Accountability, Racism and MLK, Jr.
From today's Orlando Sentinel (why DO I continue to torture myself with reading this paper?) the My Word columnist invokes the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a rant on how African-Americans play the race card to escape responsibility. Under the cynical title of "Equality" he says, "Far too many people in our culture feel they are entitled to be held to a lower standard of accountability because of their race." The writer, a GenX white man from nearby suburb Winter Park, is hardly alone in making these kinds of unconsciously racist assertions. Indeed, I believe history will ultimately reflect that the most difficult and usually unaccomplished task white Americans faced in the 21st CE was coming to grips with their own racism.
While I am not obsessed with the notion of "standards" reflecting the control issues of the WASP middle class (of which I am a member), I do agree that people should be accountable for their attitudes and behaviors individually. The trouble is, that while WASP middle class folk rail self-righteously and endlessly about individual accountability, we almost inevitably fail to take collective responsibility for the social world we have created and maintain. Race may not determine "the worth of someone's place or performance" in our society but it almost always impacts what place one holds in that society and whether one has access to perform.
When I was in seminary, an African-American classmate observed in class one day that "In America we breathe racist air." All of us are affected by the pervasive racism that informs everything from our history of genocide of the Native Americans to the current xenophobic construction of immigrants. That our racism is not as blatant as it was in the still segregated early 1960s of my childhood here in Central Florida hardly means that America's "original sin," as sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described it, has gone away. Indeed, subtle but stubbornly pervasive racism of the 21st CE is much harder to get at than firehose wielding redneck cops in Birmingham and clownish Republican governors standing in schoolhouse doors in Tallahassee. It is hardly surprising that we would wish to be relieved of having to be accountable for this history and its ongoing legacy but that doesn't mean we get to enter into self-congratulatory mode and pretend that racism no longer affects our daily lives in America if we wish to be seen as having any credibility.
When we point our finger at those who "play the race card" in our society today, we fail to see the other four fingers pointing back at our own racism. I believe King's point was that we should unclench our fists of self-righteous judgment and open our hands to embrace the other. Little wonder we responded to his prophetic ministry which served as a mirror to reflect our racism back to us by killing him.
Happy Birthday, Martin. The struggle continues.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Cui bono?
The local Chicago Tribune franchised cheerleader for consumer capitalism, the Orlando Sentinel, today editorialized in favor of an incredibly short-sighted and greed driven proposed amendment to our state constitution, Amendment One. The proposed amendment will provide major tax breaks for the wealthy and the corporate interests at the same time it will effectively defund the state and local governments, hence drawing opposition from most cities and counties, government employees and educators.
At some level, the Sentinel's position is hardly surprising. Despite an apparent trend in the past few years away from its role as the voice of the knee jerk moralist conservatism of its earlier days as a Southern Baptist citrus and cow town, the Sentinel editorial staff usually rediscovers its true self on issues of wealth. This one is no exception. Clearly this sentinel stands guard for the vested interests of the wealthy.
In all fairness the editorial does make a good point - local government spending has, at times, been profligate. Ironically, the very people now pushing for more tax breaks have been the beneficiaries of that largesse. In recent years the city of Orlando has found ways to donate millions of dollars in new facilities to a professional basketball team and tax breaks to corporations hand over fist. Riding a crest of property taxes in part (but only in part - tourist taxes fill the local coffers more often than not), the city has felt quite liberal with its checkbook - depending upon where one falls in the economic hierarchy.
It's all occurred in the name of downtown development, a downtown which seems to have lots of room for condo construction and their yuppie tenants, but little room for the human flotsam and jetsam on our streets in the form of homeless people. Indeed, it's harder and harder to find a homeless person with the city's policies of rounding them up and getting them out of sight of drunken football fans and club goers (translation: people with money). Out of sight usually means pushing the homeless out of the downtown business and club district into the impoverished historically black neighborhoods on the other side of the interstate - and the tracks which historically have divided blacks and whites in southern cities.
As a city tax payer, I have questions about the wisdom of renovating aging stadiums and building new arenas for sports teams that don't expand seating for the general public but greatly expand luxury boxes for fat cats. There's nothing like a reverse Robin Hood effect in a consumerist capitalist economy to tell the middle and working class folks of a locale that they simply don't count much when it comes to city policy making. And if you're homeless, you're little more than an obstruction to "progress."
On the other hand, the city of Orlando has evidenced some rather enlightened behaviors on social issues ranging from an anti-discrimination policy regarding gays and lesbians to the recent appointment of a black female chief of police. The city has also spent a great deal on road improvements, traffic safety and beautification. Indeed, Orlando has one of the most beautiful downtown cores of any city in the country, a fact that is readily checked by simply traveling across the city line into developer beholden and thus largely unregulated Orange County with the gridlock traffic to show for it. For the most part, Orlando is a safe city for most of its citizens though last year's spike in murders in drug infested blighted neighborhoods, albeit many of them outside city limits, indicates the unevenness of the good life in the City Beautiful (as Orlando has long touted itself).
It's precisely that unevenness that makes today's editorial so self-revealing and so problematic. The final point in the editorial admits "Amendment 1 would not make Florida's tax system fairer. But if it forces local governments to spend more wisely, all Floridians will benefit." In other words, given the already unfair taxation system Florida maintains - an inequity which has increased radically over the past 10 years of Jeb and the Pubby Boys' control of the Florida lege and their willingness to shift the tax burden from those most able to pay to those least able to absorb the burden - adding additional benefits for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else simply exacerbates an already unjust system. Whether one finds expansion of an unfair system beneficial probably turns on where one falls in the current stack up. As the Romans would have asked, cui bono? - good for whom?
I guess it probably should not be surprising that the local media lap dog of the vested interests of our current status quo would editorialize in favor of yet another shift of tax burden from the top to the bottom and seek to legitimize it with the age old mantra of capitalism - helping the wealthy helps everyone. It's hardly an original pattern. As Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 told a Senate subcommittee, "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country." Al Capp would transform Wilson in his Lil Abner comic strip into the caricature of General Bullmoose who was prone to say, "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!" Capp realized it's easier to swallow the bitter pill of adults who know better behaving like selfish children when it's put into the form of comic parody.
Perhaps I remain a bit Pollyanish even into my middle age where according to conventional wisdom I'm supposed to know better but I do find myself hoping against hope that our local media will eventually grow up and assume a little more social responsibility, editorializing for all of its local citizens, not just the vested interests of the status quo. In the meantime, there is this little matter of a tyrannical ballot issue to campaign against. While I remain hopeful that at least the required 40% of Florida's voters will see the myopia (if not the injustice) in this exercise in greed and selfishness and defeat the amendment, after the 2000 election, I know anything is possible, even the aiding and abetting of the election of imbeciles to the presidency. (Mary Harris) Mother Jones said we should "pray for the dead and work like hell for the living." It's time to go to work for the future of our state bearing in mind the wisdom of one of our modern masters of irony, Mel Brooks: "Hope for the best. Expect the worst."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The local Chicago Tribune franchised cheerleader for consumer capitalism, the Orlando Sentinel, today editorialized in favor of an incredibly short-sighted and greed driven proposed amendment to our state constitution, Amendment One. The proposed amendment will provide major tax breaks for the wealthy and the corporate interests at the same time it will effectively defund the state and local governments, hence drawing opposition from most cities and counties, government employees and educators.
At some level, the Sentinel's position is hardly surprising. Despite an apparent trend in the past few years away from its role as the voice of the knee jerk moralist conservatism of its earlier days as a Southern Baptist citrus and cow town, the Sentinel editorial staff usually rediscovers its true self on issues of wealth. This one is no exception. Clearly this sentinel stands guard for the vested interests of the wealthy.
In all fairness the editorial does make a good point - local government spending has, at times, been profligate. Ironically, the very people now pushing for more tax breaks have been the beneficiaries of that largesse. In recent years the city of Orlando has found ways to donate millions of dollars in new facilities to a professional basketball team and tax breaks to corporations hand over fist. Riding a crest of property taxes in part (but only in part - tourist taxes fill the local coffers more often than not), the city has felt quite liberal with its checkbook - depending upon where one falls in the economic hierarchy.
