A Thinking Reed

Quotes for Brother Martin’s birthday

Lee — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:05:27 +0000

From Kim at Connexions: Happy birthday, Martin!

Two “fall of the Wall” songs

Lee — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:15:45 +0000

I was a young buck of 15 at the time, so naturally my memory of the events is filtered through rock music:

Jesus Jones, “Right Here, Right Now”

Scorpions, “Winds of Change”

[Edited because of embedding issues.]

Close encounters of the religious kind

Lee — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:32:23 +0000

The Post had an article this morning on a conference being sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences on religious implications of the possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life.

In principle, I’m not sure most the challenges posed by such a discovery would be all that different from ones we’re already used to. We’re already having to come to terms with the idea that human beings aren’t the center of the cosmos. Why should it be threatening to Christians to think that God, in his overflowing goodness, would want to create other creatures throughout this unimaginably vast universe?

Similarly, the question of salvation and Christian uniqueness with respect to aliens doesn’t necessarily seem to be tremendously different from the question of Christianity’s relationship to other religions on Earth. The basic options would seem to be (1) that the one incarnation in Jesus is salvifically sufficient for all creatures, (2) that there could be multiple incarnations, or other suitable ways of relating to the divine, for each race of beings, or (3) that alien races aren’t in need of salvation, or at least not in the same way that humans are (C.S. Lewis depicted such an “unfallen” alien race in his Space Trilogy). Interestingly, Lewis proposed that the more likely scenario would be one of humans trying to exploit alien races and that it would be better for all parties concerned if we never came into contact with them.

Maybe the most challenging scenario would be to encounter races of intelligent aliens who had no religion whatsoever. Christians have been inclined to think that the development of a certain level of intelligence necessarily brings with it the potential for relating to God. But suppose there were aliens who simply lacked this sense or capability, but were otherwise just as intelligent as us (or more intelligent). Would that count as evidence against God’s existence?

UPDATE: See Caelius Spinator’s thoughts on this at the Monastery of the Remarkable English Martyrs here.

Incarnation and animal redemption

Lee — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:00:36 +0000

I recently got my hands on an excellent anthology of essays–Creaturely Theology: God, Humans, and Other Animals, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough. It brings together essays on history, theology, philosophy, and ethics to deepen the conversation about the place of animals in Christian theology and practice.

So far I’ve only read a few of the essays, but they’ve been good ones. In his essay “The Redemption of Animals in an Incarnational Theology,” Denis Edwards, the Australian theologian of ecology, develops a theory of redemption that is inclusive of non-human animals. Following Athanasius, he proposes an incarnational theory of redemption as an alternative to theories that lean heavily on notions of substitution, satisfaction, or sacrifice.

It has the great advantage of bringing into focus the overwhelming and unthinkable generosity of God. It presents redemption as a divine act of self-bestowal rather than as something that changes God. God gives God’s self to us in the Word made flesh and in the Spirit poured out in grace. The Word enters into the world of flesh, that in the Spirit the community of fleshly life might be forgiven, healed, freed from violence, reconciled, and find its fulfillment in the life of God. (p. 91)

In becoming incarnate and living a life of self-giving love, the Son of God bestows the divine love and presence on a sinful and suffering world. In taking the journey into the depths of pain and abandonment he identifies with the suffering of all sentient creatures; in rising he overcomes death and sin and makes possible the redemption of all creatures as the first born of the new creation. In Christ, not just human nature, but creaturely, fleshly nature is reconciled to its Creator. In this scheme, creation and redemption are held more closely together than they are in many other accounts of atonement: the Logos or Wisdom of God is both the agent of creation and of God’s loving self-bestowal on that creation. “In the Word made flesh, God embraces the whole labor of life on Earth, with all its evolutionary processes, including death, predation and extinction, in an event that is both a radical identification in love and an unbreakable promise” (p. 95).

This boundless compassion of God gives us reason to hope that individual animals will find some kind of ultimate fulfillment in the divine life, in whatever way is appropriate to their natures. It also provides the ground for transformed relationships between us and the rest of creation. Incorporating some of the insights of French theorist Rene Girard and the theologian Raymund Schwager, Edwards proposes that Jesus overcomes violence and sin through non-violence and love of enemies. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of his Spirit unmask the powers of scapegoating and death-dealing and form a new community dedicated (however haltingly and incompletely) to overcoming tribalism and competition and exemplifying a more universal, unrestricted love. This should properly extend to our relations with non-human creatures, and part of redemption for animals means transforming human attitudes toward them and beginning to overcome our violent exploitative ways.

