Padres to the Playoffs...

Even though I have feverish with footy excitement and I'm little riddled at what a weird season it has been, it is time to pop a cork. The Padres have won their division! Even thought they've lost just as many as they won, it's playoffs time now. It's a new season. The Padres are back in the postseason!

You know, this always happens to me. I leave SD and my team starts winning. While I was in Northern California from 1995-1999 the Padres went to the playoffs (1996) and the World Series (1998). As soon as I left in August 2004 the Chargers end up in the NFL postseason (after years of dismal play). Again, my departure has been San Diego's charm.

Footy Fever: NQ Cowboys to the finals

This time last year I had little idea what words like "dummy half," "knock-on," and "footy" meant. In spite of my ignorance of rugby "codes" and the National Rugby League (NRL), I was caught up in Townsville's effervescent excitement surrounding the Cowboys advance to the NRL semi-finals. Although the 2004 team could not advance beyond this game, the team and town were hopeful for next year. In 2005 the North Queensland Cowboys lost their first game in the playoffs 50-6 to the West Tigers. However, because of their 5th place regular season finish, the Cowboys were allowed a second life in the playoffs in which they defeated Melbourne and the regular season champions Parramatta and have bettered their 2004 result, ending up up in the Grand Final where they will again play the Tigers.

In 2005 I am again caught up in footy fever! Does this mean I am becoming a Queenslander? Will words like "scrum" and "five-eighth" began to be infused with deep significance for me? Will I begin to make statements like, "State of Origin is not just a match it is a battleground of human pride?” Am I becoming an Aussie bloke? Have I got Footy Fever or just a plain, old fever?

If I can't have my Chargers and Padres, footy fever is almost as good. "Go The Cowboys!"

Exterior Surfaces

We are appalled but not astounded to find racism at a One Nation meeting. One is saddened but not stunned to find racism in the profiling of Arabs at airport security checkpoints. While there is no excuse for this despicable behaviour but we are not taken aback in amazement when we find hate in such places.

Racism, though, rears its ugly head in unexpected places.

Unforseen, unanticipated, and unpredicted racial prejudice emerges in unlikely locales. Black and Decker’s The Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement might be such a site. The Complete Photo Guide is a 500 page tome that one would expect to be free of prejudice and malice. Guiding the eager homeowner through tasks ranging from “building a skylight shaft” and “installing ceramic floor tile” to “plumbing a master bath” and “removing exterior surfaces” the book boasts “over 1,700 photos” and “250 step-by-step” projects.

The photo guide gives helpful illustrative pictures of enthusiastic Do-It-Yourselfers working hard to install wooden flooring, route cable, and generally improve their homes. We see the workers in various stages of activity with wide-angle shots and close ups on the hands. The book is packed with helpful how-to photographs.

However, I am struck though at the bleakness of diversity in Black and Decker’s manual. Every worker pictured is white. Absent from this voluminous manual are Asian Do-It-Yourselfers, Black Handymen (or women), and Hispanic builders. Do no Asians own homes in need of improvement? Aren’t black people also interested in an enhanced abode? Who made the assumption that Mexican homeowners shouldn’t be pictured as model workers?

Without warning we are faced with discrimination and nasty narrow-mindedness. “Only white people own homes. Only white people are eager to fix up their houses” is the message from this offensive text.

The choice of model workers in The Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement is what the education texts call the “null curriculum” – the values that are taught by their absence. By its omissions the guide makes a strong statement. It is what critical theorists call the “politics of representation” (or in this case, lack of representation). Black and Decker’s book manages to hide offensive racially-coded values in an innocuous context.

In 2000 provocative movie man Spike Lee produced a stimulating and conformational film called Bamboozled. The film demonstrates how racism has become our entertainment. Racial chauvinism is concealed in entertaining media. We revel in stereotypes. We find our amusement in typecasting.

Like the amusement shows the Lee sharply critiques, The Complete Photo Guide camouflages it prejudice. While there are colour photos in this book, there is not much colour. While there are step-by-step projects, projects carried out in The Projects are absent. The only thing black about The Complete Photo Guide is the name Black and Decker.