It's all occurred in the name of downtown development, a downtown which seems to have lots of room for condo construction and their yuppie tenants, but little room for the human flotsam and jetsam on our streets in the form of homeless people. Indeed, it's harder and harder to find a homeless person with the city's policies of rounding them up and getting them out of sight of drunken football fans and club goers (translation: people with money). Out of sight usually means pushing the homeless out of the downtown business and club district into the impoverished historically black neighborhoods on the other side of the interstate - and the tracks which historically have divided blacks and whites in southern cities.
As a city tax payer, I have questions about the wisdom of renovating aging stadiums and building new arenas for sports teams that don't expand seating for the general public but greatly expand luxury boxes for fat cats. There's nothing like a reverse Robin Hood effect in a consumerist capitalist economy to tell the middle and working class folks of a locale that they simply don't count much when it comes to city policy making. And if you're homeless, you're little more than an obstruction to "progress."
On the other hand, the city of Orlando has evidenced some rather enlightened behaviors on social issues ranging from an anti-discrimination policy regarding gays and lesbians to the recent appointment of a black female chief of police. The city has also spent a great deal on road improvements, traffic safety and beautification. Indeed, Orlando has one of the most beautiful downtown cores of any city in the country, a fact that is readily checked by simply traveling across the city line into developer beholden and thus largely unregulated Orange County with the gridlock traffic to show for it. For the most part, Orlando is a safe city for most of its citizens though last year's spike in murders in drug infested blighted neighborhoods, albeit many of them outside city limits, indicates the unevenness of the good life in the City Beautiful (as Orlando has long touted itself).
It's precisely that unevenness that makes today's editorial so self-revealing and so problematic. The final point in the editorial admits "Amendment 1 would not make Florida's tax system fairer. But if it forces local governments to spend more wisely, all Floridians will benefit." In other words, given the already unfair taxation system Florida maintains - an inequity which has increased radically over the past 10 years of Jeb and the Pubby Boys' control of the Florida lege and their willingness to shift the tax burden from those most able to pay to those least able to absorb the burden - adding additional benefits for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else simply exacerbates an already unjust system. Whether one finds expansion of an unfair system beneficial probably turns on where one falls in the current stack up. As the Romans would have asked, cui bono? - good for whom?
I guess it probably should not be surprising that the local media lap dog of the vested interests of our current status quo would editorialize in favor of yet another shift of tax burden from the top to the bottom and seek to legitimize it with the age old mantra of capitalism - helping the wealthy helps everyone. It's hardly an original pattern. As Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 told a Senate subcommittee, "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country." Al Capp would transform Wilson in his Lil Abner comic strip into the caricature of General Bullmoose who was prone to say, "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!" Capp realized it's easier to swallow the bitter pill of adults who know better behaving like selfish children when it's put into the form of comic parody.
Perhaps I remain a bit Pollyanish even into my middle age where according to conventional wisdom I'm supposed to know better but I do find myself hoping against hope that our local media will eventually grow up and assume a little more social responsibility, editorializing for all of its local citizens, not just the vested interests of the status quo. In the meantime, there is this little matter of a tyrannical ballot issue to campaign against. While I remain hopeful that at least the required 40% of Florida's voters will see the myopia (if not the injustice) in this exercise in greed and selfishness and defeat the amendment, after the 2000 election, I know anything is possible, even the aiding and abetting of the election of imbeciles to the presidency. (Mary Harris) Mother Jones said we should "pray for the dead and work like hell for the living." It's time to go to work for the future of our state bearing in mind the wisdom of one of our modern masters of irony, Mel Brooks: "Hope for the best. Expect the worst."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, December 20, 2007
William Penn: The heart from which all Scriptures come
From today's daily online quote service, Words of Wisdom, comes this quote: "There is something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come." -William Penn (1644-1718)
I've always liked Penn. I admire his idealism and the colony he founded on that idealism. Through the portals of the city of brotherly love poured thousands of European colonists who would not have been welcome in most other American colonies primarily because of their religious beliefs. They included a number of my own emigrant ancestors.
The Quakers held a number of beliefs seen as odd by their fellow Anglican, Puritan and Catholic countrymen and women. They believed that everyone had a spark of the divine in them and that worship did not involve the set liturgies of the Catholics and Anglicans or the extended guilt-driven preaching of the Calvinists but rather sitting in silence, waiting for the divine within to quake, moving the individual to speak what was on their heart. They also reasserted the wisdom of the early Christian movement that following Jesus essentially ruled out military service and the state killing we attempt to euphemistically rationalize as capital punishment. Penn's jails were true penitentiaries, solitary confinement for the purpose of repentance, reconsidering one's life with the goal of social reassimilation at the end of that experience.
Penn's Quakers were quickly outnumbered and eventually overwhelmed. But the matrix of religious freedom and the refusal to couple absolute religious certitude with temporal power resulted in a creative mix in Philadelphia in the heart of Penn's Woods that would ultimately give birth to a new nation "conceived in liberty," as Lincoln would describe it a century later at Gettysburg, today a short drive away from Philadelphia. We are in William Penn's debt for his vision, without which, as the Proverbs writer observed, we would surely have perished.
What synchronicity that this quote arrives two days after my minor eruption over the barely implicit literalism in the statement of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (see previous blog entry) Penn's words reflect two major influences on my spiritual development. The first is Francis of Assisi's focus on compassion driven praxis: "Preach the good news at all times, use words when necessary." For Francis, written words on a good day reflected the compassionate life one was living which treated all of creation, particularly its most vulnerable members, with respect. On other days, they merely got in the way of the compassionate life of service to the poor.
The second is the wisdom of Jerry Drino, my rector and mentor at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in San Jose, CA. A fellow of the Four Spring Seminar which uses a Jungian depth analysis to consider the Christian faith, Jerry was wont to pose this question: "Is it true because Jesus said it, or did Jesus say it because it was true." The first time I heard that question I found it disquieting to say the least. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was an important question, a question I continue to pose to my students today.
Scripture is always at most a secondary product of a primary experience of the divine. Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy called the experience of the divine the mysterium tremendum, an awe inspiring event (both in the sense of terror and wonder) which poorly lent itself to words. For virtually all of us, any scripture seen holy today is the product of centuries of transmission of first oral and later written tradition resulting in our receiving a product that is many years and countless generations of transmission removed from the experience which gave rise to it. Thus to conform one's own spiritual life to scripture, as the archbishop was suggesting, is essentially to buy into someone else's experience of the divine. At a very basic level, it is potentially a betrayal of one's own calling to an authentic life of spirit.
As I said in my rant on Rowan's ramblings, I hardly could be seen as one who does not value scripture. I find scripture highly useful and worth serious consideration. I quote it in my teaching, my writing (as alluded to above) and my conversations with others. Scripture is a valuable beginning place for the consideration of one's own spiritual life. But is but a beginning place, the first word, not the final. Hence, notions of conforming to scripture, obedience to official dogmatic understandings of that scripture or testing one's own spiritual experiences against others' understandings of that scripture for validity (whatever that could possibly mean) runs a major risk of truncated spiritual lives even as they provide the basis for the belief systems approved by conventional religious authorities.
Penn's formula provides one powerful corrective to this truncating tendency: what does one's heart say to you? How does your own experience of the divine inform your understanding? What might one's very spirit sense about what the spirit is saying to you, to the world? These are important dimensions to any spiritual life of integrity. Without them, our religion does not belong to us. As I teach my students, the most brittle religious constructs in the world are those we inherit from respected others and simply accept without question, much less reflection. It's precisely those inherited religions that are most vulnerable to the simple question "Why do you believe that?" And it is the consideration of that question that often induces painful feelings of betrayal of one's authority figures and cognitive dissonance in recognizing the fragility and often the superficiality - sometimes even the indefensibility - of inherited and unreflective belief systems.
While Penn has located the personal and affective dimension of believing, I would suggest there is yet another important question one must ask about one's own religious construct and the way scripture is appropriated within that construct: How does one's religion impact the world around us? It is, of course, very Franciscan to look around the Creation and see the image of the divine imprinted on every aspect of the created universe. And that's a good starting place. But it's only the starting place.