Health care reform and Catholic social teaching

Lee — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:17:23 +0000

Commonweal has an interesting article on Catholic critics of health care reform. The principle of subsidiarity, a key tenet of Catholic social teaching, is often conflated with the kind of small- or anti-government rhetoric you sometimes get from the Right. J. Peter Nixon argues that this is a mistake. His conclusion:

Catholic critics of health-care reform may be correct that, according to Catholic social teaching, a “right” to health-care services does not necessarily require those services to be provided by the government. At some point, though, the burden of proof is on the critics to provide a workable alternative. They have largely failed to do that. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the concept of subsidiarity is being employed to mask an antigovernment animus that has little support in the Catholic tradition. There may be other reasons for Catholics to be concerned about aspects of health-care reform, but subsidiarity is not one of them.

Read the rest here.



Friday Metal: going Dutch
Lee — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:15:33 +0000

The Dutch band Textures clearly has some heavy Meshuggah influences, but I find their melodic aspects (which are more pronounced in their more recent material) make them a bit more accessible: 

       


Did we save the rainforest?
Lee — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:20:13 +0000

Not really, as it turns out. Though climate change may be putting it back on the agenda, as the rainforests are pretty important for keeping vast amounts of carbon from escaping into the atmosphere.
Incidentally, this is a nice example of how the “free market” often works in practice: the World Bank bribes a relatively poor country to “develop” its natural resources in order to provide richer countries with things like rubber and cheap meat. This entails, among other things, sending the urban proletariat into the rainforest, forcing indigenous forest-dwellers off their land, and handing over huge tracts of the country’s natural patrimony over to big corporations. Freedom!
       


A defense of Ghostbusters
Lee — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:06:52 +0000

As if one was needed! Still one of my all-time faves. Link.
       


This generation’s Black Flag?
Lee — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:00:03 +0000

It’s nice to see hipster redoubt Pitchfork finally starting to review metal and other heavy music. Here’s a review of Converge’s Axe to Fall, which has been getting heaps of critical praise. I just got it yesterday and have yet to fully digest it, but so far so good.
       


Building a better farm animal?
Lee — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:06:54 +0000

Thanks to mizm of the fine blog Left at the Altar for alerting me to this paper by Adam Shriver that makes a case for replacing factory farmed animals with animals genetically engineered to feel less pain. The author cites recent research that seems to show that it’s possible to eliminate, or at least reduce, animals’ capacity for suffering and goes on to argue that, on consequentialist grounds, this could provide a certain technological fix to the moral problem of factory farming.
I have two problems with this piece, a somewhat superficial one and a deeper one. First, even if it is possible to reduce or eliminate the unpleasant sensations associated with pain, there’s still the issue of how factory farming frustrates animals’ natural tendencies toward certain behaviors. A pig wants to get up and move around, and a hen wants to stretch her wings. This is true even if they aren’t in pain per se. Not to mention the various social and other behaviors that are proper to these creatures but which the confined conditions of factory farming prevent them from engaging in. Even if we could genetically engineer away pain, is it possible to engineer away the frustration, boredom, and fear that these animals undoubtedly also experience?
Suppose it is possible, though–is it desirable? This brings me to my more fundamental objection. Even if such a thing was technically feasible, would it be right to engineer animals with such radically different natures that they no longer even wanted to express the patterns of behavior proper to their kind? Granted, we can’t necessarily see natural kinds in quite the same ways that our pre-Darwinian ancestors might have, but isn’t there something monstrous about the prospect of fashioning such unnatural beings? Is our gluttony for flesh so insatiable that there’s no length we won’t go to in order to satisfy it? 
In fairness to Shriver, he seems to be an animal advocate, and his argument is motivated in part by a deep pessimism that moral argument will persuade large numbers of people to boycott the products of factory farms. Replacing existing farm animals with ones incapable of suffering is, for him, a second-best option. I’m not sure I share his pessimism, but even if I did, there are some things that we shouldn’t do even if they seem to promise the best available utilitarian outcome. The kind of engineering he envisions would, it seems to me, be the ultimate reduction of animals to commodity status–it would be an explicit affirmation that they are entirely material to be manipulated for our use, rather than creatures with an independent dignity and worth. The result might well turn out to be a case of winning the battle only to lose the war: a society with such a wholly instrumentalist view of non-human life is not likely to learn to restrain itself from running roughshod over creation whenever it feels like it. Is that the kind of society we want? And is it one that can last?