Uncivil Unions: Why This Jesus-Lover Didn't Sign the Manhattan Declaration

A few months ago I was part of a Veritas planning team to bring in a speaker to our campus.  (If you haven't heard of Veritas, it's a great Christian scholastic organization.)  We brought in a eminent early Christianity scholar to talk with one of our religious studies professors about the creation of the idea of the "heretic" in Late Antiquity.  He was a wonderful speaker.  We also asked him to speak to Christian students about being a Christian academic and how to balance the two.   This speaker, whom I helped bring to campus and whom I genuinely like as a human being, humanitarian and scholar, announced to a room of my colleagues that some moral issues are universally recognized as critical to the Church, like abortion and gay marriage, and that he had therefore signed the Manhattan Declaration as a result.  He implicitly suggested that we as good Christians and role models should do the same.  I flinched. 

The truth is, even though I'm an evangelical Christian for the most part (I do have some liturgical tendencies), I'm no real fan of The Manhattan Declaration.   If you haven't heard of it, this is a religious manifesto created, in their own words, "in defense of the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. It issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere firmly to their convictions in these three areas."  I was originally interested in it because this is the first time in a while that I've seen Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist and Charismatic Christians of every stripe actually agree on something. 

Normally, I'm a huge fan of such ecumenical movements because 1) I don't believe in divisions in the body of Christ and 2) I spent six years in a denomination where the lion's share of its members doubted whether any the other denominations were actually Christians.  But this brand of ecumenism... well, I'm not sure I like this one.  On the one hand, I am a firm pro-lifer (with reservations about approach) and I'm a huge proponent of religious freedom for all faiths.

But then there's that third tenet: the "defense of traditional marriage."  As you all doubtlessly know, I find myself stuck between the two main communities on this one.  On the one hand, I am a straight evangelical.  I know what the traditional interpretations of Scripture says on this one, and that's something I'm still struggling to understand for myself, and the more I do, the more I find myself on the other side of the issue from my compatriots.  On the other hand, I know intimately the degree to which the Christian moral conviction against sexual sin is really a veil over a deep-rooted homophobia.  I've seen it.  That's why I'm actively participating in our local LGBTA and trying to get my co-religionists to realize that they have a moral obligation to reach out to the LGBT community with love, compassion, and acceptance no differently than we're supposed to be doing to the rest of the world.  And I firmly believe that the church as a whole needs to reach out to the gay community to ask for forgiveness for our sins against them.  The most horrible "coming out" stories I've heard nearly always come from the most zealous Christian families and congregations.

Secondly, I don't like the entire premise of their argument, their reason for drafting the declaration, and the assumptions it makes.   It's based upon a premise that I simply can't accept, Biblically speaking, and one that has been bothering me for quite a while now, long before I'd heard of the Declaration. Besides,  I think it odd that Christians who can't even always agree on the first seven councils of the Church can all agree that gay people shouldn't get married.  So, we can't even agree on the procession of the Holy Spirit or the nature of the Trinity, but we can all agree that we don't like gay couples?!  There seems to be a strange disconnect here with the Manhattan Declaration and the relationship between God and society they create, so that's what I want to spend some time thinking about for a few posts as I work on some more material for TLP.

Aaron McKinney's Tattoos, or the Ethics of Reading Humans as Literature

One thing that I've been wondering about is how little literary criticism has been written on The Laramie Project so far.  When I started thinking about the play, my initial impulse was to write an academic article.   (I've changed my mind since then.)   But when I started to pull together scholarly sources to start my research, I found that there wasn't too much to build from.  I started to wonder: why I can I find so few literary scholars writing about this play?  

For instance, when I did a search in the MLA Bibliography for The Laramie Project, I only got eight hits; six were articles of literary criticism, and one of those is Tigner's.  I tried the International Index to Performance Arts and netted another 4-5 scholarly articles, but they're mostly about documentary/nonfiction performance rather than the play as text.  That seems really strange for a play that has been as popular and culturally important for the last eight years as TLP has.  Just for comparison, Shaffer's play Amadeus had nineteen articles written and indexed in MLAB by 1988.  Why haven't all those gape-mouthed literary professors who teach this text (of whom I suppose I am one) been writing about it? Why are pens so silent in my own professional field? 

Maybe others aren't writing on this text as a literary object for the same reason that I'm a little reticent about writing on this text in an academic forum myself.  I don't like treating actual, living human beings as abstractions (which was probably clear with one of my previous posts).  It's one thing to talk about "Mozart" and "Salieri" as characters because, even though these people are real, the play itself is a total fiction.  I can even do it with Spiegelman's Maus because the conscious meta-narrative and the fictive animal story insulates the reader enough from the unspeakable horror of Vladek Spiegelman's lived reality to give him a more critical eye.  I have a much harder time doing the same thing with a person in The Laramie Project, especially when it's somebody I took classes from or saw in church.

Maybe other critics have the same hangups.  For instance, there are only 36 articles in MLAB for In Cold Blood, and they mostly seem to be focusing on genre or journalistic concerns  rather than treating it as a literary work.  Maybe we're all running into the same question: what are the ethics of reading a documentary work or "faction" (fact-based fiction) as a literary event?  Is it ethical to treat a real, live human as a symbolic construction, whether it be the Clutters, Gary Gilmore, or Russell Henderson?  Do you lessen the gravity of the situation if you talk about Aaron McKinney's failures from a literary, rather than a historical or cultural standpoint?

