Wednesday, May 26, 2010, 3:44 PM
My career in ministry has been marked with a consistent theme: I repeatedly find myself doing things that I either utterly failed to anticipate, or that I specifically said that I'd never do. I actually said aloud in seminary that I never wanted to serve as an interim pastor; I spent nearly ten years doing just that. And today I spend the vast majority of my time on electronic publishing and communication media that simply didn't exist when I graduated from school over twenty years ago.
More recently, I've found myself leading workshops, several of them, in fact, on social networking, the Church's relationship to social networking phenomena, and how to adapt "safe church" practices to the virtual world. With these utilities still very young themselves (Facebook is only six years old), I'm obviously just one step ahead of anyone in the workshop groups, and sometimes two or three steps behind...
But there's a characteristic of the Internet that, I think, cries out for a word from the Church, from Christians, and from people of a wide variety of faiths. The characteristic is the longevity, the durability of information in the Internet. My workshop leadership partner successfully found the text of a paper she'd submitted for a class in the 80's -- somehow, it had been posted to a database, "spidered" by Google, and there it was for anyone to find.
At the same time, we keep hearing of firms and institutions evaluating the applications of potential employees with searches of the Internet and, particularly, of their "personal" social networking profiles. According to a 2009 Proofpoint study, 8% of US companies with over 1,000 employees had fired staff for misbehavior related to social networking. How many weren't hired in the first place?
In the past, we've been able to leave our errors behind us. The indiscretions of youth, the sins of ignorance, and the painfully-overcome failures associated with addictions or with strongly-held, sadly mistaken beliefs. Graduation, change of residence, change of job, new affiliations all brought a New Start.
With the Internet, we've probably lost that, and it's probably gone for good.
So we're going to have to learn to forgive.
I can't think of anything more counter-cultural at the moment. This is a judgmental time. The ideological politics we bewail has deep roots in the inability to tolerate or forgive dissent. A political victory in one issue makes collaboration on another issue prohibitively difficult.
In 2008, the United States led the world in the percentage of its population which was behind bars. I strongly suspect that in prior years, and in other countries, at least some of those imprisoned offenders would have been confronted differently than they are today.
With the political mechanisms paralyzed, with huge numbers of citizens released from prisons and anticipating a short stay "outside" before they're returned, with all of our long-since-forgotten but electronically preserved peccadilloes waiting for us to find them again, we'd better learn to forgive.
Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting, and it never was. Forgiveness does not release anyone from responsibility; I'd argue that until there is repentance, there can be no forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the restoration of relationship; it is the acknowledgement of prior failure and the commitment to a new way of success. Forgiveness reinforces responsibility even as it relieves the offender from the consequences of offending.
Forgiveness has always been a foundational Christian value. It has always strengthened families and communities. It has always been praised when publicly displayed -- remember Pope John Paul II and his attempted assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca -- while simultaneously dismissed as a virtue with utility in the "real world."
The real world and the virtual world now, I think, demand that we deliberately, systematically, and steadfastly employ this virtue of forgiveness. When forgetfulness will no longer permit new life, then forgiveness must take its place.
I think this is one of the central challenges for the Church of Jesus Christ in this age: to summon society to this new virtue, for its survival and salvation.
Friday, April 16, 2010, 6:32 AM
Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 4:32 PM
Friday morning changed the theme from the shifts in communication and technology to the shifts in religion itself. Ingrid Mattson, our neighbor at Hartford Seminary and President of the Islamic Society of North America, spoke of the changes within North American Islam in the last ten years. One tenet of the Muslim faith that has been both enormously valuable to her and greatly challenging has been the idea that, when evil strikes, there is opportunity in dealing with that evil for people of faith to grow.
The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, came just days after a meeting of American Muslims that promised increased participation in society. Mattson resented the terrorists not just for their violence, but “because it upset my plans.” “Very often we hate having to deal with a situation,” she reflected, but maybe having to deal with it is a good thing for us.
In the wake of the attacks and of the reactions to it - including the disappearance of Muslims required to complete a “special registration” - Mattson noted the community’s common efforts to raise funds for the legal defense of their members, and the emergence of new friends to help them, including the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA and the Jewish Action Network. In communities around the nation, it is now normal for interfaith groups to reach out to their Muslim neighbors.