(I’d be curious to hear from readers about unlikely places they have seen/experienced racism.)

Theocracy

I guess there are no questions in the Right's mind about where their authority is derived from! (The least they could do is spell correctly.)

Graceful Baseball

"Baseball is more than a game to me, it's a religion."
(William J Klem, Hall of Fame umpire)

"You should enter a ballpark the way you way enter a church."
(Bill Lee, Red Sox player)

"Baseball is like church. Many attend but few understand."
(Wes Westrum, NY Giant player)

The Padres found little mercy today. 20-1 is a devastating loss for any team, even in the thin air of Coors field. But even in the humiliation there is mercy. In the baseball season one game means hardly anything. One fall from grace is only 0.6% (less than 1 %) of a season. Losing by 19 runs is the same as having a no-hitter pitched against you. It is a game of forgiveness.

Grace is built-in to the baseball season.

Gridiron (American football) is much less compassionate. The Chargers played well in their first two games, but in the final minutes found no saviour. Their bruises and statistics show them to be winners, but they are 0-2. The NFL schedule shows no clemency. Only 14 days into the campaign and a postseason-less year seems to inevitable. 2 weeks have passed and 13% of the season is gone. They are lost.

Atonement is on the diamond. Redemption is found rounding the bases.

The lengthy April-October road is a road of hope and reprieve. Grace is there, even in the losing. Grace means that 21 players got a chance to play. Grace means the third baseman took a turn on the mound. Grace assures that tomorrow is a whole new ballgame. Grace means that there is another 99.4% of the season to find atonement. Grace is finding hope for the future even within 20-1 losses. Grace knows that, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Truth is in the Verification

We had a group of friends over last night and got into an interesting discussion on truth. I made the point that we cannot call something "true" until it is verified. Until then, it is only a candidate for true status. After our friends went home I sent them this email:

Perhaps the problem is with the way we define truth. I think think the position I was disagreeing with sees truth as something like TRUTH or The Truth. Let me make a few observations. First, there is a difference between the actual existence of a thing and a judgment. For example, quoting Dewey:

I hear a noise in the street. It suggests as its meaning a street-car. To test this idea I go to the window and through listening and looking intently...organize into a single situation elements of existence and meaning which were previously disconnected. In this way an idea is made true; that which was a proposal or a hypothesis is not longer merely a propounding or a guess. If I had not reacted in a way appropriate to the idea it would have remained a mere idea; at most a candidate for truth that, unless acted upon the spot, would have always remained a theory (Westbrook, 131).

The noise was merely a theory - or "candidate for truth" - until it was verified in experience. This locates truth in verification, not prior to it. Dewey justifies his assertion by noting the difference between plain existences of events and judgments/ideas about them. Truth is concerned with judgments not bare existence. That is, the truth (and its opposite, falsity) are qualities of evaluation. On their own, "[e]vents do not 'truly' happen" - truth must have a reference point. The noise in the street existed prior to its being true. Only upon the experience of verification was a truth claim possible (Westbrook, 135).

Much later in his career Dewey again wrote about the dangers of an absolutist idea of truth:

The claim to possession of absolute truths, and of final, unalterable standards, might conceivably be even a boon, if everybody had the same set of absolute truths and standards, or if there were in existence some method by which differences could be amicably ironed out and men brought to agreement. What upholders of absolute principles always forget is the vulnerability of their implicit assumption that the principles which they advance are the absolute principles which any can accept. The claim to possession of first and final truths is, in short, an appeal to final arbitrament by force.... (Westbrook, 521).

He goes on to note that "the claim to possession of the truths by which life should be directed" is said to originate "outside of actual experience" and the claim is asserted to be incapable of being tested by anything in experience...." The ironic thing about this is that opposing viewpoints often hold such views of reality and there is no way to resolve this except by force.

So what is truth's place?