It is very easy for first world peoples in a consumer-driven society to appropriate scripture such as the Genesis passage instructing human beings to take dominion of the earth and use it to their heart's content without regard for impact on others. It is easy for people living in atomized first world nations marked by hypercompetiveness to rationalize the practice of state killing or economically driven invasions of other countries with selective appropriation of scripture. Conversely, it ought to be no surprise that a selective literalist appropriation of the Quran was on the lips of the pilots of highjacked airliners as they collided with the Twin Towers in New York. As Mark Twain said, even the devil can quote scripture. And as feminist scholars have long noted, any text without a context (or consciousness of implicit subtexts) is almost always a pretext.
Demands for conformity to an authorized vision of scripture almost always signal a number of things: the combination of some form of power with an absolute conviction of the rectitude of a given course of action which scripture has been marshaled to legitimize. Clearly, such a combination can on the rare occasion be salvific, i.e., it can bring health and wholeness to its adherents and those whose lives they touch sometimes in the face of extreme adversity, such as the confessing church movement in Nazi Germany. But more often the combination of power, absolute certitude of one's rectitude and the use of legitimizing scripture is anything but healthy, as the example of George Bush's invasion of Iraq because, according to him, G-d had instructed him to do so suggests.
The question of "What does the Bible say?" is too rarely accompanied by the more important questions of "What does it mean?," "What might the divine be saying to me and to the world in this?" and "How does that understanding impact my own life, the lives of others and the world around us?" And when we neglect the elements of head, heart and relationality to the world around us, buying into the understandings of others without reflection, we have virtually guaranteed that our own spiritual lives will be stunted and set the stage for religious tyranny.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church, Dio. of El Camino Real, CA (inactive status)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From today's daily online quote service, Words of Wisdom, comes this quote: "There is something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come." -William Penn (1644-1718)
I've always liked Penn. I admire his idealism and the colony he founded on that idealism. Through the portals of the city of brotherly love poured thousands of European colonists who would not have been welcome in most other American colonies primarily because of their religious beliefs. They included a number of my own emigrant ancestors.
The Quakers held a number of beliefs seen as odd by their fellow Anglican, Puritan and Catholic countrymen and women. They believed that everyone had a spark of the divine in them and that worship did not involve the set liturgies of the Catholics and Anglicans or the extended guilt-driven preaching of the Calvinists but rather sitting in silence, waiting for the divine within to quake, moving the individual to speak what was on their heart. They also reasserted the wisdom of the early Christian movement that following Jesus essentially ruled out military service and the state killing we attempt to euphemistically rationalize as capital punishment. Penn's jails were true penitentiaries, solitary confinement for the purpose of repentance, reconsidering one's life with the goal of social reassimilation at the end of that experience.
Penn's Quakers were quickly outnumbered and eventually overwhelmed. But the matrix of religious freedom and the refusal to couple absolute religious certitude with temporal power resulted in a creative mix in Philadelphia in the heart of Penn's Woods that would ultimately give birth to a new nation "conceived in liberty," as Lincoln would describe it a century later at Gettysburg, today a short drive away from Philadelphia. We are in William Penn's debt for his vision, without which, as the Proverbs writer observed, we would surely have perished.
What synchronicity that this quote arrives two days after my minor eruption over the barely implicit literalism in the statement of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (see previous blog entry) Penn's words reflect two major influences on my spiritual development. The first is Francis of Assisi's focus on compassion driven praxis: "Preach the good news at all times, use words when necessary." For Francis, written words on a good day reflected the compassionate life one was living which treated all of creation, particularly its most vulnerable members, with respect. On other days, they merely got in the way of the compassionate life of service to the poor.
The second is the wisdom of Jerry Drino, my rector and mentor at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in San Jose, CA. A fellow of the Four Spring Seminar which uses a Jungian depth analysis to consider the Christian faith, Jerry was wont to pose this question: "Is it true because Jesus said it, or did Jesus say it because it was true." The first time I heard that question I found it disquieting to say the least. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was an important question, a question I continue to pose to my students today.
Scripture is always at most a secondary product of a primary experience of the divine. Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy called the experience of the divine the mysterium tremendum, an awe inspiring event (both in the sense of terror and wonder) which poorly lent itself to words. For virtually all of us, any scripture seen holy today is the product of centuries of transmission of first oral and later written tradition resulting in our receiving a product that is many years and countless generations of transmission removed from the experience which gave rise to it. Thus to conform one's own spiritual life to scripture, as the archbishop was suggesting, is essentially to buy into someone else's experience of the divine. At a very basic level, it is potentially a betrayal of one's own calling to an authentic life of spirit.
As I said in my rant on Rowan's ramblings, I hardly could be seen as one who does not value scripture. I find scripture highly useful and worth serious consideration. I quote it in my teaching, my writing (as alluded to above) and my conversations with others. Scripture is a valuable beginning place for the consideration of one's own spiritual life. But is but a beginning place, the first word, not the final. Hence, notions of conforming to scripture, obedience to official dogmatic understandings of that scripture or testing one's own spiritual experiences against others' understandings of that scripture for validity (whatever that could possibly mean) runs a major risk of truncated spiritual lives even as they provide the basis for the belief systems approved by conventional religious authorities.
Penn's formula provides one powerful corrective to this truncating tendency: what does one's heart say to you? How does your own experience of the divine inform your understanding? What might one's very spirit sense about what the spirit is saying to you, to the world? These are important dimensions to any spiritual life of integrity. Without them, our religion does not belong to us. As I teach my students, the most brittle religious constructs in the world are those we inherit from respected others and simply accept without question, much less reflection. It's precisely those inherited religions that are most vulnerable to the simple question "Why do you believe that?" And it is the consideration of that question that often induces painful feelings of betrayal of one's authority figures and cognitive dissonance in recognizing the fragility and often the superficiality - sometimes even the indefensibility - of inherited and unreflective belief systems.
While Penn has located the personal and affective dimension of believing, I would suggest there is yet another important question one must ask about one's own religious construct and the way scripture is appropriated within that construct: How does one's religion impact the world around us? It is, of course, very Franciscan to look around the Creation and see the image of the divine imprinted on every aspect of the created universe. And that's a good starting place. But it's only the starting place.
It is very easy for first world peoples in a consumer-driven society to appropriate scripture such as the Genesis passage instructing human beings to take dominion of the earth and use it to their heart's content without regard for impact on others. It is easy for people living in atomized first world nations marked by hypercompetiveness to rationalize the practice of state killing or economically driven invasions of other countries with selective appropriation of scripture. Conversely, it ought to be no surprise that a selective literalist appropriation of the Quran was on the lips of the pilots of highjacked airliners as they collided with the Twin Towers in New York. As Mark Twain said, even the devil can quote scripture. And as feminist scholars have long noted, any text without a context (or consciousness of implicit subtexts) is almost always a pretext.
Demands for conformity to an authorized vision of scripture almost always signal a number of things: the combination of some form of power with an absolute conviction of the rectitude of a given course of action which scripture has been marshaled to legitimize. Clearly, such a combination can on the rare occasion be salvific, i.e., it can bring health and wholeness to its adherents and those whose lives they touch sometimes in the face of extreme adversity, such as the confessing church movement in Nazi Germany. But more often the combination of power, absolute certitude of one's rectitude and the use of legitimizing scripture is anything but healthy, as the example of George Bush's invasion of Iraq because, according to him, G-d had instructed him to do so suggests.
The question of "What does the Bible say?" is too rarely accompanied by the more important questions of "What does it mean?," "What might the divine be saying to me and to the world in this?" and "How does that understanding impact my own life, the lives of others and the world around us?" And when we neglect the elements of head, heart and relationality to the world around us, buying into the understandings of others without reflection, we have virtually guaranteed that our own spiritual lives will be stunted and set the stage for religious tyranny.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church, Dio. of El Camino Real, CA (inactive status)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, December 17, 2007
"It's Bib-i-cal" - Of Power, History and Stuffed Purple Shirts
If I have ever felt that I am a stranger to the Anglican expression of the Christian tradition which I once pledged my life to serve "as priest in the order of Melchizedek forever," it is certainly upon reading the Advent Letter from the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I have to confess I did not get far into the letter before becoming so nauseous I had to stop reading. Here are two points that caught me:
The Communion is a voluntary association of provinces and dioceses; and so its unity depends not on a canon law that can be enforced but on the ability of each part of the family to recognise that other local churches have received the same faith from the apostles and are faithfully holding to it in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture and bestows his grace in the sacraments.
