Wednesday, May 23, 2012


Same Sex Vows, Theological Crisis

In today’s Belief Blog at the CNN website, a professor of law in Minnesota makes an argument for gay marriage from the perspective of his religious faith. Mark Osler argues that

What I see in the Bible’s accounts of Jesus and his followers is an insistence that we don’t have the moral authority to deny others the blessing of holy institutions like baptism, communion, and marriage. God, through the Holy Spirit, infuses those moments with life, and it is not ours to either give or deny to others.

Not surprisingly, his column has given rise to a wide range of comments, the majority of which offer some version of the rather simplistic question raised by a writer identified as Buck Mast:

            Is the Bible the Word of God or not??

Theological Crisis

Notre Dame scholar of religion Mark Noll recently published an informative book about American religion and its response to the question of slavery prior to and during the Civil War. In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll found that evangelical Protestant preachers and theologians who favored slavery – on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line - tended to cite specific excerpts of the Christian Bible, often taken out of any kind of context as evangelical are prone to do, to argue that not only did G-d permit slavery but even commanded it. Ending slavery required disobedience to G-d, they said. And they argued that to ignore one piece of scripture was tantamount to tossing out the entire faith – where did the selective process end?

Conversely, abolitionist theologians and preachers often resorted to a big picture approach to scripture which saw theological and ethical development as one moved through the Bible ending in the life and example of Jesus as paradigmatic for Christians. Abolitionists argued that slavery was simply incompatible with the Golden Rule and the Second Great Commandment, Jewish teachings placed on the lips of Jesus in the Gospels. As Noll somberly notes, in the end it is the Union Army and not the superior theological argument which resolved the question of slavery.

It’s interesting to note how these same patterns play out in the current arguments about same sex marriage. It is certainly possible to cite isolated passages of scripture, taken completely out of context, to argue that somehow G-d opposes same sex marriage. As Shakespeare observed in the Merchant of Venice, even “[t]he devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” Of course, such approaches by definition presume that G-d shares one’s own foregone conclusions, a presumption skewered by religious writer Annie Lamott’s observation ““You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out
that God hates all the same people you do.”  

Ironically, it is precisely the selective use of scripture evangelicals decry that has resulted in their own “one man, one woman” mantra since the vast majority of Biblical history with its patriarchal polygamy hardly reflects that understanding. As Jessie Jackson is prone to say, “A text without a context is a pretext.”

A Bigger Picture

But it is also quite possible to look at the bigger picture of the faith tradition, to note as President Obama recently argued that discrimination against same sex couples seeking to marry is simply irreconcilable with the Golden Rule. One simply cannot love their neighbor as themselves and actively discriminate against them, particularly in this most intimate area of human existence. Indeed, it is salient to note that without an evolution of understanding of the faith tradition and the use of its scripture, including its failure to resolve the crisis of slavery prior to the Civil War, the pronouncer of that opinion would not be sitting in the Oval Office of the White House today but rather working without pay on its janitorial staff.

American default to pragamatism – and thus to the status quo with its innate conservatism - has historically produced a wide array of myopic understandings that have not well served America. No doubt, big picture arguments fly right by the opponents of same sex marriage immediately focused on a given excerpt of scripture legitimating their foregone conclusions that they are willing to see as somehow binding and final. Yet, the Golden Rule reflects the principle of reciprocity that underlies most ethical systems in the world, most notably Kant’s categorical imperative in the West. And as Lawrence Kohlberg has noted in his work on stages of moral reasoning, when the principled post-conventional reason of Stage 5 with its focus on justice confronts the tribal conventional reason of Stage 3 with its focus on the approval of significant others, the post-conventional arguments are largely unable to be heard by the holder of the lower level conventional moral reasoning.

But, the inability – often mixed with the unwillingness – to see a bigger picture rarely means it doesn’t exist and can’t be seen, it simply means it hasn’t been seen yet. Big picture moral reasoning has a way of winning out over the course of history, as Noll’s work so well documents, albeit often in the wake of a bloody trail of epic struggle.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Friday, May 11, 2012


In the Perfumed Garden -
bittersweet  memories in the season of the white blooming things

Most people in Florida are from elsewhere. About three of every four to be exact. And most come from places that have more pronounced seasonal changes than Florida, a good number of them coming from “up Nawth” with its nasty winters and laws that apparently mandate that retirees must move to Florida upon reaching age 65. Clearly these Yankees are law abiding people.

The tendency among these emigrants is to see Florida as a place without seasons, a land of 50 weeks of summer and two weeks of brief winter-like temperatures. And perhaps from their perspective, that is true. But many of us natives (and especially those of us whose families have been here five generations like my own) recognize the very subtle changes that mark Florida’s four clearly definable seasons.