Again I'm influenced by Dewey, but for readability I’ll endeavor to not quote as much! It is important to differentiate between perceptions, knowledge, and truth. Absolutist epistemology assumes that at some level truth can be known on its own (by reason). The absolutist might say that experience can evaluate reason, but does not precede reason (and thus truth). I think the problem with this is that it supposes that in our experiences we clearly perceive truth. However, there are times when what we "truly" perceive is not "truly true." For example, when gazing into the night sky we may think we see a star but instead of an actual celestial body all we really perceive is the light emanating from the star. While the existence of the star is not in question, the veracity of our perception is.

We "know" through our perceptions but this is not truth. In other words, knowledge sits in-between perception and truth "mediating" between the two. However, as a mediator, knowledge is not a mirror of reality; rather it is a judgment as to the worth/workability of something. I don't mean "workability" in the since that something is known to be true because it makes us happy but that it is proven/demonstrated in experience. For epistemology, knowledge is concerned with actual things. Knowledge is the judgment of propositions/probabilities about things. In other words, I'm saying that truth and knowledge are not the same thing while absolutist epistemology conflates knowledge and truth (See Westbrook 120-137).

To take this a step further, I want to observe something about the timing of truth. Based on what I've said truth can be said to come into existence. That is, it did not previously have life until a positive judgment was made. In Dewey's street car example, the phenomenon was not "true" until it was proven to be so. Truth is made (or at least verified) in time.

In summary, “Truth” is a connection between an object and the knower’s correct thoughts about the object. While reality exists independent of the knower, “truth” is not actualized without the presence of a knower.


(Comic from yahshvah.com)

Big Shoes to Fill

Thomas Groome once wrote an article called "Theology on our Feet." For Jimmy's Shoe Repair, theology is literally on one's feet.

I wonder if Jimmy also speaks in "tongues."

The UN and Major League Baseball

Every winter (northern hemisphere) the General Managers of the Major league teams meet for their annual Winter Meetings. At these "hot stove" sessions, the activity is fast and furious. Players are shuttled from coast-to-coast. Contracts are re-evaluated. Players-to-be-named later are dealt. Multi-team blockbuster deals are commonplace.

Perhaps the United Nations could learn something from the Major Leagues.

The stove at the recent United Nations World Summit wasn't very hot. Nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament were undressed. Poverty was inadequately responded with Bob Geldof (Make Poverty History coordinator) giving the summit failing marks (4/10). The UN Security Council was not reformed to reflect a more global perspective.

Maybe instead of people like John Bolton, we should send Billy Bean, Kevin Towers, and Theo Epstein to the UN....

Papal Pleasantry

Can Protestants poke fun at the pontificate? If so, enjoy...

(The first picture comes from my seminary friend Ronnie who found it on this page. The second is from this site.)

Riddled Padre Fan

What team can lose 7 of their last 11 games including 4 straight games to the main contenders in their division and still remain in first place?

Hint: the answer is the same as the answer to the question, “Which team’s record is 0.493 and is nevertheless headed for the postseason playoffs?”

mi casa

Jodie and I have just bought our first home! The contract was completed yesterday afternoon. Needless to say, after being married for 7+ years we are overjoyed. Jodie is already planning out decoration strategies and I'm figuring out how I'm going to convince my father-in-law to do any repairs.

Come and visit.

Overrated and Hyped-up

Here's the sign the the rector at St Marks (i.e. my boss) put up to advertise a series of sermons that I gave from May-August. It was a little over-animated I thought.

Covenant: Being preceeds Speaking

The God of the Bible is a Covenant-Making-God. God “cuts covenants” and enters into relationships with people. Theologians feed their families by parsing these covenants, analysing their minute details, and evaluating their significance.

Yet while covenants can be sliced and diced on the theologian’s chopping board and peered at under the microscope of biblical biology, their true vitality is in the existential situation out of which they developed. Covenants arose out of the political structures of people and were marked by signs – the “sign of the covenant”. Noah’s covenant was signed by a rainbow. Abraham’s was signed by circumcision. Moses’ was signed by the Sabbath. I find it notable that these signs are normal, yet transcendent. They break the monotony of life, yet they are intertwined with life.