Of course, one of the great beauties of the Anglican Communion has been its refusal to be bound by the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of the Roman expression of catholicism. I observe that the British Isles' expression of Christianity has long demonstrated that resistance. It is evident in the community-based Celtic Church prior to the Council of Whitby at which Roman rule was imposed. It was also evident in the Pelagianism native to Anglican thought which refused to buy into Augustinian constructs of conditionality of G-d's love and the requirement of obedience to an institution and its dogma as a condition of salvation.
Clearly, the Communion is one of voluntary affiliation. The reality of that existence in itself ought to guarantee healthy disagreement and discussion about matters of faith as a matter of course. Attempts to impose a single vision on that ongoing discourse as a condition of belonging is a betrayal of the tradition. Indeed, it would be an abandonment of the Communion as it has historically existed.
What I found most alien in this statement was the notion of a single received tradition, "the same faith from the apostles" which true members of the communion are "faithfully holding…in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture…" Of course, much of that is the boiler plate theobabble one would expect from an Archbishop of Canterbury. What is troubling is its lack of any semblance of historicity.
The reality is that the understanding in this letter is hardly "the same faith from the apostles." While it goes without saying that Jesus would probably not recognize himself in much of the religion which bears his name, the same can undoubtedly be said for his earliest followers and interpreters. Indeed, the notion of a single faith held by the various parties within what became the Christian faith is simply irreconcilable with the extant voices of that early tradition. What is observable from those voices is multiplicity of understandings, not a univocal tradition. The history of the stream of faith that came to be called Christianity more readily justifies a description of the same as Christianities, not a single Christian faith. The notion of a Golden Age in which everyone got along and believed the same things - located prior to the corruptions of Rome in the Protestant mythmaking or in an unbroken chain of sharers of the same vision dating back to St. Peter and hammered out in councils and succeeding magisterium in the Roman Catholic version of the myth - is simply the stuff of wishful thinking.
But here is the part that stopped me dead in my tracks -
So a full relationship of communion will mean:
The common acknowledgment that we stand under the authority of Scripture as 'the rule and ultimate standard of faith', in the words of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral; as the gift shaped by the Holy Spirit which decisively interprets God to the community of believers and the community of believers to itself and opens our hearts to the living and eternal Word that is Christ. Our obedience to the call of Christ the Word Incarnate is drawn out first and foremost by our listening to the Bible and conforming our lives to what God both offers and requires of us through the words and narratives of the Bible. We recognise each other in one fellowship when we see one another 'standing under' the word of Scripture.
Perhaps it is the "authority of scripture" passage, the code language of biblical literalists, that first stuck in my craw. Or perhaps it was the language about obedience, again a cardinal value of conservative worldviews befitting parent/child relationships but not those of mature adults. Or perhaps it was the "'standing under' the word of Scripture, again, an essentially fundamentalist construction. I read and reread this paragraph and thought to myself, what is this? What do I recognize in this writing of my own religious history or my current understandings?
What finally gave me a place to begin was the reference to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral Statement of 1866, one of the many documents found at the rear of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer under the heading "Historical Documents." Long known by many Episcopalians as boring sermon relief, the documents are marked more by their antiquity and curiosity than anything informing the faith of Episcopalians today. Williams' letter called the Statement "the rule and ultimate standard of faith." In fact, what that statement lays out are four "principles of unity…which we believe to be the substantial deposit of Christian faith..." Among these four "inherent parts of this sacred deposit," the statement lists scripture first. But it hardly refers to it as "the rule and ultimate standard of faith," an assertion which would promote it to an exclusive, superior status, a theological trump card over the remaining three principles. Nor does its inclusion in that list exhaust the faith, according to the Statement, only a "substantial deposit" of it.
Indeed, rules are by definition statements mandating specific behaviors and thus at a lower level of authority than overarching principles which underlie rules and thus are broader and more open to interpretation and application. Rules are the stuff of parent/child relations. Principles are made for adult believers capable of reason, reflection, deliberation and prayerful application. Think state laws (rules) and Constitutional provisions like Due Process (principles). At least in theory in Anglo-American jurisprudence, when lower level rules come into conflict with higher level principles, it is the latter which must take precedence every time.
Rowan increasingly sounds like a power-driven fundamentalist. And to the extent he actually speaks for Anglicanism, he speaks about a religion I do not recognize. But what troubles me most about this statement is not its betrayal of Anglicanism or its revelation of Rowan's devolution from thoughtful theologian, albeit a theologian generally isolated from reality, to a stuffed purple shirt spouting mindless theology unbefitting a man of his intellect and educational attainment. What troubles me most is that increasingly I find myself looking on from outside at a religion I no longer recognize devolving into a form that I despise and, like Rip Van Winkle, wonder how long I've been asleep.
Increasingly I find generalized references to "the Bible" in conversation to be signals to tune out. I find myself making the very ungracious presumption that whatever follows will be uncritical - if not mindless - theobabble. Sadly, that presumption has proven to be true more often than not. I also find myself replying to assertions about what "the Bible says…" with comments like "Bibles don't speak. Their readers do." And I find myself assessing religious constructs which describe themselves in terms such as "bible centered" or "bible based" as essentially practicing an idolatry of bible worship I find completely alien. It would be easy to slide into an ungenerous pattern of prejudice here, a proclivity of which I remain on guard in my dealings with others, particularly my students.
I also increasingly find my understanding of G_d to fit very uneasily with the descriptions of G-d found in Hebrew Scripture or the New Testament. I don't doubt the validity of the descriptions found there, whatever notions of validity might mean in such cases. I simply presume that while they may well describe the experience of ancient peoples of the divine, those experiences and resulting descriptions may or may not be particularly compelling for people of good faith here and now.
Perhaps the most troubling realization in all this is simply that the Bible per se does not form the basis of my faith. It does strongly inform it. And I value its wisdom even as I recognize its human imperfections and its captivity to cultural assumptions people in the 21st CE West no longer share. But my notion of the divine has grown over the years as I have grown. And a god who can be confined to any book, even a book as divinely inspired as the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is not a god worth worshipping. Conversely, a religion which purports to be devoted to the worship of a G-d who is the ground and source of all being cannot be relegated to, much less based exclusively in, any single account of that G-d.
And so I find myself looking from the outside in at a leader I once admired of a faith tradition I no longer recognize and wonder how I ended up here. I find myself essentially in theological free fall, awash in a sea of cognitive dissonance. But I also recognize that the genie cannot go back into the bottle again. I cannot "fake it till I make it," per the disingenuousness of 12 Steps thinking. I was not ordained to be dishonest with myself or others. I’m not sure I ever really believed what Rowan Williams is talking about here. But I am sure I don't believe it now and the chances are, I never will. Indeed, I think people of critical reflection and good conscience probably can't.
This past week on a prison visitation I engage annually with people of faith I found myself describing my religious orientation as post-Christian recovering Episcopalian. Ironically I came home from death row of our state prison to find this letter from Rowan Williams, an obituary for the faith I once held in the Anglican Communion. Whither goeth the Episcopal Church in the wake of this devolution of Anglicanism is yet unclear. So, what does it mean to be a priest of a tradition whose leader speaks in a language you find foreign? What does it mean to defend a faith increasingly cast in terms you find untenable? What can be salvaged of a faith which once burned brightly and hopefully and now sputters and dies?
