Simeon Wiehler

But dare we peer into this abyss without also confronting the same propensity in our own hearts, the inclination towards evil, where we have marginalized, belittled, undervalued, or hurt others whose lives are equally precious in God’s eyes? Truly opposing genocide or colonialism, racism or discrimination does not start from moral superiority but through deep humility that sees fallen humanity with all its failings, and recognizes that human fallenness in our own hearts as well.

Only then can we ask ourselves if we are the systemic change that this world needs. Do we embody a shared willingness to contribute to the common good to achieve what the individual alone cannot? Are we truth-seekers? Telling the deep truth about ourselves, about our comfortable myths and imagined realities can be uncomfortable, but without truth-seeking, good cannot grow and evil clings on, like mold, in the cracks. Have we looked at the world around us and imagined what might be better and then said so? Do the small acts of our daily lives help build stronger relationships, better neighborhoods? Do our actions strengthen justice and enhance what is good in our communities? Do we pursue peace and oppose hate even in the small things, knowing that small plus small plus small can get pretty big? Will each one of us be able to say, when life nears its end, that we planted our feet determinedly on the side of good, that we struggled for what was right, that we joined with similarly-minded people and together tried to build a better society?

Flannery O’Connor:

Satisfy your demand for reason always but remember that charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity.

Joseph M. Keegin:

The consensus among the Greeks, it seemed, is that ethical activity is grounded in care toward one’s own soul. If forgiveness is morally valuable, it is because anger gums up the gears of one’s own flourishing and distracts one from more noble pursuits, such as engaging in politics, grasping for honours, or achieving spiritual equanimity. One might express concern for another if their spiritual greatness matches one’s own, if both parties are equally worthy of honour and praise. But concern for the good of another in full knowledge of all their flaws—even in their wretchedness—is alien to the Greek moral imagination.

Having been disappointed by Greece in my search for how to forgive, I turned my attention to the East. The Buddhist tradition endorses a similar understanding of the need for withdrawing one’s anger for the sake of one’s own spiritual health. Here we find echoed the doctrines of (1) the self as the principal object of ethical attention and (2) self-purification as the ultimate goal of reflection. Entanglements with the world and with others get in the way of the individual’s journey toward enlightenment. If one is to be lenient toward the wrongdoing of others, it is simply because the karmic order of the world demands this kind of flexibility in order to be properly maintained. …

The goal here is a kind of system equilibrium at both the level of the whole and the level of the individual ego. My goal is to make the world have less hate in it, but the only way to do this is to have less hate in me. The specificity and particularity of another person disappears altogether, subsumed into a system that one carefully maintains like a rock garden.

…I had always been suspicious of Christianity as being somehow too good to be true, that it papered over the real ugliness of the world with a happy message about hope and love. As far as I could tell, we are alone in a universe that is slowly dying of its own accord, and all we can do in the meantime is stitch together beautiful stories of various kinds to build a shelter for ourselves from the cold indifference of the cosmos—but the indifference of the cosmos is what is real, not the stories we tell. Religion, I believed, is cowardice, retreat; courage demands facing the facts, owning up to the meaninglessness of things. And the central doctrines of Christianity, of course, are just so implausible: God and man at the same time? What could be crazier?

But then my friend suggested the Gospel of St. Luke. …

I didn’t immediately recognize the significance of what I read. After puzzling over Scripture for some time, I went back to my friend and reported that my mission had failed: I’d finally found evidence of forgiveness, but only in the Bible! What was I supposed to do with that? If the brilliant philosophers had overlooked something that only appeared later in the Gospels, troubling conclusions would follow. It would mean that our most important tool for discovering truths about the world had failed in one crucial respect—and if so, and we could not think our way to forgiveness on our own, it might have to come to us by some other route, arriving from somewhere outside of ourselves. Only after a few months of reflecting, and struggling, and fighting against the obvious like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, did I finally understand that what I had found was a little hole in the structure of things, a place where human reason—even at its greatest and most noble—had been unable to go. And it was through this tiny gap that I first caught a glimpse of God.

Franz Rosenweig:

There were always the disguised enemies of Christianity, from the Gnostics up until today, who wanted to remove its “Old Testament.” A God who would be only Spirit, no longer the Creator who gave his Law to the Jews; a Christ who would be only Christ, no longer Jesus, and a world that would be only still universe whose center would no longer be the Holy Land—these would certainly no longer offer any resistance to deification and idol worship; but there would also be nothing more in them that would call the soul out from the dream of this deification back into unredeemed life; it would not only be lost, no, it would stay lost. . . . The historical Jesus must always take back from the ideal Christ the pedestal under his feet upon which his philosophical or nationalistic worshippers would like to set him, for an “idea” unites in the end with every wisdom and every self-conceit and confers upon them their own halo. But the historical Christ, precisely Jesus the Christ in the sense of the dogma, does not stand on a pedestal; he really walks in the marketplace of life and compels life to keep still under his gaze.

W.H. Auden:

Friday’s Child

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought—
“Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent.”
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

From Rowan Williams’s 1998 response to Newark Bishop John Spong:

The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.

Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited. … Is this tradition as barren as Spong seems to think? […]

Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don’t believe in a God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it’s harder to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.

Perhaps, too, it has a bit to do with the sense of utterly unexpected absolution or release, the freeing of the heart.