Rainbows appear on the horizon of a rain-drenched sky. Sparking with normality they form a protective bow reminding us that the divine and earth are connected.

Sabbath occurs every week. It does not have the excitement of Santa’s once-a-year (if you’re nice) visit. Sabbath is habitual, and yet Israel must keep it holy.

Circumcision is physically inscribed. It is bodily. It is fleshy. And yet it takes on spiritual meaning.

While religion gets caught up with laws, we forget that The Commandments follow the covenant event. And as Paul Tillich said, “Being precedes speaking and the revelatory reality precedes and determines the revelatory word”.[1] The real events of history and nature have sequential priority over any language about them. The deeds of God occur and only then are followed by telling of the great deeds. With covenants, a physical sign or mark is made and only then take on symbolic significance.

William James talked about how feeling and philosophy are both a necessity to religion but that feeling comes first. Without feeling there would be no theology. The mystical and emotional actualities are primary (in terms of order, if not importance); speculation on what feeling means, conjecture on how feeling can be communicated, and comparison of feeling with other experiences are all secondary. Creed gets its clues from commotion of real life. James said theology occurs “after the fact”; it is an “over belief” that is “performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.”[2]

In The Quest for Certainty,[3] John Dewey describes knowing as occurring in this order:

Perceive > Respond > Refine/Reflect > Know

Each of these "steps" involves an active relation between subject and object. The subject perceives an object, responds to an object, reflects on the object, and knows an object. It is also important to recognize that this relationship is active. The steps above are verbs in the active voice. There is life here. This is not the abstract deduction of grand old ideas that exist apart from life. Rather than using bulky ideas to understand existence, the day-to-day is the means to positing and knowing the ideal. The transcendent is found in the immanent.

The event comes before the doctrine. Tillich again: “There are no revealed doctrines, but there are revelatory events and situations which can be described in doctrinal terms. Ecclesiastical doctrines are meaningless if separated from the revelatory situation out of which they have grown. The 'Word of God' contains neither revealed commandments nor revealed doctrines; it accompanies revelatory situations"[4].

God cuts covenants in the midst of life.



[1] Systematic Theology I (1951) 125.
[2] The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 331 & 330.
[3] 1929.
[4] Tillich, 125.

While I'm on the subject of the Hebrew Bible...

...I found this comic funny!

(Unfortunately, I can't remember the web site it comes from.)

One God: Solution to or Origin of Violence?

I've just begun a new series of sermons on "The Heart of the Hebrew Bible" and started off last week with monotheism. History is filled with the frightful results of monotheistic religion: Jews, Christians, and Muslims all killing each other in the name of "their" One and Only.

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud said this: “Religious intolerance was inevitably born with the belief in one God." More recently, Regina Schwartz has written The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism which makes a similar point: “Monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass.”

Miroslav Volf argues powerfully that monotheism mustn't necessarily be violent - it is the brutal aberrations that we must be concerned about. He says polytheism can be just as violent and monotheism can be a universal umbrella for peace.

I agree with this on a theological level. On a biblical level, though, monotheism seems be tied to violence. Deuteronomy 6 is where we find the Shema - Israel’s monotheistic creed. Intrinsically tied to one-god-ism is wholehearted devotion: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (6.5). When we move to Deuteronomy 7 the message is eliminate the Canaanites. Clear the land of the infidels! To me this seems to be a direct implication of the single-minded, unqualified piety demanded by Israel’s monotheism. Holy War doesn’t seem to be an aberration of monotheism – but the very implication of monotheism.

While it is vouge to show violent parts of the Koran, the Christian scriptures surely have these texts of terror as well. I have no solutions to this, only questions.

The most recent entry on Ben Worthington’s blog is a poem about the possibility of Jews, Christians, and Muslims worshipping the same God together. Read the poem and also his comments on it.




For fun, here is a humorous article: “Judge Orders God To Break Up Into Smaller Deities.”

Streets of Gold

I took this picture while hiking with my family through some Queensland rainforest in July. As we turned a bend I was struck by this leaf-covered path. This experience in a calm, pristine rainforest makes streets of gold much more real image than if it were taken literally.