There are no easy answers tonight, perhaps no answers at all. Tonight there is but grieving for a once proud tradition that has fallen into decay and anxious pondering of a faith journey which once seemed so promising and now has vanished into a fog of zero visibility.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA, inactive status)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If I have ever felt that I am a stranger to the Anglican expression of the Christian tradition which I once pledged my life to serve "as priest in the order of Melchizedek forever," it is certainly upon reading the Advent Letter from the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I have to confess I did not get far into the letter before becoming so nauseous I had to stop reading. Here are two points that caught me:
The Communion is a voluntary association of provinces and dioceses; and so its unity depends not on a canon law that can be enforced but on the ability of each part of the family to recognise that other local churches have received the same faith from the apostles and are faithfully holding to it in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture and bestows his grace in the sacraments.
Of course, one of the great beauties of the Anglican Communion has been its refusal to be bound by the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of the Roman expression of catholicism. I observe that the British Isles' expression of Christianity has long demonstrated that resistance. It is evident in the community-based Celtic Church prior to the Council of Whitby at which Roman rule was imposed. It was also evident in the Pelagianism native to Anglican thought which refused to buy into Augustinian constructs of conditionality of G-d's love and the requirement of obedience to an institution and its dogma as a condition of salvation.
Clearly, the Communion is one of voluntary affiliation. The reality of that existence in itself ought to guarantee healthy disagreement and discussion about matters of faith as a matter of course. Attempts to impose a single vision on that ongoing discourse as a condition of belonging is a betrayal of the tradition. Indeed, it would be an abandonment of the Communion as it has historically existed.
What I found most alien in this statement was the notion of a single received tradition, "the same faith from the apostles" which true members of the communion are "faithfully holding…in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture…" Of course, much of that is the boiler plate theobabble one would expect from an Archbishop of Canterbury. What is troubling is its lack of any semblance of historicity.
The reality is that the understanding in this letter is hardly "the same faith from the apostles." While it goes without saying that Jesus would probably not recognize himself in much of the religion which bears his name, the same can undoubtedly be said for his earliest followers and interpreters. Indeed, the notion of a single faith held by the various parties within what became the Christian faith is simply irreconcilable with the extant voices of that early tradition. What is observable from those voices is multiplicity of understandings, not a univocal tradition. The history of the stream of faith that came to be called Christianity more readily justifies a description of the same as Christianities, not a single Christian faith. The notion of a Golden Age in which everyone got along and believed the same things - located prior to the corruptions of Rome in the Protestant mythmaking or in an unbroken chain of sharers of the same vision dating back to St. Peter and hammered out in councils and succeeding magisterium in the Roman Catholic version of the myth - is simply the stuff of wishful thinking.
But here is the part that stopped me dead in my tracks -
So a full relationship of communion will mean:
The common acknowledgment that we stand under the authority of Scripture as 'the rule and ultimate standard of faith', in the words of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral; as the gift shaped by the Holy Spirit which decisively interprets God to the community of believers and the community of believers to itself and opens our hearts to the living and eternal Word that is Christ. Our obedience to the call of Christ the Word Incarnate is drawn out first and foremost by our listening to the Bible and conforming our lives to what God both offers and requires of us through the words and narratives of the Bible. We recognise each other in one fellowship when we see one another 'standing under' the word of Scripture.
Perhaps it is the "authority of scripture" passage, the code language of biblical literalists, that first stuck in my craw. Or perhaps it was the language about obedience, again a cardinal value of conservative worldviews befitting parent/child relationships but not those of mature adults. Or perhaps it was the "'standing under' the word of Scripture, again, an essentially fundamentalist construction. I read and reread this paragraph and thought to myself, what is this? What do I recognize in this writing of my own religious history or my current understandings?
What finally gave me a place to begin was the reference to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral Statement of 1866, one of the many documents found at the rear of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer under the heading "Historical Documents." Long known by many Episcopalians as boring sermon relief, the documents are marked more by their antiquity and curiosity than anything informing the faith of Episcopalians today. Williams' letter called the Statement "the rule and ultimate standard of faith." In fact, what that statement lays out are four "principles of unity…which we believe to be the substantial deposit of Christian faith..." Among these four "inherent parts of this sacred deposit," the statement lists scripture first. But it hardly refers to it as "the rule and ultimate standard of faith," an assertion which would promote it to an exclusive, superior status, a theological trump card over the remaining three principles. Nor does its inclusion in that list exhaust the faith, according to the Statement, only a "substantial deposit" of it.
Indeed, rules are by definition statements mandating specific behaviors and thus at a lower level of authority than overarching principles which underlie rules and thus are broader and more open to interpretation and application. Rules are the stuff of parent/child relations. Principles are made for adult believers capable of reason, reflection, deliberation and prayerful application. Think state laws (rules) and Constitutional provisions like Due Process (principles). At least in theory in Anglo-American jurisprudence, when lower level rules come into conflict with higher level principles, it is the latter which must take precedence every time.
Rowan increasingly sounds like a power-driven fundamentalist. And to the extent he actually speaks for Anglicanism, he speaks about a religion I do not recognize. But what troubles me most about this statement is not its betrayal of Anglicanism or its revelation of Rowan's devolution from thoughtful theologian, albeit a theologian generally isolated from reality, to a stuffed purple shirt spouting mindless theology unbefitting a man of his intellect and educational attainment. What troubles me most is that increasingly I find myself looking on from outside at a religion I no longer recognize devolving into a form that I despise and, like Rip Van Winkle, wonder how long I've been asleep.
Increasingly I find generalized references to "the Bible" in conversation to be signals to tune out. I find myself making the very ungracious presumption that whatever follows will be uncritical - if not mindless - theobabble. Sadly, that presumption has proven to be true more often than not. I also find myself replying to assertions about what "the Bible says…" with comments like "Bibles don't speak. Their readers do." And I find myself assessing religious constructs which describe themselves in terms such as "bible centered" or "bible based" as essentially practicing an idolatry of bible worship I find completely alien. It would be easy to slide into an ungenerous pattern of prejudice here, a proclivity of which I remain on guard in my dealings with others, particularly my students.
I also increasingly find my understanding of G_d to fit very uneasily with the descriptions of G-d found in Hebrew Scripture or the New Testament. I don't doubt the validity of the descriptions found there, whatever notions of validity might mean in such cases. I simply presume that while they may well describe the experience of ancient peoples of the divine, those experiences and resulting descriptions may or may not be particularly compelling for people of good faith here and now.
Perhaps the most troubling realization in all this is simply that the Bible per se does not form the basis of my faith. It does strongly inform it. And I value its wisdom even as I recognize its human imperfections and its captivity to cultural assumptions people in the 21st CE West no longer share. But my notion of the divine has grown over the years as I have grown. And a god who can be confined to any book, even a book as divinely inspired as the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is not a god worth worshipping. Conversely, a religion which purports to be devoted to the worship of a G-d who is the ground and source of all being cannot be relegated to, much less based exclusively in, any single account of that G-d.
And so I find myself looking from the outside in at a leader I once admired of a faith tradition I no longer recognize and wonder how I ended up here. I find myself essentially in theological free fall, awash in a sea of cognitive dissonance. But I also recognize that the genie cannot go back into the bottle again. I cannot "fake it till I make it," per the disingenuousness of 12 Steps thinking. I was not ordained to be dishonest with myself or others. I’m not sure I ever really believed what Rowan Williams is talking about here. But I am sure I don't believe it now and the chances are, I never will. Indeed, I think people of critical reflection and good conscience probably can't.
This past week on a prison visitation I engage annually with people of faith I found myself describing my religious orientation as post-Christian recovering Episcopalian. Ironically I came home from death row of our state prison to find this letter from Rowan Williams, an obituary for the faith I once held in the Anglican Communion. Whither goeth the Episcopal Church in the wake of this devolution of Anglicanism is yet unclear. So, what does it mean to be a priest of a tradition whose leader speaks in a language you find foreign? What does it mean to defend a faith increasingly cast in terms you find untenable? What can be salvaged of a faith which once burned brightly and hopefully and now sputters and dies?
There are no easy answers tonight, perhaps no answers at all. Tonight there is but grieving for a once proud tradition that has fallen into decay and anxious pondering of a faith journey which once seemed so promising and now has vanished into a fog of zero visibility.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA, inactive status)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Where's the Adult?