The cross as sacrifice? God knows, there are barbaric ways of putting this; but as a complex and apparently inescapable metaphor (which, in the Bible, is about far more than propitiation) it has always said something sobering about the fact that human liberation doesn’t come cheap, that the degree of human self-delusion is so colossal as to involve ‘some total gain or loss’ (in the words of Auden’s poem about Bonhoeffer) in the task of overcoming it. And that human beings compulsively deceive themselves about who and what they are is a belief to which Darwinism is completely immaterial. […]

Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong’s account of classical Christian faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely reflect his own knowledge of it. I think I understand the passion behind all this, the passion to make sense to those for whom the faith is at best quaint and at worst oppressive, nonsense.

But the sense is made (in so far as it is made at all) by a denial of the resources already there – to the extent that Spong’s own continuing commitment to the tradition becomes incomprehensible.

Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious, inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?

Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this; and – if I can’t try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit – I don’t know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.

Willy Staley (2021):

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism. Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little [Tony Sopranos], lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to. Climate change? Everyone knows it’s caused by five corporations. Amazon? Someone in power ought to do something about that, but you shouldn’t ask people to boycott it, even for a day. The widespread exploitation of undocumented workers by food-delivery apps? Neoliberal capitalism has exhausted me to the point that I cannot make my own pasta. There’s no point, these forces are too powerful to disrupt, it’s true — at least you can tell yourself that.

Marilynne Robinson (1998):

The problem is that there is something about the way we teach and learn that makes it seem naive to us to talk about these things outside a classroom, and pointless to return to them in the course of actual life. In other words, whatever enters the curriculum becomes in some way inert.

What used to be meant by “humanism,” that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what was called the human spirit, once an object of unquestioned veneration, has ended. Both institutional education and all the educating aspects of the civilization — journalism, publishing, religion, high and popular culture — are transformed and will be further transformed until the consequences of this great change have been absorbed. Education as it was practiced among us historically reflected its origins in the Renaissance, when beautiful human creations were recovered from the obscurity of forgotten languages and lost aesthetics, or of prohibition or disapprobation or indifference, and were used to demonstrate the heights which human beings can attain. It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.

When people still had sensibilities, and encouraged them in one another, they assumed the value and even the utility of many kinds of learning for which now we can find no use whatever. It was not leisure that was the basis of culture, as many have argued, but the profoundly democratic idea that anyone was only incidentally the servant of his or her interests in this world; that, truly and ideally, a biography was the passage of a soul through the vale of its making, or its destruction, and that the business of the world was a parable or test or temptation or distraction and therefore engrossing, and full of the highest order of meaning, but in itself a fairly negligible thing.

… Given our power and influence, which seem only to grow as disorder and misfortune afflict so many populations, it seems a sad failure that we have not done more to make the world intelligible to ourselves, and ourselves to the world.

And again:

The use of the word [“natural”] implies a tendentious distinction. Billions of dollars can vanish into the ether under the fingers of a bad young man with a dark stare, yet economics is to be regarded as if it were lawful and ineluctable as gravity. If the arcane, rootless, disruptive phenomenon we call global economics is natural, then surely anything else is, too. […]

But economics is simply human traffic in what people make and do and value and need, or think they need, a kind of epitome of civilization. It is the wealth of nations, and also their fraudulence and malice and vainglory. It is no more reliably benign or rational than any other human undertaking. That is to say, it requires conscious choice and control, the making of moral and ethical judgments. […]

The idea of progress implies a judgment of value. We are to believe the world will be better if people are forced into severe and continuous competition. If they work themselves weary making a part for a gadget assembled on the other side of the earth, in fear of the loss of their livelihoods, the world will be better for it. If economic forces recombine and shed these workers for cheaper ones, the world will be still better. In what sense, better? To ask is to refuse to accept the supposedly inevitable, to deny the all-overriding reality of self-interest and raw competition, which will certainly overwhelm us if we allow ourselves some sentimental dream of a humane collective life. This economics implies progress and has no progress to show. […]

This school of thought — ordinarily referred to as modern thought — tells us nothing more urgently than that we are wrong about ourselves. We are to believe we are the dupes of the very reactions that make us judges of circumstance, and that make us free in relation to it. Obviously, if we must act in our own interest, crudely understood, we have few real options. But if we act from a sense of justice, or from tact or compassionate imagination, then we put the impress of our own sense of things on the external world. If this is another version of the will to power, it is in any case the kind of power that religion, and civilization in its highest forms, has always sought to confer. If this is another version of self-interest, it is also a proof of the fact that the definition of that term is very broad indeed, classically friendly to paradox — “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” for example, or “it is in dying we live.” […]

I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking it has displaced. […]

The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now. […]

Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores, and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another’s sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it — religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.

Jonathan Malesic:

Academic and professional cultures get people like me to locate our identity within them, in part by separating us from people and place. The business scholar Gianpiero Petriglieri (Sicilian, married to an Englishwoman, teaching in France) calls his elite MBA students “a peculiar tribe. A tribe for people unfit for tribalism.” To ease their careers in multinational corporations, they’re tied to no country. They identify themselves by their skills, intellect, and work ethic, which they’re always ready to take to their next job, wherever it might be. In the cosmopolitan ideal, you belong to the world, equally at ease in Berlin or Bangkok, knowledgeable of local customs, ready to join a conversation anywhere, with anyone. It’s an ideal of connoisseurship. It’s knowing to pronounce the Czech capital Pra-ha, not Progg, when you’re chatting about Bohemian pilsners.

But it also means being equally ill-at-ease anywhere, including among citizens of your home country. The desire to belong is incongruous with the individualistic culture of America’s elite. To live out the cosmopolitan ideal means you know someone everywhere but have close ties nowhere, because you’ve moved so many times for work. It means you never realize the dream of the Cheers theme song. There’s no place you can go where everybody knows your name.