It looks like some smart people are back and steering AAR. The Christian Century is reporting that AAR and SBL may be getting back together:

The annual pre-Thanksgiving joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature had a record registration in 2006 of over 11,000, and last year’s meeting in San Diego drew about 10,200 scholars, students and publishers.

But the 2007 meeting was to be the last concurrent one for the two organizations except for 2011 in San Francisco. The AAR board had concluded that the meetings were getting too big and were limiting program innovation. Besides, some said, most AAR academicians teach about all kinds of religions, whereas the SBL, with its mixture of seminary scholars and professors at secular universities, focuses on biblical research.

However, acknowledging that the separation was a “contentious subject,” the AAR board in April decided that the organization should return to the old arrangement. A major factor was its internal survey of AAR members last year showing that between 70 and 75 percent, depending on the question, wanted to meet with the SBL.

…If the SBL is agreeable, the AAR board said, it would welcome back the jointly sponsored book exhibits, a common employment interview center and the freedom to attend each other’s sessions, programs and receptions, according to Jack Fitzmier, AAR executive director.

This video is just too good not to post. It is excellent.

I find most interesting (other than the fact that this story starts in a thanksgiving celebration) the mention at the end about narrative, creating a narrative, and then telling this hurting boy that this is simply the way the world works, so “get used to it.” In such a stark reality that the video so eloquently portrays, gifting (grace) is a radical reality, but has apparently no proper place in governmental politics. Juxtaposing the divine economy of grace and the economy of governmental politics begins to help the Christian understand what political theology really is; the two are very different at the most fundamental level. Such a dramatic category distinction is the beginning of the re-politicizing of American Christianity.

I think Ben Myers did this meme just to see how many people he can influence… and Halden tagged me, so here it goes:

1. One movie that made you laugh:
Death at a Funeral. Seriously, it was awesome.

2. One movie that made you cry:
Romero

3. One movie you loved when you were a child:
The Ten Commandments - I was a weird, weird child.

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once:
Hamlet by Kenneth Branaugh. I’ve watched this one so many times.

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it:
The Mummy

6. One movie you hated:
Mars Attacks. Honestly, I still want those 2 hours back.

7. One movie that scared you:
The Omega Codes. Who wouldn’t be scared that dispensationalists can put out such… stuff?

8. One movie that bored you:
V for Vendetta

9. One movie that made you happy:
Strange Brew

10. One movie that made you miserable:
Pirates of the Carribean 3

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see:
The Ring

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with:
Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy

13. The last movie you saw:
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

14. The next movie you hope to see:
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - I just hope it doesn’t go the way of Star Wars. You hear me Lucas??

15. Now tag five people: Patrick, Chris, R. O. Flyer, Michael, and Eric.

Above, the reader will note a new tab: Theological Responses to the Wright Fiasco.

I decided to order the reflections on Liberation theology, Jeremiah Wright, James Cone, Barack Obama, and the media fiasco and to make a space for such a list. I expect such a tab to become somewhat important around November. I also have found some current readers show up at some of the less important posts, so in an effort to guide the reader towards the core, I have also emphasized certain posts on the list. Lastly, I suspect for now, the majority of people would not care for continuing posts, but I do plan on updating the list when need be in the future, say, around election time when all those negative adds slam Wright to slam Obama.

After finishing my Sacramental/Liturgical Guided Reading class, I’ve come up with a few definitions.

Liturgy: The event/experience of ontological space and action that functions as a Christological matrix of the grace of God.

Sacrament: Grace/gift/experience and understood by Christians in liturgy.

Sacramental: Experiencing the event of Grace.

The books that helped develop such an understanding were:
The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith by James F. White
Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual by Tom F. Driver
The Eucharist and Human Liberation by Tissa Balasuriya
Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology by Susan A. Ross
Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas by Siobhán Garrigan
Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church by Joseph Martos
Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Experience by Louis-Marie Chauvet

I’ve been waiting to post on J. Kameron Carter. He came by Union to speak at Columbia in mid-April from his up coming book, Race: A Theological Account — specifically the lecture was on the scientific classification of race driven by its theological roots. The video of him should be up here soon, said an email response to my query for an eta, but as one can tell they have quite a backlog and I am unsure as to when the video will actually be made available. So bug them to move the video up on their priority list.