Books I've recently read

Since this is a new blog and since one reason for this space is to share some things I've experienced in my reading I'm going to briefly share some books I've read in the last month or so:

Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education by Douglas Sloan was given to me by my friend Ronnie S. It is a great book whose chief contribution is showing historically how difficult it is to not divide "religious truth" and "secular truth" into different realms.

Honest to God by John AT Robinson is about religion-less Christianity. It is about an honest faith that doesn't believe the unbelievable. I found it challenging to think of God in non-theistic terms as Robinson proposes. His ideas about prayer and liturgy not being centred in withdrawal from the world are very helpful.

Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography . This provocative book makes the case for Christian activism (including violence). It posits that individual ethics are not the same as communal ethics. Niebuhr changed his stance in later years but it's still a challenging read.

Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy by RJ Hollingdale is a good biographical introduction to this provocative thinker who said "God is dead." However, Kaufmann's seems to be the definitive biography. I've also been reading the Basic Writings of Nietzsche.

Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography by Richard Fox is an excellent look into the life of an American thinker who had a realistic, pragmatic view of Christian action in the world.

Searching for Faith: A Skeptics Journey by W. Ross Winterowd is the private reflections of one academic who is seeking faith. The book is similar to Borg's The Heart of Christianity in its layout but it is more personal and less systematic. I bought it because Winterowd uses John Dewey and William James as sources of his theology.

The Broker by John Grisham. I don't want to admit to reading this but it is a guilty pleasure that I indulged in while on holidays with my American family.

I've got a whole stack of books waiting to be read so I'll end this list and dip in...

Speaking for God: Paul Tillich Quotes

Each week I get up in front of a group of people and attempt to tell them what God is saying. Even though I am clearly finite and conditioned, because of my role people listen to hear something of ultimate significance. This is a demanding task. I find these words from Paul Tillich wise and solemn counsel to those who profess to speak "for" God...

God is independent of his people which is a critical guardian against "the temptation of bearers of the holy to claim absoluteness for themselves" (Systematic Theology I, 227).

"There are no revealed doctrines, but there are revelatory events and situations which can be described in doctrinal terms. Ecclesiastical doctrines are meaningless if separated from the revelatory situation out of which they have grown. The 'Word of God' contains neither revealed commandments nor revealed doctrines; it accompanies revelatory situations" (Systematic Theology I, 125).

Welcome

I'm just getting this new blog set up. I thought about many different names for this space including habitus, praxis, grounded, and currere. Besides the last one, these were already taken by people who were quick to take all the good names! I also thought about impressive titles such as Ruminations on Reality but I've decided that instead of attempting to offer wide-ranging commentary on the whole of existence, I'd delimit my focus to my own existent experience

So this blog will focus mainly what I'm reading and other personal reflections.

In a real way aaronghiloni.blogspot.com is an act of "currere" (one of the discarded titles). Currere is a phenomenological concept that attends seriously to the individual’s lived experience; it could be called "the curriculum of my life."

What about the other already-taken words?

Habitus is Edward Farley's term for a "form of theological inquiry that does not sharply distinguish between spirituality's struggle to allow the self to be centered and formed by the love of God and the cognitive effort to apprehend the truth of God's revelation in history." (James Fowler's description). I'm reading Farley's book Theologia right now and am taken by this concept of integration.

Praxis is a popular word that now has a range of meanings but when I use the word I mean the concept from Liberation Theology that combines action and reflection. See Paulo Friere's work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed for more on this concept.

Grounded was going to be the title making reference to Paul Tillich's way of talking about God as the "ground of being." It also harkens back to the Pauline metaphor of being "rooted and grounded."

I also considered the name cognizant but that just seemed too pretentious.

So alas we are left with the much more manageable title Aaron Ghiloni. That's who I am. While I strive to be grounded in habitus and to be engaged in praxis while ever congnizant of the world around me, I'll just start with the currere of Aaron. Stirring "ruminations on reality" can wait for now.



(Interestingly, habitus also means "The physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially the tendency to develop a certain disease"!)