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anthropology

Writing Exercises My Respect Muscles (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)

pens photo

“Respect, I think, always implies imagination—the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.” (Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace)

In South Africa where I lived for many years, the basic “hello” greeting, sawubona, translates literally, “I see you.” In this mundane greeting, people declare to each other a tiny reminder that “I see you as a human, and I respect you.”

Writing offers an opportunity to say the same: “I see you; I respect you.” In writing, we slow down long enough to see other people’s lives and care about other people’s matters.

In my work as an anthropologist, I write most often about people. To prepare for writing, I listen, I watch, I visit, and I live among people. The warm mug of tea prepared by a woman I interview, the smell of chicken manure in the factory where I spend a day, or the energy of a hip hop artist as he closes his eyes to improvise, all remind me of the shared humanity involved in writing. As anthropologist Irma McClaurin writes:

“We have taken upon our shoulders an enormous responsibility that is beyond any allegiance we might owe to the academy or any desire for tenure. We hold in our words, real people’s lives.” (Anthropology Off the Shelf)

At its best, writing is more than a chance to exercise our brains, build our CVs, or inform an audience. It offers a gift to those heard and seen in the process. As I write, I remember people like Mtoko, a young South African man with tattooed arms and a debilitating drug addiction, who shouted jubilantly after me on the first day I visited his home, “She’s gonna tell my story in America!” I think of Thembi, a mother of ten adopted children, who thanked me for writing about her life saying, “You heard even more than I spoke.”

If you write from data more distanced from human experience, still your words hold human lives. Writing from government records, rain water samples, historical fiction, or economic models, you describe and affect human lives.

Often in Christian organizations I find the words “voiceless” and “invisible” used to describe people. Living in Nicaragua, China, South Africa, and among refugees in the United States, I have yet to meet anyone invisible or without a voice. I have, however, met others who do not care to hear or see. I know many busy people—myself included some days—who spend life too blind and deaf to respect other humans.

Writing gives the space to see people as they deserve to be seen. Madeleine L’Engle writes,

“The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama” (Walking on Water).

At our best as writers, we slow down, we see, and we respect people.


Image courtesy of Pexels at Pixabay.com.

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Lent: Frames of Reference and a Global Perspective (Scholar’s Compass)

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Anthropologist Kevin Birth explores what it means to have a global perspective on the church calendar.

Estamos en el sur y como estamos en tiempos de recuperar nuestra identidad, el Gobierno boliviano está recuperando nuestro Sarawi, de acuerdo a nuestro Sarawi, que significa camino, de acuerdo con nuestro Ñan, en quechua, nuestros relojes deberían girar a la izquierda.

Translation: We are in the south and since we are in times of recovering our identity, the Bolivian Government is recovering our Sarawi, and according to our Sarawi, which signifies path, and according to our Nan, in Quechua, our clocks should rotate to the left [counterclockwise]. (David Choquehuanca, foreign minister of Bolivia, on the decision to have the clock on the Legislative Palace turn counterclockwise)

I must apologize for the last blog. It was rather pedantic, and pedantry is one of the curses of scholarship. It is easy to become focused on the nuances and complexities of the small domain of knowledge that we study. It is not just that pedantry makes us bores, or that pedantry is a subtle form of narcissism, but pedantry leads us to errors. [Read more…] about Lent: Frames of Reference and a Global Perspective (Scholar’s Compass)

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Scholar’s Compass: Lent and Easter’s Timing

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Photo by akahodag

The time when Easter is ordained to take place is, like the Paschal celebrations as a whole, redolent with sacred mystery. In the first place, we are careful to wait until after the equinox to celebrate the Lord’s Passover . . . so that the feast-day on which the Mediator between God and man, having destroyed the power of darkness, opened the way of light for the world, might show its inner [significance] by means of the order of time. — Bede, 0 (trans. Faith Wallis)

