun control laws post-Heller.

I actually have fairly middle-of-the-road, or even conservative views on gun rights. Part of that comes from growing up in a small town/rural area where virtually every adult male (and not a few of the women) I knew owned multiple firearms. So, I don’t have the aversion to guns per se that a lot of my liberal friends do.

But – D.C. is a dense urban area with a high crime rate, and it strikes me as utterly reasonable that the District would want to regulate guns, even if Heller makes an outright ban untenable. Approaches to gun control ought properly be tailored to local needs and conditions; that’s one benefit of federalism. Stunts like these are nothing more than playing to the folks back home, while depriving D.C. residents of meaningful self-government.