A couple of days have passed since the firestorm erupted over the Andrew Meyers event at the
We know about what happened next from the YouTube video Meyers had a fellow student make. In the video, as Meyers ranted some students are seen rolling their eyes, others listening in rapt attention. But the student head of the Accent program, a position historically occupied by future politicos in training, was not amused. First he had the student's microphone cut off. Then he told university police to arrest Meyers.
Not surprisingly, Meyer's did not react well to being manhandled by university police. His repeated response was "I didn't do anything wrong." Reports that the student was being "escorted from the building" are at best kind if not outright spin. This young man was dragged from the microphone, his shirt partially ripped off his body, and ultimately was thrown to the floor by several officers. It was at that point, with the young man clearly under the control of several physically superior officers, that they used a taser to electrically shock the student despite his now famous plea, "Don't tase me, bro." The sound of the student screaming still echoes in my head.
As the details of this young man's life have emerged, it has become clear he is a publicity seeker. His website includes a number of videos of himself seeking attention through stunts. His comments in the police car enroute to the jail (he was arrested for resisting arrest and inciting a riot) suggest that he did not blame the police for their conduct. In the meantime, the university has suspended the officers in question and ordered an investigation of the event.
Perhaps it is because this is my alma mater, the school at which my parents met, the school at which I spent six years of my life as an adult and many years as a child on campus for football games and a summer at the university lab school, that I feel such embarrassment about this event. I was so upset on Tuesday I could not think straight and got little done on the day I reserve for grading and class prep. But it has been the reactions of many I love and whose opinions I trust that has upset me even further.
I think it way too easy to buy into blame the victim and simply brush off this event as the result of a publicity stunt gone awry. Even more disturbing is the clear tendency among many to suggest the student got what he deserved. No one deserves to be electrically shocked. Even if we decide that tasing someone is the lesser evil than having them continue destructive behavior, it nonetheless remains evil. People have died from being tasered. It is a form of coercive force that should ALWAYS be used as a last resort, never the first. Andrew Meyer is no angel. But he is a human being worthy of having his person respected regardless of his conduct. And it is precisely when concerns for order and security presumptively outweigh the duty to honor human dignity that the society in question reveals its potential for tyranny.
In my discussions with one friend, I referred to events such as this in Berkeley, where I spent four years of my life while in seminary and grad school, in which prophets with messages from various gods wandered in off the streets and proclaimed revealed truth, sometimes for many more minutes than Andrew Meyer used in his comparatively short diatribe. While such events almost always managed to annoy the gathered participants of the events, the self-appointed prophets were usually indulged, endured but rarely removed and never physically accosted. It seems to me that public events require a wide berth for people like Andrew Meyer. Annoyance at inconsiderate speakers does not rise to the level of threats to security, the only time when coercive force should ever be seen as justifiable.
The First Amendment's protections of free expression were designed for publicity seekers and impassioned prophetic speakers like Andrew Meyers. It's precisely unpopular speech that is protected by the amendment, not everyone's speech. Popular speech needs no protections - it pleases the majority and thereby runs no risk of having the majority use its power to squelch unpopular speech, the tyranny of the majority.
A family member repeated the Fox "News" mantra that Meyers had "refused a lawful order." I guess I'd question whether the order was lawful. As Meyers said, "I didn't do anything wrong" and other than annoying some of the audience and the Accent staff, I observed no laws being broken. If one is not engaged in wrongdoing, how could the order to desist be lawful? Because the Accent director said so? Case law has repeatedly affirmed that people have a right to resist unlawful detention. But, beyond legal considerations, this line of argument does reveal the parent/child construction of citizen v. government power that lies at the heart of my disturbance over this event. It leads me to ask where the adult was in this case.
Universities are places of learning. As I observed in northern California, patient endurance of blowhards in public meetings serves to respect both the dignity of the individual involved (even when they have been inconsiderate of the dignity of the other individuals present) as well as teaching the lesson that, while democracy is inevitably messy, a little patience and an awful lot of forebearance is the best way to insure that democracy can work. What lesson was taught at UF Monday? Sadly, that impatience backed by the use of coercive force is the way we conduct our business at the
For those who would avoid social responsibility, exonerating armed police officers who manhandle pests at public events by locating all responsibility in the individual, there is a slight problem. Such an analysis presumes a fact not in evidence - that a level playing field exists. But the parties here are nowhere close to equal. Andrew Meyers was armed with a microphone and an inordinate amount of chutzpah. The UPD officers were armed with guns, tasers and the color of law providing them the authority and implicit approval for their actions from the public they are sworn to protect. While the UPD charged the student with inciting a riot, the only real energy in that auditorium emerged at the point the officers had manhandled and tased a fellow student. How was the public protected here?
I agree with the UF Independent Alligator's take on this: the kid was a jerk, the arrest was at best questionable, but the use of force including a taser was unwarranted. The university owes this student - and the general public the university serves - an apology.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Independence Day?
It was July 4, 2007, America's Independence Day. Behind the guest services counter at the Best Western Hotel in San Jose, an American flag covered the wall. On our pillows in our room we found a small chocolate wrapped in red, white and blue cellophane with a small note attached reading "Happy 4th of July!"
All of this would seem rather ordinary under most occasions. But this was not San Jose, California. It was San Jose, Costa Rica. For only the second time in my life, I found myself thinking of home, of America on its birthday, from a foreign country.
On the television, the smarmy twang of country music confusing militarism with patriotism provided this musical reminder of the day:
And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land - God bless the U.S.A.
- Lee Greenwood, God Bless the USA (1984)
I think it would be easier to be proud to be an American if I didn't actually love my country. I've always found some wisdom in the worn maxim that we like people because, we love people in spite of. I think that is true about father or motherlands as well.
But America is giving us much to love it in spite of these days. The week preceding Independence Day, George the Unready commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby, convicted of lying repeatedly to a grand jury about the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame as a means of getting back at her husband, Joe Wilson for refuting the lie about Iraq and nuclear capability as a pretext for the invasion. There will be no penalty for the abuse of power that could have cost Ms. Plame her life, a crime that no doubt originated at the top of the White House food chain. As usual, there will be no accountability for this administration whose hollow use of "the rule of law" when convenient has provided a moral lesson in hypocrisy.
Earlier in the week, the Bush packed Supreme Court handed down three rulings that ought to make even the most moss backed conservative nervous. In a case originating out of Alaska, the Supremes ruled that a sign held by students off campus at a public but not school sponsored event reading "Bong Hits for Jesus" could be the basis for disciplinary action by the school because the message advocated drug use. This is a Court that has lost sight of the very purpose of the First Amendment - the protection of unpopular expression from what DeTocqueville rightly recognized as the ever present potential for the "tyranny of the majority."
Previous courts have readily recognized exigent circumstances as grounds for curtailing expression - clear and present danger, defamatory potential, fighting words. But few have ever set themselves up to judge the content of speech as the grounds for failing to protect it. Were the Supremes particularly candid (and the Bush v. Gore case suggests that is NOT the case) they might have admitted to allowing the troubling religious content to have impacted their vote. Or they might have admitted that the drug element points to a serious problem in our society, a reflection of who we are rather than an invitation to behavior for which we have already demonstrated no need of invitation to engage. Instead, what we get is a blow to individual expression, albeit offensive expression, with a lame excuse that the banner somehow ran afoul of the "war on drugs." Please.
The second and third rulings essentially confirmed the court's complete sell-out to business interests. The first rejected the right of tax payers to challenge administration awarding of contracts to "faith based" organizations to provide social services. Groups like the Salvation Army, whose services to the homeless are often overshadowed by its manipulative evangelistic tactics in providing those services and by its homophobic hiring practices, can now receive tax moneys with impunity. The second ruling struck down the limitations on campaign spending by corporations and unions with so-called "issue ads," little more than thinly veiled partisan attacks. Elections can now function as auctions to the highest bidders with impunity.
There is a name for a governmental system which goes out of its way to protect the rights of its artificial persons, i.e., corporations, at the same time it represses the rights of its natural persons, i.e., human beings. Mussolini called his version "corporatism" but most people of his time simply called by its common name - fascism.