And so, with the possibility of the video not getting posted soon, I figured I would mention an appearance by Gregory Jones, dean of Duke’s divinity school, J. Kameron Carter, professor at Duke, and William Barber II, president of North Carolina’s NAACP were on a local news show discussing faith and politics. Any time one has the opportunity to see Carter speak, I highly recommend it.

An interesting side note, when Carter came by, he mentioned a few current and future projects. If he stays on course, well, lets just say Radical Orthodoxy will get quite a critique soon. I expect such a critique will be flowing from his book to be published this summer and along the lines of “the way beyond the present isn’t always about looking in the past to move forward.”

There was a decent summary piece on Black Liberation Theology in the New York Times yesterday. It attempts to locate Dr. Wright within the historical movement of Black Liberation Theology, and in order to do so, James Cone and Gary Dorrien, both professors at Union, are interviewed. Its worth a quick read and it is certainly better than much of what the media has put out so far.

Interestingly, the article covers two specific subjects that I want to make sure are addressed — one normally ignored, and the other, a focal point for controversy. The first is the acknowledgement of Catholic Liberation theology in the discussion of Black Liberation theology:

Even as Dr. Cone and others such as the Rev. William A. Jones at Bethany Baptist in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, crafted a theology of black liberation, Catholic theologians in Central and South America crafted their own liberation theology, arguing that God placed the impoverished peasants closest to his heart.

There is little evidence that one liberationist talked to another; rather, these were cornstalks rising in a fertile and revolutionary field. “These were remarkable similar arguments, that oppressed people have their own way of hearing the Gospel,” said Dr. Dorrien of the Union Theological Seminary.

On this note, I’ve got a copied picture of Dorothy Sölle, Jürgen Moltmann, Gustavo Guitérrez, James Cone, and Christopher Morse from years ago taken here at Union - Cone still had his fro and some were wearing plaid. And after seeing this picture last year, I asked Dorrien, since Guitérrez spent a year at Union in the early 70s (hence the picture), if there was much talk then between Guitérrez and Cone, and Dorrien said the same thing then as he was quoted in the article, “there seemed to have been little talk, if at all.” I suppose this shows how far Liberation theology has come today, where there seems to be a lot of conversation. However, I am also wary that the article does not spend enough time on the Marxist aside. It seems that still today Marxism is a loaded term and to have such a small mention might have been irresponsible.

The second issue addressed in the article are Wright’s comments concerning AIDS as understood by Cone:

Dr. Cone, the black liberation theology theorist, has known Mr. Wright for decades and says he much admires his provocations. But when Mr. Wright opined recently that the United States government may have used AIDS as a form of biological warfare against black people (Mr. Wright notes, correctly, that the United States has tried biological warfare on foreign nations), Dr. Cone winced.

“I don’t believe that,” Dr. Cone says. “But I will say that when blacks look at what government has done to black people, the eugenics and the syphilis, it’s easy to get angry.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: I hope our government didn’t introduce AIDS, but its not like the United States has a track record that says the contrary. I don’t want to believe it happened, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the other abuses that the United State pulled, which was so similar to the Nazi doctors in concentration camps. With all this in mind, no wonder liberation theology operates through a hermeneutic of suspicion.

A negative theology is to say what something is not. Generally understood, negative theology applies towards stating what God is not. Below is a negative theology of Dr. Wright. He isn’t a crazy person, a man with “issues”, or a reverse racist.

Last night Bill Moyers reflected on Dr. Wright, conservative preachers, and the whole continuing media debacle on race. Well done sir.

It is quite telling that every time there is a public discussion on Wright - or even a private discussion on race - we must begin with a reflection on the history of slavery. Indeed we ought to begin with an honest history, however, the reason we must today is because the grand story of America refuses to listen to horrors that America has committed. In such a refusal, the ideas that Wright is a crazy person, a black man with issues, or a reverse racist find their genesis.

Dr. Wright is angry. Yes. Or rather, can be angry, but there is nothing wrong with that. I suspect God has been as angry as Wright, and so were the prophets and Jesus. White people might find anger threatening, but Dr. Wright hasn’t lost his ability to speak in his anger. His story is still voiced and that is more threatening. However, those who refuse to hear his words at all, call him a crazy person. They make an appeal that he is out of his mind, that he is merely emotional. This simply isn’t true, rather the opposite is correct. One must simply listen to what Wright says to see this. He is too coherent to be crazy.