In addition to these new relationships, the crisis of sectarian strife after the Iraq invasion prompted imams and teachers from around the world to gather and come to consensus, for the first time, on what groups would be considered Muslim. The intersection of interfaith opportunities and the possibility of internal consensus resulted in the 2007 release of “A Common Word Between Us and You,” an initiative oriented toward finding common ground with Christians. Responses have come from Christian leaders around the world, and have included a major conference at Yale Divinity School.
Diana Eck, professor of Comparative Religion and Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, noted that, “In this [digital] world, no one speaks in private.” That has brought religious communities that previously had little exposure to each other into new relationships. “Religious difference is increasingly part of our lives,” she said.
The Pluralism Project holds a high value in helping faithful people of different traditions to make connections, and not simply live side by side. “Pluralism begins with difference and not with an easy sameness,” said Eck. Building the relationships will take both time and effort, and much of that work must be done on the local level, between members of Hindu temples and Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques and Christian churches.
Several speakers at the Congress have noted that customary understandings of religious authority have faded in recent decades. Cultures around the world seem to be “seeker cultures,” comparing and contrasting leadership, doctrine, and spiritual depth.
Living with each other clearly requires such magnificent efforts as “A Common Word” and the presence of religious leaders together at their neighbors’ groundbreakings or festivals. It requires as well, I think, a renewed commitment to and grounding in the best of our own faith traditions. To come to the discussion with Muslim imam, Buddhist monk, or even an Eastern Orthodox priest, I owe it to them to prepare myself in the faith, so that I present and represent it honestly and as fully as I may. Common ground may lie at the foundations, and it may lie also further up in the piled stones of our religious edifices (to push the metaphor toward the sky).
I owe my partners in discussion the same labors the imams made in “A Common Word.” And I owe it further to them to listen to what they say with something other on my mind than what I’d like to say next.
Dr. Mattson left me with another thought, one that requires further humility in the conversation. Christian mission in many places in the world, she said, carries with it a great difference of wealth, with all its attendant baggage of assumed power for good or ill. That wealth can be a resource for truly caring ministry, but also a catalyst for resentment and fear.
It’s something to bear in mind.
Monday, April 12, 2010, 10:51 PM
I wish I were half as smart, half as accomplished, and half as good a preacher as the Rev. Otis Moss, III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. His sermon last summer at the 2009 General Synod was engaging, scholarly, and dramatic. His address to religious communicators, though not precisely a sermon, seized upon the Biblical image of Joshua’s succession to the leadership of Israel after the death of Moses.
“Moses is dead,” Moss repeated in a rhetorical refrain. “This is the Joshua generation.”
Moss considered the development of rap music, its foundation of social critique of poverty and violence and its co-option by moneyed interests into a profit center. In gangsta rap “corporations saw the chance,” he asserted, “to sell black pathology to the suburbs.” But he surveyed as well the decline in public space, illustrated by the shift of porches from the front of homes to the back, reducing neighbors’ awareness of each other; the rise of prosperity gospels in the 80s and the decline in attention to poverty and racism; the arguments in mainline churches about “contemporary services.”
“You cannot reach a Joshua generation with Moses methodology,” said Moss. The focus on method obscures the message, in which lies the power. “We have eight-track ministries in a CD world.”
Moss identified four pillars of hiphop music as a way of helping to understand this basic movement of the teenage generation. First, there is graffiti: graphical representation, or in short, art. Second, there is the DJ, who appropriates technology. This generation, says Moss, wants to connect through technology. Third, there is rapping: orality, poetry. And fourth, there is breakdancing: movement and dance.
The pillars themselves are no different from those of other musical forms and, for that matter, of liturgical forms. Worship, even in the plainest Puritan church, understands and employs the power of visual art. The Church has employed technology since it appropriated the basilica’s architecture for its acoustics and, more recently, the wireless microphone and digital projector. Christianity is profoundly wedded to the spoken word, to the point that nearly every great reform movement in its two millennia has included a renewed commitment to great preaching. Movement, likewise, has its place. Not all churches share in dancing, but all move: if only to stand for hymns and designated times of prayer.
Joshua is a remix of Moses, Moss declared. “We’ve got to learn how to remix. To take all the values our ancestors taught us and give them a new beat.”
Moss didn’t say so, but he might easily have noted that in the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith, we are reminded of the Church’s obligation to make the faith new in every generation. He did say, in the question time, that God is still speaking.