The lead story on the July 4 morning news on CNN, provided on the local cable system, was the winner of the Nathan's hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, NY. The obviously ill young man managed a wan smile when it was announced he had stuffed 66 hotdogs down his gullet in 12 minutes, a new world's record. Fortunately we were spared the inevitable regurgitation that would surely follow.
The second story alluded to the terrorist plots, both aborted and successful, in the United Kingdom and then jumped into the Chamber of Commerce required notice that no terrorist activities had been detected in the US, our terror alert had not been heightened, and thus it was OK to go spend money at the malls, American flag festooned car lots and fireworks stands.
The third story focused on the speeding stop of Albert Gore, Jr., the former vice-president's son, and the variety of prescription drugs found in the vehicle. The story began with his arrest photo, mentioned previous entanglements with the law and treatment for drugs and ended with the note that the Gore son had not yet hired an attorney. Another celebrity life available for the feeding frenzy of a bored people demanding passive entertainment.
Earlier in the day, ESPN had been touting a golf tournament sponsored by Tiger Woods in honor of the military, an interesting event considering Tiger's non-existent career in the service, a privilege available to him as a man of color as the exception to the rule in America. A spokeswoman for the tournament recited a rather mindless statement about how freedom is never free and must be defended by our military. Of course, if one's military were not so busy defending protecting corporate interests and their exploitative economic relationships with most of the world, perhaps it would not find freedom in such need of defense. Indeed, perhaps it's not freedom that's being defended at all.
This is what Costa Ricans - and much of the world - saw of America July 4, 2007. What a wonderful face my country provided the world on its birthday celebration - gluttony celebrated as accomplishment, a never ending fear of the possibility of terrorism its own actions has inflamed, a culture so unhappy with its life that it feels the constant need to escape it through drugs and alcohol. G-d bless the USA!
If one didn't love their country, it would be easy to be proud to be an American, as Greenwood suggests. But the reality is that we're hardly free even if we delude ourselves with that notion. We are slaves to a materialism that expresses itself in many pathological ways ranging from our addiction to petrochemicals to an epidemic of obesity. We are prisoners of fear which at heart implicitly recognizes that our relationship to much of the world has been exploitative at best, destructive at worst. But most of all, we are unable to escape the unhappiness that our materialistic, militaristic culture causes us even as we continue to buy into the messages of our culture industry that we are supposed to be happy.
Three days after Independence Day, I mulled over all these things as I flew back to Miami International. I found myself excited about being home, about having my aging dachshund and two cats greet me, about seeing friends and family and being in my chosen hometown. But I simultaneously found myself strangely ambivalent about coming back to a United States that six weeks in Latin America had given me some distance from and some trepidations about my return to it.
We are a good people. We are creative, ingenious, compassionate. We have the capacity for great nobility when we strive for the ideals our great documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and "I have a dream" speech represent. We know how to be a just nation. But we also have the capacity to elect presidents with little capacity for handling such responsibilities, deluding ourselves that his mediocrity (not to mention mendacity and mean-spiritedness) somehow makes him one of us. We are all too readily manipulated by fear which allows for unjust and often inhumane treatment rivaling that of history's greatest despots to prevail. And we fail to demand from our media that the whole truth be told, preferring to be entertained with half-truths, banal sit-coms and staged "reality shows."
To which America have I come home? Where is the country that I have loved and served these 52 years? And where is it going? May G-d bless the USA with a wakeup call soon.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It was July 4, 2007, America's Independence Day. Behind the guest services counter at the Best Western Hotel in San Jose, an American flag covered the wall. On our pillows in our room we found a small chocolate wrapped in red, white and blue cellophane with a small note attached reading "Happy 4th of July!"
All of this would seem rather ordinary under most occasions. But this was not San Jose, California. It was San Jose, Costa Rica. For only the second time in my life, I found myself thinking of home, of America on its birthday, from a foreign country.
On the television, the smarmy twang of country music confusing militarism with patriotism provided this musical reminder of the day:
And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land - God bless the U.S.A.
- Lee Greenwood, God Bless the USA (1984)
I think it would be easier to be proud to be an American if I didn't actually love my country. I've always found some wisdom in the worn maxim that we like people because, we love people in spite of. I think that is true about father or motherlands as well.
But America is giving us much to love it in spite of these days. The week preceding Independence Day, George the Unready commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby, convicted of lying repeatedly to a grand jury about the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame as a means of getting back at her husband, Joe Wilson for refuting the lie about Iraq and nuclear capability as a pretext for the invasion. There will be no penalty for the abuse of power that could have cost Ms. Plame her life, a crime that no doubt originated at the top of the White House food chain. As usual, there will be no accountability for this administration whose hollow use of "the rule of law" when convenient has provided a moral lesson in hypocrisy.
Earlier in the week, the Bush packed Supreme Court handed down three rulings that ought to make even the most moss backed conservative nervous. In a case originating out of Alaska, the Supremes ruled that a sign held by students off campus at a public but not school sponsored event reading "Bong Hits for Jesus" could be the basis for disciplinary action by the school because the message advocated drug use. This is a Court that has lost sight of the very purpose of the First Amendment - the protection of unpopular expression from what DeTocqueville rightly recognized as the ever present potential for the "tyranny of the majority."
Previous courts have readily recognized exigent circumstances as grounds for curtailing expression - clear and present danger, defamatory potential, fighting words. But few have ever set themselves up to judge the content of speech as the grounds for failing to protect it. Were the Supremes particularly candid (and the Bush v. Gore case suggests that is NOT the case) they might have admitted to allowing the troubling religious content to have impacted their vote. Or they might have admitted that the drug element points to a serious problem in our society, a reflection of who we are rather than an invitation to behavior for which we have already demonstrated no need of invitation to engage. Instead, what we get is a blow to individual expression, albeit offensive expression, with a lame excuse that the banner somehow ran afoul of the "war on drugs." Please.
The second and third rulings essentially confirmed the court's complete sell-out to business interests. The first rejected the right of tax payers to challenge administration awarding of contracts to "faith based" organizations to provide social services. Groups like the Salvation Army, whose services to the homeless are often overshadowed by its manipulative evangelistic tactics in providing those services and by its homophobic hiring practices, can now receive tax moneys with impunity. The second ruling struck down the limitations on campaign spending by corporations and unions with so-called "issue ads," little more than thinly veiled partisan attacks. Elections can now function as auctions to the highest bidders with impunity.
There is a name for a governmental system which goes out of its way to protect the rights of its artificial persons, i.e., corporations, at the same time it represses the rights of its natural persons, i.e., human beings. Mussolini called his version "corporatism" but most people of his time simply called by its common name - fascism.
The lead story on the July 4 morning news on CNN, provided on the local cable system, was the winner of the Nathan's hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, NY. The obviously ill young man managed a wan smile when it was announced he had stuffed 66 hotdogs down his gullet in 12 minutes, a new world's record. Fortunately we were spared the inevitable regurgitation that would surely follow.
The second story alluded to the terrorist plots, both aborted and successful, in the United Kingdom and then jumped into the Chamber of Commerce required notice that no terrorist activities had been detected in the US, our terror alert had not been heightened, and thus it was OK to go spend money at the malls, American flag festooned car lots and fireworks stands.
The third story focused on the speeding stop of Albert Gore, Jr., the former vice-president's son, and the variety of prescription drugs found in the vehicle. The story began with his arrest photo, mentioned previous entanglements with the law and treatment for drugs and ended with the note that the Gore son had not yet hired an attorney. Another celebrity life available for the feeding frenzy of a bored people demanding passive entertainment.
Earlier in the day, ESPN had been touting a golf tournament sponsored by Tiger Woods in honor of the military, an interesting event considering Tiger's non-existent career in the service, a privilege available to him as a man of color as the exception to the rule in America. A spokeswoman for the tournament recited a rather mindless statement about how freedom is never free and must be defended by our military. Of course, if one's military were not so busy defending protecting corporate interests and their exploitative economic relationships with most of the world, perhaps it would not find freedom in such need of defense. Indeed, perhaps it's not freedom that's being defended at all.
