Brian McLaren in Madison

I was very fortunate to be able to hear Brian McLaren speak in Madison, Wis., this past weekend. I could only stay for his first session, but DairyStateMom stayed for the whole day (and got some good quotes from the evening lecture).

In case it's of any interest, here's coverage of the event in Isthmus, Madison's alt-weekly newspaper.

Searching for My Voice

More than a year ago I began a series of posts on politics. After the 2010 elections, I got stalled.

The reasons were many: family responsibilities, my struggle to manage a growing an overwhelming workload, but also an emotional paralysis that arose from the events that unfolded in my home state and in the nation over the last year.

I knew what I wanted to say, sort of, but I couldn't find the words or make the time to lay it all out.

Today I read this article in Yes! magazine. It comes as close as anything I have found to articulating where I have been moving, spiritually and politically, in recent years:

I participated because I have witnessed overwhelming evidence that the economic and political systems of my country stand against those people who the God I worship stands for. My conception of God, inadequate as it may be, is better described as the Love that generates creativity and community than as a super-man judging us from some heavenly skybox. Such a Love contrasts with everything that reserves power, dignity, wealth, or the status of full humanity for some while denying these things to others. My commitment to Love requires me to challenge the increasing consolidation of all these good things in the hands of a few, and to collaborate for the creation of something that Love would recognize as kin.

Read the whole thing here.

ETA: I'm not commenting here so much on the specifics of the Seattle event that the YES contributor referred to. Christine, in the comments, makes some good points about that. I'm speaking rather of the overarching spiritual and political point of view from which the writer comes, and to which he speaks.

Now, where this leads me day to day remains, for now, unclear.

I don't think it leads me out of either of my spiritual homes. It does sharpen my longing to live in both of them, together, more fully.

I don't know what it might imply for my professional life of 30-plus years or for the direction it might take going forward. That's a particular challenge because, given my very real life circumstances and responsibilities, I don't see the sort of freedom that might allow me to simply abandon my livelihood as it is now.

I almost didn't bother to write this post. As I said, I've been trying to put into words, for a very long time now, a collection of experiences, feelings, beliefs, yearnings, resolutions that are still too inarticulate for me to be able to put down on paper or keyboard. I'm not there yet, so what's the point in writing anything?

But I guess I have to start somewhere. So let it be here.

Oh yes, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and a Happy 2012 to all.

"Disestablish Your Congregation"

Dan Harper on Liberal Religion as Countercultural. And I will assert it is as relevant to progressive Christians as it is to Unitarian Universalists.

(And thanks to Will for pointing me to it.)

"Doing God's Work"

Two decades ago I covered labor for a major metropolitan newspaper, and in that capacity attended the United Auto Workers 1989 convention in Anaheim, California. At a previous UAW event I had already met the union's chief PR guy, and I met with him again this time. I was quite surprised to learn that he was soon to leave the union to attend divinity school.

Today Peter Laarman is executive director of a progressive Christian social justice group in Southern California and ordained in the United Church of Christ.

A friend of mine posted a link to this essay by Laarman at Religion Dispatches, a progressive religion news and commentary web site. The whole thing is very worth reading, but two passages stood out for me especially: One a critique of the media,

This was evidence, as if more were needed, of the way members of the upper echelons in government, law, and finance defer to each other. These elegantly-attired “achievatrons” (in Lewis Lapham’s coinage) merely enact a kind of kabuki when they pretend to have a spat.

It would be good if just once in a while, the corporate media would take note of this kabuki dimension. But the media’s major talking heads have their own theatrics to attend to. Witness the chatter on CNBC, Bloomberg, and CNN over whether putting some transparency into derivatives markets, limiting highly-leveraged bets, etc., would “stifle innovation.”

To my knowledge, no one holding forth on this question ever bothered to interrogate that word innovation even a tiny little bit. Last week CNN’s unsavory Ali Velshi brandished the word as a shibboleth and accused morning anchor Tony Harris of threatening to bring down the “dynamic” U.S. economy because sweet Tony dared to say that he longed for the old-fashioned kind of stock trading—the kind where your broker actually finds you a solid investment in a real enterprise. (Dynamic: there’s more throwaway jargon begging for interrogation.)

-- and the other a much more nuanced assessment of the Tea Party movement than I have seen elsewhere:

That the Tea Party crowd are actually slightly more affluent than average actually points to the precise nature of this revulsion: these people feel, with some degree of justification, that they worked hard for everything they have. And they have a sneaking suspicion—warranted, as it turns out—that today’s nattily-dressed Wall Streeters and high-level politicians have been able to ride a fast track to privilege and serious money based on insider connections, access to certain schools, etc. They have a sneaking suspicion—also warranted—that these new-class elites take advantage of special tax breaks and other sweet deals even as they continue to make the rules for everyone else and even as they decide what interest rates we drones will have to pay and what level of taxation we will have to bear.

Do not expect Main Street’s visceral rage over such presumptions of privilege—and over the special moral exemptions the excessively over-privileged carve out for themselves—to subside anytime soon. And because that rage is mixed up with so much racism and anti-Semitism and identity anxiety, it could not be more dangerous.

I don't think this necessarily contradicts the points made in a post I put up a few days ago. I do think both offer important insights.

An alternative strategy on religion in the public square

I'm a pretty big believer in separation of church and state, and I think that the religious right's meme that somehow their religious views are "suppressed" in school and other public venues is mostly phony.

At the same time, however, I think some of the strategies of separation advocates -- to keep religion muted or silent in the public square -- end up being wrongheaded, because they do end up feeding that selfsame suppression meme.

For a long time I've thought it would behoove non-Christians, including atheists, to opt for an alternative strategy: a place of their own in the public square.

The fundies want to have a Bible study class in the public school after school? Fine. And let's have a pagan group, or an atheist group, or what have you, as well. Make the battle for equal protection, not for blanket exclusion.

Now of course a risk in posting that idea blithely on a blog is that I haven't fully thought through all the implications. (One that stumps me right off: so what about the group that wants to set up a neo-Hitler Youth or a Junior Klan? Okay, acknowledged that we may have a half-baked concept here in need of the Idea Oven*.)

Still, I was moved to give voice to this simmering notion of mine after seeing this item at The Wild Hunt:

One wonders if Schultheis will remain a big fan of the law, if passed, once religious minorities start taking advantage of it. Because the answer to “where does it end” for Schultheis is most likely “far beyond where you’d like it to”. Perhaps Pagans in Colorado Senate District 9 should drop him a line to let him know how eager you are for Pagan students to express themselves more fully in class (pentacles! t-shirts!), and for teachers to discuss the pagan origins of Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and other major holidays.

*"The Idea Oven" is a conceit of Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn. I was going to link to his category, but there are only 3 items in it and they all go back to 2005. So I'll just credit him for the concept.