Much of the rest of the day illustrated just how difficult some of that task will be. The morning’s panel brought two professional journalists and an academic to the stage to reflect on the way changes in the media landscape change coverage of religion. Religion News Service’s Kevin Eckstrom and National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley-Hagerty both work in more “traditional” media services, and both experience the struggles and anxieties of the landscape shifting under their feet. Both lament the drastically shortened news cycle which encourages quick reporting over considered analysis, and which favors pundits’ opinion over substantive scrutiny.
In contrast, the Poynter Institute’s Kenneth Irby asked how we can embrace the change. He sees great opportunities for building communities, the strength of social networking. He sees the value of people being able to tell their own stories. Like Eckstrom and Bradley-Hagerty, he sees a need for people to take the role of sense-makers; people who will take the sacred responsibility to be trusted sources of information.
The great church historian and writer Martin E. Marty moderated the panel, and said something that struck me very profoundly: its takes an average of 250 years for the Church to adapt to change. And we’re only thirty or so years into this one. Hm.
I attended three workshops that day as well. One was technical, in which I learned some very useful techniques for Photoshop, but the others continued this same theme of adapting to technological change. Kenneth Irby’s workshop on ethics in new media was very useful in considering the themes underlying the choice of using images. And Rabbi Aaron Spiegel did a good survey of the use of social networking by congregations.
In the evening, I visited Chicago’s Art Institute, where with Moss’ words still echoing, I was able to see each generation “re-mixing” the work of their forebears and their contemporaries. It’s an amazing collection, particularly of the Impressionists, but also one where the curators have very clearly attempted to illustrate the artistic “conversations” as they display the pieces.
Monday, April 12, 2010, 10:47 PM
That’s a profoundly misleading title, and at the same time a perfectly fair one. In my first day of the Religion Communication Congress 2010, I’ve heard about a pretty good range of topics in just a few hours -- shifts in institutional authority, the relationship between religion and media of mutual influence, the comedy of religion, the profound influence of faithful people on the communities around them -- but as I seek to impose an impossible order upon it all at an advanced hour (and ignoring my lack of sleep), the word dilemma leapt to mind.
Some of it emerged from conversations I’ve had with other communicators today. As Stewart Hoover said this afternoon, we have a bad habit of assuming the power is in the medium rather than in the message. Tonight’s presentation by Mitch Albom, author of Have a Little Faith, reinforced that basic truth. Yet here we are conferring, not about the message (which, in an interfaith gathering, cannot entirely cohere), but about media. Hm.
Some of it emerged from tonight’s trio of religiously oriented comedians. Two -- Rabbi Bob Alper and Baptist pastor the Rev. Susan Sparks -- actually lead congregations; Chicago-born Muslim Azhar Usman boldly lifts up his faith in his comedy. The three regularly perform together to demonstrate both that God has a sense of humor and that the three faiths can laugh together (and Irish step-dance together, but that’s another story). Yet the dilemmas of comedy are quite stark. Much laughter derives from pain, and each of them, at some point, walked up to a place, pointed to it, and said, in effect, “There’s something very wrong here.”
As Shaw said, if it’s funny, start looking for truth.
Earlier today Nabil Echchaibi described a phenomenon in Islam of new media-savvy non-traditional authorities offering guidance on spiritual, cultural, and ethical practice primarily on Muslim “secular” satellite television and the Internet. Instead of older, school-authorized imams, these hosts adopt Western costume and deliberately evoke contemporary cultural touchstones. One hosts a reality show with the look and feel of “The Apprentice,” but the weekly challenges are ones of charity and service. LIke other reality shows, of course, a contestant is dismissed at the end of each episode.
My first thought in learning about this was to wonder why a program about charity would never work in our country. My second was to admire the artistry of the new frame for fairly traditional Muslim values being constructed. What I came to appreciate was the daily dilemmas of living the faith in a culture that is not particularly friendly to it.
And I appreciate as well that the those dilemmas are not for Muslims alone. All the presenters I heard today made that case to some degree. Living the faith requires facing those questions every day.
I leave you with this thought, shared by MItch Albom from a conversation with his long-time rabbi. Asked for the secret of happiness, his rabbi said, “Be satisfied with what you have, and who loves you, and what God has given you. And be grateful.”
In each situation, that may be the most critical dilemma of all, and the difference between the laughter of truth, and tears of falsehood.
[Author's note: one curious irony of this Congress on communication change was that the host hotel had entirely inadequate Internet service: slow and, at $15 a day, incredibly expensive. This post was written at the end of the first day, but not posted until I returned home.]