Reflection

It was a revelation to one of my Jewish students when she realized that the holidays she cherished tied the rhythms of her life throughout the year to the agricultural and social cycles of ancient Israel. What had begun as a term paper about the Jewish calendar had become an intellectual journey that transformed these days from mere dates in the Gregorian calendar into moments of meaning connected to her heritage. [Read more…] about Scholar’s Compass: Lent and Easter’s Timing

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Omri Elisha: The Moral Ambition of Evangelical Christians

Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches by Omri Elisha (U of California Press, 2011)
Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches by Omri Elisha (University of California Press, 2011)

Last year, I began a series reviewing academic perspectives on evangelical Christians, beginning with James Bielo’s Words Upon the Word and T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back. I’m picking up this series again with Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches by Queens College anthropologist Omri Elisha.

Elisha’s work came highly recommended by two trusted sources. First, friend-of-ESN and occasional guest blogger Kevin Birth suggested I review Moral Ambition when I asked for suggestions last year. Then, at Urbana, my InterVarsity colleague Julian Reese commended Elisha for his insight into evangelicalism. Julian heard Elisha speak at the University of Tennessee in 2011 and had been impressed by his take on evangelical Christianity — which is especially notable because the subject of Moral Ambition is two evangelical megachurches in Knoxville, home of UT. If Julian thought that Elisha had gottent the religious climate right about his hometown, then this needed to be the next book I review. So far, having read three of the book’s seven chapters, I’m finding Kevin’s and Julian’s recommendations to be well-deserved. Moral Ambition is an insightful portrait of evangelical Christianity.

Like Words Upon the Word and When God Talks Back, Moral Ambition is an ethnography of specific groups of evangelical Christians, focusing on one particular aspect of the religious experience. Where Bielo looked at Bible study groups in Lansing, Michigan, and Luhrmann at the experience of “hearing” God among Vineyard Christians, Elisha examines social outreach in two evangelical megachurches in Knoxville.

Evangelical Activism and Social Outreach

Central to Elisha’s book is the concept of moral ambition, which he uses to describe the evangelical social outreach that both responds to evangelical beliefs and seeks to inspire those beliefs in others:

…as socially engaged evangelicals work to attain religious virtues associated with grace and compassion, they simultaneously work to inspire others to adopt the appropriate moral dispositions necessary to enhance volunteer mobilization. (2)

By “social outreach,” Elisha specifically means work done for the good of the community beyond the church, especially among the poor, dispossessed, and alienated members of society, distinct from the care provided to members of the church or outwardly focused evangelism. As anyone who has been involved with these types of efforts at evangelical churches know, they occupy a complex place within the church. As he does with many other areas of evangelical life, Elisha captures the complexity and tensions well: [Read more…] about Omri Elisha: The Moral Ambition of Evangelical Christians

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Evangelicals and Suffering (When God Talks Back)

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

Last week, in my discussion of what evangelicals can learn about themselves from T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back, I mentioned our approach to suffering. Originally, I wasn’t going to write another post on the book, but I wanted to come back to this important topic. Luhrmann discusses suffering in a chapter titled, “Darkness,” along with the related issue of feeling distant from God. Early in the chapter, Luhrmann describes the Vineyard’s approach in this way:

Churches like the Vineyard handle the problem of suffering [in a different way than traditional theodicy]: they ignore it. Then they turn the pain into a learning opportunity. When it hurts, you are supposed to draw closer to God. In fact, the church even seems to push its congregants to experience prayers that fail [due to their boldness]. (268, emphasis added)

Luhrmann observes that Vineyard churches and other evangelicals face two challenges that aren’t faced by certain other branches of Christianity or Judaism:

  • Evangelicals expect an intimate relationship with God. Unlike traditions that few God more distantly, evangelicals want daily closeness with him.
  • Evangelicals, particular of the Vineyard variety, expect God to answer big prayers. Luhrmann goes so far as to say that the Vineyard practically sets up its members for disappointment through its encouragement to prayer for healing and success (e.g. being accepted into certain college).

Times of suffering and spiritual dryness are inevitable. How, then, does Luhrmann see evangelicals addressing them? [Read more…] about Evangelicals and Suffering (When God Talks Back)

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