For a plant nut like myself, one of the cues that allows us to discern distinctive seasons is the kind of plants that bloom at that time. Fall showers us with golden blooms of rain trees and yellow jacarandas and the leaves of our Florida maples, sweet gum and Chinese tallow trees which turn first yellow, then scarlet, before falling around the first of each new year. I’ve always loved fall, the season of my birth and the season in which each new school year begins. I’ve often said that life begins anew in fall.

But as my husband and I engaged our nightly walk around Lake Underhill last week with our celebrity beagle, Daisy (for whom people actually stop their cars and get out of them to kiss her!), a wonderful scented warm breeze swept  over us. In the grassy area of the park across the street from the lake itself, the city has planted a number of magnolia trees. There are few things more truly wonderful than magnolia blossoms.

Magnolias are among the white blooming things that transform Florida into a perfumed garden each spring. They are joined by the heavy perfume of Confederate jasmine and gardenia and the delicate smells of citrus trees in blossom. It’s almost worth enduring the occasional cold snaps of December and January when my yard with its many tropical specimens resembles an Okie or Arkie refugee town shrouded in sheets and newspapers to protect them from freezing just to be rewarded with such wonderful scents come spring.

Author Marcel Proust once wrote about how certain sounds, smells, sights can trigger memories of people, places and events gone by. In Swann’s Way, he said, “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends upon chance whether we come on it or not before we ourselves must die.”

As we walked through the dried grasses of the park last week, blades crackling from lack of water in a spring dry season beginning to show the first signs of impending climate change, wave after wave of magnolia perfume swept over us. And for one second, I was transported back to earlier, more innocent days of Springs Past, of magnolias growing in our shaded yard in the country, of venerable, ancient magnolias blooming in the quad outside the dormitories at the University of Florida where I was a resident and my parents had studied three decades prior, of magnolia family bay trees blooming along the tracks of the Walt Disney World steam railroad where Andy and I both worked as conductors in the summer of 1975, even of the magnolias blooming in northern California during our four year sojourn there whose scents roused modest homesickness. All of those moments, long gone but fully present in the breeze swept park last week.

It’s this connection to the land, to a life history in this place, that largely proves to be the trump card in our decision thus far to remain in a state whose radical political and developmental changes in the past two decades have long since caused it to lose any semblance to the Florida in which I grew up, the Florida I once knew and loved. And so it was with no small amount of irony that at dinner at Dexters the other night, my long time friend and fellow Florida native, Bill Fite, and I suddenly broke out into the song we had learned as children in a Florida who once actually provided music teachers for its elementary school children:

I want to wake up
in the morning
where the orange blossoms grow.
Where the sun comes apeepin’
in where I’m asleepin’
and the song birds say “Hello!”
I love the fresh air
and the sunshine
it’s good for us, you know…..
So, make my home in Flo-ri-da
where the orange blossoms grow.

In the Perfumed Garden the white blooming things provide a bittersweet reminder of the wonders of this beautiful, flowered place (hence its Spanish name) even as its current human occupants seem hell-bent on destroying it. 

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D. 
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status) 
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA) 
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law 
University of Central Florida, Orlando 


 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. 
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Wednesday, May 02, 2012


Vocatus

“The center cannot hold….  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats, The Second Coming (1920) 

Today I sat in a meeting regarding the General Education Program in which I teach and heard the latest news from Tallahassee. It’s grim.

The legislature has determined that Florida’s students simply don’t need so many liberal arts courses and will cut the GEP by two classes (6 credit hours). To make matters worse, of the two courses remaining to be required in teach of the areas (ours being Social and Cultural Foundations), one will be determined by the university and all students will have to take a section of that course. The remaining course will be competed for by all the area disciplines. I'd say the chances that Humanities will be the chosen required course are about as good as Ron Paul's shot at the Republican nomination.

My heart ached as I heard this news. Our higher education system seems to be doomed to being flushed down the toilet by lawmakers without a clue about higher education. And I thought we were mass producing mindless mediocrity before.

As Yeats asserted nearly a century ago, we are in a time of major change. Instability is the rule, not the exception. Somehow, it seems that the more of the same, as lame as it might have been,  simply is not possible. And the positive aspects of a true college education increasing have the appearance of an endangered species. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

As my head was spinning today, I wondered how much more of this insanity I can stand. Indeed, I wonder to what degree  I am complicit in that insanity. Amidst the din of anxious voices and the rush of my own hypertension in my inner ear,I could hear the small, still voice in the depths of my soul asking ever so softly, “So, to what is my life calling me now? And how will I know?”

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando


 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system,
be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++