This is what Costa Ricans - and much of the world - saw of America July 4, 2007. What a wonderful face my country provided the world on its birthday celebration - gluttony celebrated as accomplishment, a never ending fear of the possibility of terrorism its own actions has inflamed, a culture so unhappy with its life that it feels the constant need to escape it through drugs and alcohol. G-d bless the USA!
If one didn't love their country, it would be easy to be proud to be an American, as Greenwood suggests. But the reality is that we're hardly free even if we delude ourselves with that notion. We are slaves to a materialism that expresses itself in many pathological ways ranging from our addiction to petrochemicals to an epidemic of obesity. We are prisoners of fear which at heart implicitly recognizes that our relationship to much of the world has been exploitative at best, destructive at worst. But most of all, we are unable to escape the unhappiness that our materialistic, militaristic culture causes us even as we continue to buy into the messages of our culture industry that we are supposed to be happy.
Three days after Independence Day, I mulled over all these things as I flew back to Miami International. I found myself excited about being home, about having my aging dachshund and two cats greet me, about seeing friends and family and being in my chosen hometown. But I simultaneously found myself strangely ambivalent about coming back to a United States that six weeks in Latin America had given me some distance from and some trepidations about my return to it.
We are a good people. We are creative, ingenious, compassionate. We have the capacity for great nobility when we strive for the ideals our great documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and "I have a dream" speech represent. We know how to be a just nation. But we also have the capacity to elect presidents with little capacity for handling such responsibilities, deluding ourselves that his mediocrity (not to mention mendacity and mean-spiritedness) somehow makes him one of us. We are all too readily manipulated by fear which allows for unjust and often inhumane treatment rivaling that of history's greatest despots to prevail. And we fail to demand from our media that the whole truth be told, preferring to be entertained with half-truths, banal sit-coms and staged "reality shows."
To which America have I come home? Where is the country that I have loved and served these 52 years? And where is it going? May G-d bless the USA with a wakeup call soon.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Last night I saw something amazing.
Birthday parties are nothing unusual even when they are for the dreaded #30 after which no one under 30 can trust you anymore according to the wisdom of the 60s. But this party was unusual. First, the young man celebrating his passage into his 30s threw the party for himself. At church. He enlisted the help of the parish and they generously provided a beautiful spread of food, drink and decorations. He created a theme - shady ladies - and asked people to wear shades. They did, ranging from the oversized sunglasses from the Rocky Horror Picture Show to Minnie and Mickey Disney shades to lamp shades. It was a hoot.
But that was just the beginning. The party was designed as a fund raiser for an international AIDS ministry. An Episcopal priest who serves that ministry came to speak to the party, this just days out of open heart surgery. What he said took me by surprise.
He began by congratulating St. Richard's parish for its willingness to open its doors, its ministries and its hearts to all people, regardless of whom they love. Around the room a number of gay and lesbian parishioners nodded their heads in agreement, including the young man celebrating his birthday. In a room filled with well over 100 people, most of them St. Richard's parishioners, the truth of Fr. Freu's observations was apparent. He reminded the parish of the obvious - they offer an important ministry in a diocese which is often hostile to and judgmental of the very people St. Richard's welcomes. That witness is a light in what is often a very dark and cold diocese. And it occurs by swimming upstream against the dominant vision of the diocese and its leadership. It is a courageous witness, indeed.
He went on to offer some of the sanest theology I've heard in this diocese in a long time: "On the seventh day, G-d looked at all he had created and he said, 'It is good.' And that's all you have to know. And anyone who would tell you the world is evil is simply wrong." I looked around the parish hall and the faces of those present - white, black, Latino, Asian, old, young, straight, gay - presented a snapshot of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called G-d's Rainbow People. That sight brought tears to my eyes. Because, as G-d has assessed it, it is very good. Indeed, it was quite beautiful.
There are days when I catch a brief glimpse of the Episcopal Church I joined so many years ago. It was a church that valued head and heart, that entertained questions rather than insisting upon simplistic answers. It was a church that truly did believe that there would be no outcasts. It was a church whose people prayed together as a starting place for serving G_d's world. Last night, for a brief moment, I saw that old Episcopal Church. It was truly wonderful to see it in this diocese where I became an Episcopalian some 30 years ago last January, a diocese which long ago lost its way. As I said to my gentle spirited partner who attended the party with me, "Now, *this* is the church I joined" and he smiled and nodded his head in agreement.
I am grateful to Marc Guttierez for his untiring service to his parish and this diocese, to St. Richard's for its courageous witness and for folks like Fr. Rand Freu who continue to toil away at making the kingdom of G-d just one small step closer to reality every day. Most of all, I am grateful for this glimpse of the Episcopal Church I once knew and loved, if ever so fleeting. I thank all of you who were part of this wonderful evening. And I pray for the day when this vision of church will once more become the norm and not the exception in this place where I have chosen to live the rest of my life.
Happy Birthday, Marc. And thank you for the present you gave to all of us last night.
Preach the Gospel at all times; use words when necessary. Francis of Assisi
Harry S. Coverston, Ph.D., J.D.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Birthday parties are nothing unusual even when they are for the dreaded #30 after which no one under 30 can trust you anymore according to the wisdom of the 60s. But this party was unusual. First, the young man celebrating his passage into his 30s threw the party for himself. At church. He enlisted the help of the parish and they generously provided a beautiful spread of food, drink and decorations. He created a theme - shady ladies - and asked people to wear shades. They did, ranging from the oversized sunglasses from the Rocky Horror Picture Show to Minnie and Mickey Disney shades to lamp shades. It was a hoot.
But that was just the beginning. The party was designed as a fund raiser for an international AIDS ministry. An Episcopal priest who serves that ministry came to speak to the party, this just days out of open heart surgery. What he said took me by surprise.
He began by congratulating St. Richard's parish for its willingness to open its doors, its ministries and its hearts to all people, regardless of whom they love. Around the room a number of gay and lesbian parishioners nodded their heads in agreement, including the young man celebrating his birthday. In a room filled with well over 100 people, most of them St. Richard's parishioners, the truth of Fr. Freu's observations was apparent. He reminded the parish of the obvious - they offer an important ministry in a diocese which is often hostile to and judgmental of the very people St. Richard's welcomes. That witness is a light in what is often a very dark and cold diocese. And it occurs by swimming upstream against the dominant vision of the diocese and its leadership. It is a courageous witness, indeed.
He went on to offer some of the sanest theology I've heard in this diocese in a long time: "On the seventh day, G-d looked at all he had created and he said, 'It is good.' And that's all you have to know. And anyone who would tell you the world is evil is simply wrong." I looked around the parish hall and the faces of those present - white, black, Latino, Asian, old, young, straight, gay - presented a snapshot of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called G-d's Rainbow People. That sight brought tears to my eyes. Because, as G-d has assessed it, it is very good. Indeed, it was quite beautiful.
There are days when I catch a brief glimpse of the Episcopal Church I joined so many years ago. It was a church that valued head and heart, that entertained questions rather than insisting upon simplistic answers. It was a church that truly did believe that there would be no outcasts. It was a church whose people prayed together as a starting place for serving G_d's world. Last night, for a brief moment, I saw that old Episcopal Church. It was truly wonderful to see it in this diocese where I became an Episcopalian some 30 years ago last January, a diocese which long ago lost its way. As I said to my gentle spirited partner who attended the party with me, "Now, *this* is the church I joined" and he smiled and nodded his head in agreement.
I am grateful to Marc Guttierez for his untiring service to his parish and this diocese, to St. Richard's for its courageous witness and for folks like Fr. Rand Freu who continue to toil away at making the kingdom of G-d just one small step closer to reality every day. Most of all, I am grateful for this glimpse of the Episcopal Church I once knew and loved, if ever so fleeting. I thank all of you who were part of this wonderful evening. And I pray for the day when this vision of church will once more become the norm and not the exception in this place where I have chosen to live the rest of my life.
Happy Birthday, Marc. And thank you for the present you gave to all of us last night.
Preach the Gospel at all times; use words when necessary. Francis of Assisi
Harry S. Coverston, Ph.D., J.D.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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