Uncivil Unions: Rome is Falling

 Most of you have probably never heard of Paulus Orosius, but he's somebody I've studied extensively as a medievalist.  Orosius was a Spanish priest who played postmaster between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, but he's mostly known in modern circles (when talked about at all) as the author of an enormous, bizarre history of the world starting with Adam and ending shortly after the sack of Rome.  According to Orosius, Rome was the fourth, and blessed, world kingdom, which God used to bring about the conversion of the world and subdue it for Christ.

In reality, it was a pretty untenable argument, but Orosius held onto that premise so doggedly that he eventually bent historical fact, logic, and Scripture itself to try and fit his theological bed of Procrustes.  For one, it leads him to argue a lot of silly things, like that the barbarian sack of Rome wasn't really a sack, or that Constantine (who wiped out a lot of his family) was a model of virtue.  His theology is absolutely terrible (Augustine pretty much tears it apart in City of God, Book 18), but its Christian-imperialistic vision appealed to the clerical masses-- so it stuck around as a fundamental text of the European middle ages and was even translated into Arabic.

Orosius was so convinced that God established the Roman Empire as the backbone of his new Christian order that he argued it was essential for Christian society to thrive on earth. So, if the Roman empire fell...? Hmm. Perhaps it's for the best that Orosius never lived long enough to see a barbarian king on the Roman throne and the dissolution of his beloved empire into little states run by Franks and Vandals. He'd have thought the world had gone to hell in a hand-basket.

So, I was morbidly interested to discover that the Manhattan Declaration invokes the same event, the presumed fall of Rome, in its Preamble:

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture.

What's funny so about this is that it isn't really true.  Barbarian "tribes" didn't exactly "overrun" Europe; except for the Huns, a large part of them were already there, and the Romans pushed into them first.  And, a huge portion of the Burgundians, Franks and Goths were Roman federates, soldiers, or-- depending on whose articles you read-- Roman citizens.  The earliest copy of a non-Latin vernacular Bible is in Gothic.  And, in just a couple of generations those monasteries they mention are stocked with so-called "barbarians" copying out the Bible themselves, completely unaware they almost destroyed Western Civilization.  These barbarian invasions are mostly just a story we use to buttress our feelings of pride in our Christian heritage, and one the Manhattan Declaration invokes without question.  There are a couple of other ideas they invoke without question, too-- things that make them pull an Orosius and distort their argument to make it support a bad premise. 

Specifically, Orosius made the Roman empire more important to the continuance of Christian social order than it really was.   I think that's my main problem with the Manhattan Declaration, too: they're trying to build the backbone of the social order on things never meant to bear that kind of weight-- and that thing is marriage.  They think that the continuance of a sound social order rises or falls on the definition of what a marriage actually is. 

So, that's where I'm going to spend some time today: what's the real center of society, as envisioned by the Bible?  Where's the place of marriage?  And what happens when hetero sex gets fetishized to the point of absurdity?

Hunter of Justice talks about TLP: 10 years later

Hunter of Justice is a blog run by Nan Hunter, a professor at Georgetown Law which focuses on issues of human rights and equality, and it's a great read.  She focuses especially on issues of gender and sexuality.  You can visit "Hunter of Justice" here and check up on some current posts if you like.  

Nan Hunter had a guest writer give a writeup on the Ten Years Later performance. and you can access the article on 10 Years Later here.  It has some great observations about the play!

Well, just... darn.

Every once in awhile when I'm wandering on "teh Internets" I run across something that just makes me burst out laughing so loud that it makes my husband jerk his head up from whatever statistics work he's doing and give me that "are you nuts?!" look.  Well, the other night was one of those nights as I wandered through a site with a bit of Internet potpourri on it.

What got my attention, you might ask? This, actually:

It took just a second or two to track down the original website, which is full of really, really bad English translations from around the globe.  I don't even know where to start. But if this is what other countries think about where I'm from...  maybe we better start up an exchange program to clear the air, perhaps?  

Hope you enjoy it! 

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!