Or, to put it from a more practical standpoint: am I doing a disservice to Aaron McKinney (and, by extension, Matt Shepard) as a human being if I treat him like a literary construction?   

I'm headed home!

Well, I got the bad/good news just last week-- my ticket is bought and I'm going home to the Rockies in a couple of weeks.  My elderly grandfather in Montana announced to the family about a month ago that he wants to move into one of those senior citizen's communities and sell his house.  He's arranged for a two-bedroom apartment in town where he'll be surrounded by other swinging seniors and have a social life. (Heaven help 'em all.  He's such a grouchy old fussbudget.) 

So, I'm going to be the dutiful granddaughter and help my mother and aunt get him packed up and moved in.  This is going to involve a lot of packing of boxes-- and of Grandpa unpacking and repacking them again because he's O.C.D. and has to make sure all the labels on his canned goods are facing the same direction.

I expect this should go smoothly for the most part, until we get to the old brass bed my grandmother inherited many years ago from her parents and Grandpa no longer wants.  I might have to step in and referee the arm-wrestling contest between my mother and aunt to see who gets it.  ;-)

This means that me, my camera, and my audio recorder are headed back to Wyoming-- and I've decided to go back to Laramie for part of that time to do some research.  At first this seemed like the natural thing to do, given my academic inclinations and fascination with TLP, but I'm having a little bit of panic about actually talking to real live people about The Laramie Project.  I'll have to outline that in a little more detail later.

But in the meantime:  Woo-hoo!  I'm headed home, y'all!

April Showers bring.... Columbine, apparently.

Summer is here, and it has brought me lots of boredom (which is unusual for a graduate student). I've been heading out with my camera taking pictures a lot more than hitting the books recently-- and I don't feel a bit guilty.

So, I thought I'd share another picture for you, from my university's trial gardens at the College of Agriculture.

This is a variety of columbine I'd never seen before. The flowers are only about as big as a quarter or so, and a lovely maroon color. Enjoy!

A Picture of Savage Beauty For You

The Kalamazoo Swan, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

I was up in Kalamazoo, Michigan about ten days ago for a long conference on medieval studies. While I was there, I took some pictures of the Western Michigan University campus and some of its more interesting inhabitants, and I wanted to share a few pics with you.

It's nesting season up in WMU, and this is their infamous campus swan, patrolling the banks of the little pond next to the dorms where I stayed. He's a thing of beauty-- and, just as he should be, a little intimidating.  Swans are anything but the serene, peaceable creatures that Disney movies make them out to be. 

He spent most of the conference beating up on the Canada geese who also share this same pond, keeping them away from the end of the pond where his mate was still nesting. He was a sight to behold.

Enjoy!

Pro-Wrestling Meets Appalachia

Every once in a while I have these little moments of epiphany where I suddenly look around and realize that I'm not in the Rockies anymore.  Usually it's something subtle, like when I smell lilacs (which are rare down here) and I get desperately homesick, or when I see a Cadillac drive by with a "Git-r-done" bumper sticker, and I get confused.  But recently, the culture of public space has been making my status as resident alien to the South to me much more clearly than anything else.

For instance, take the street-side vendor.  Seeing people hock things on the side of the road isn't all that unusual; you see fruit stands and whatnot occasionally out west.  But I'm still not used to seeing a guy in overalls and a lump of Copenhagen in his lip set up shop on the highway selling "Boled P-Nuts" [sic] or "Shrump" [also sic] off the tailgate of his truck.   The strangest thing, up until last week, were the traveling garage sales that sprout up, like mushrooms, in vacant lots and grassy fields next to the road.  I can understand selling your stuff in a yard sale... but why pack it all in your van and roll it all out on the pavement next to the Kroger on my street? 

But what I saw two weeks ago in my neighborhood absolutely took the cake.  What I ran into was this: 

That's right: a bush-league semi-professional wrestling troupe set up a portable ring a block from my house and held a full-out wrestling entertainment extravaganza.  There were five different matches, complete with a tag team event featuring three male wrestlers and one female personality who styled herself as "Miss Las Vegas."  And I, I'm a little surprised to admit, enjoyed it in a weird sort of way, and for a weird reason.  So without further ado, here are some of the highlights:

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Tectonic Uncertainty Principle

In my attempt to think through the relationship of Tectonic Theater to the Laramie community, I've tended to focus on their relationship to the Laramie community as a whole:  are they reporting it like they are from the "inside" of the community in reflection or from the "outside" in judgment?  There's another way to think of the organization, however: as either passive observer, or active participant in, the events they're observing.  When Tectonic came into Laramie this second time, how much had they already changed the situation in Laramie with their first play?  For me, the answer is simple because I don't think that passive observation of a community is possible; you're always changing the environment you're observing.  Therefore, for me the question is not whether Tectonic Theater has had an influence in Laramie; the  question is how much, and whether or not Tectonic recognizes that fact in the second play. 

So, to start, all of you Trekkies out there understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right?  Here it is in a nutshell:  you can't observe an aspect of a particle in space without changing something else about it.  For instance, if you can pin down a particle's momentum, you know nothing about its position because your observation of its momentum precludes knowing its position.  And, since you have to "poke" a particle to know where it's at, you have to sacrifice knowing its momentum just to know its position.  It's the damnable, frustrating fact of life for quantum physicists:  you simply can never be a passive observer; to some extent, just by observing you are always a participant, you always interfere and you can therefore never know everything.