Others seem to think Wright has “issues.” Anne Lamott does. Thankfully she admits she isn’t a theologian (and it shows). To put it mildly, yes, Wright has issues, but not in the way we say it. In fact there is still the large issue of race that we refuse to adequately engage (hell, we haven’t even got to other forms of racism directed toward immigrants, etc.). This weighs hard of the black community, while the white community refuses to acknowledge systemic problems (to speak in broad terms - really its the black and white stories that are at odds, one more honest than the other). Of course Wright would have a few problems to shout about, because by and large America is still racist.

Dr. Wright is also not a reverse racist. This is not to say that a black person cannot be racist, however, what Newt Gingrich purports assumes that racism does not continue to exist in any large way. Yet, if what Wright does say is true, understood within a racist culture at large, than it merely rings true. However, Wright is not engaged by others at the level of his and his community’s experience. Instead, Wright’s words are taken from his mouth - from his black body and black context - and put into a white person’s body and context. In some senses, it seems that even Wright speaking cannot be understood as a black person speaking; rather, culture at large must think of him as a white person. How is that not itself racist, stripping him of his own humanity? Sure, maybe if we took Wright’s words and gave them to an oppressive people, the content of the words might sound racist, because they would be coming from the oppressive people’s lips. The body and context from whom the words come from are infinitely important. To call Wright a reverse racist merely on the basis of what he said in his speeches, based on forgetting the black community’s story and acting like he is a white man, is bullshit. This is just another way to marginalize a black man speaking prophetic truth.

With all this in mind, no wonder liberation theology operates through hermeneutic of suspicion.

Thus, the ritual memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not Christian unless it is veri-fied in an existential memory whose place is none other than the believers’ bodies… To wash one another’s feet is to live existentially the memory of Christ that the Eucharist makes us live ritually.

It is precisely because the ritual memory sends us to the existential memory that the sacraments in general, and the Eucharist in particular, constitute a “dangerous memory,” in the words of Metz. It is dangerous for the Church and for each believer, not only because the sequela Christi (”following Christ”) leads everyone onto the crucifying path of liberation (as much economic as spiritual, collective as personal), but because this “following of Christ” is “sacramentally” the location where Christ himself continues to carry out through those who invoke him the liberation for which he gave his life. The ritual story at each eucharist, retelling why Jesus handed over his life, sends all Christians back to their own responsibility to take charge of history in his name; and so they become his living memory in the world because he himself is “sacramentally” engaged in the body of humanity they work at building for him.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 260-261.

The memory of the past thus makes the present move; it puts back on their feet, in view of a new beginning, those who are prostrate in the silence and oppression of exile.

Of course, there is memory and memory. There is the memory that is nothing but the simple act of the memorization of static events one pulls out from the past the way one takes some yellowed photos out from the back of a drawer. Such a memory, imaginatively idealizing the past as “the good old days when things were so much better,” is counter-productive; instead of mobilizing energies to take on present tasks it plunges one into the lethargy of a dream-past. Shrunk to the size of an anecdote, this past, from which one has washed away whatever there was of suffering, struggle, promise of a future, has no more history: it is a simple memory, as J.-B. Metz has said, that has been robbed of its future.

But there is also the memory that is a living act of commemoration. It is in this act of communal memory a people or a group regenerates itself. The past of its origins is snatched out of its “pastness” to become the living genesis of today. This today is thus received as “present,” as a “gift of grace.” It is thus a process of revivification, where the memory of sufferings experienced, of oppression undergone, and of the fight undertaken to liberate oneself play an essential role: tomorrow will better than yesterday; and the present is full of this living hope. Every project concerning the future seems rooted in the awakening of such a tradition: humanity has a future only because it has a memory. Totalitarian governments know this well; their strongest weapon is rubbing out the collective memories of the groups they oppress, beginning, where this is strategically possible with their language. For a group sees its identity being erased insofar as it loses its collective memory or insofar as this memory is no longer the anticipatory carrier of a possible new future. “Revolutions” show this: whenever it is declared that the future is realized, whenever it is declared that eschatology is fully present, it is urgent to invent a new utopia under pain of dying.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 233-234.