theology | On Walton

"People with disabilities don't suffer from being disabled...



...they suffer from us."


A topic that often comes up when discussing the intersections of theology and disability is the place of lables like "disabled," "person with disabilities," or even a medical diagnosis such as "Down Syndrome." Labels are both gift and tyranny. Labels are a gift, because they name something and in so doing provide information which helps shape our interactions. Naming a tree "evergreen" shapes our expectations about what will happen when the autumn rolls around. But as anyone knows, anyone at least who has read Foucault or has wondered why people don't like being labled, labels can be tyrannical. They carry information and in so doing can locate us in a field of wisdom which helps us liver our lives together. However, in carrying limited information, they highlight only specific facets of life or can impose a singular conception on a person's life. This is something which resorting to so-called "people first" language does not remedy. The shift from "disabled person" to "person with a disablity" does not in reality accomplish much. Sure, one would say, but the latter admits that the person is first a person and then asserts that their disability is only a facet of their story. In reality, the former does as well or the person in "disabled person" would be redundant. The reason why people don't like to be labeled in general is that one's character exceeds any single label. However, as I've argued the use of labels should not be discarded, but perhaps they should be used penitently. The penitential use of labels carries a remorse that we may be too separated from those around us, a separation which makes it impossible to use a person's name. Penitential use of labels admits that there is something to be overcome, it pulls us in closer until the labels are no longer necessary. This turns labels into cultural artifacts, both necessary and useful but in the end temporary. It also allows us to be open to seeing the ways in which our labels may be violent and oppressive. So, perhaps when we speak, using our new and improved labels like "person with developmental disabilities," we should take it as a sign that we have more work to do, until we can say something like:



"This is my friend, Walton."

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Politics][Disability]

life | An Interview With AYT

Douglas Rain sits down with Dan Morehead who has recently relocated to Scotland. The following are excerpts from the interview.

DR: I've heard you don't like being asked "how are you?"

AYT: Now and then my parents will complain that my discussions of myself, for example when I write about myself on my blog, often communicates what I'm doing, but not how I'm doing. And I think they are right about that. Still, I take it to be rather difficult to honestly answer the question, "How are you doing?" I don't register big changes in how I'm doing on a day to day basis. So, for me, the question always begs a larger scale evaluation of my life. Depending upon how deeply one stares into that question, one notices the question itself fracturing. Even if I could answer, there's the possibility I could be wrong. How accurate is self-knowledge?

DR: So would it be better to ask "how are you feeling?"

AYT: Well, at least that gives it a sense of immediacy. But, though I'm pretty sensitive, I don't register large emotional swings. So often I answer with 'fine' or 'okay,' but, of course, those aren't exactly emotions.

DR: Are you content?

AYT: I don't think one can ever be completely content, I mean, wait a couple hours and you'll notice that your stomach starts to growl. To be completely content, it seems like one would have to be dead. But, I'm pretty content. I have a lot of time right now which I can fill as I please. I like that. I have a lot of wonderful friends, who I miss when I'm not around them. Love and loss are two sides of the same experience. Our whole lives are structured by finitude, so much so that we don't really know what we hope for when Christian's talk about everlasting life. You see this in the Odyssey, right?, when Odysseus leaves to go back to Penelope even though Calypso promises him immortality if he stays. So, I'd say I'm content for the most part, but the sting of absence is still part of that.

DR: You moved to Scotland to study Karl Barth, why?

AYT: Barth is important in the history of Christianity for several reasons. One is that he's a big thinker. I mean what is his Church Dogmatics, 9,000, 10,000 pages? There's an audacity to that sort of project, which is rare and worth interacting with. I don't want to be a Barthian, but I want to go through Barth and come out on the other side. Barth also has an interesting relationship to 19th century theology and philosophy. Barth read Kant and was schooled in Schleiermacher and we all to some degree are swimming in Kantian waters, and in the church you can see the specter of Schleiermacher everywhere. In the US, everywhere from liberal Protestantism to those evangelicals who would never have claimed Schleiermacher, and who have now become a little more subtle, a little more jaded, and are calling themselves the emerging church, they still unknowingly have Schleiermacher as their primary theological father. This is funny because some of them also read Barth and have no sense of the peculiarities this enmeshes them in. So, Barth still has some things to say today. I do have a particular theological agenda which involves Barth but it's a long-term project, which I don't think I want to discuss at present.

DR: So, switching gears a bit, how has being on the other side of the Atlantic been for you so far?

AYT: Good. I've not been in the UK since the summer of 2003 when I was studying at Canterbury Cathedral. I've found the people of Scotland nothing but friendly and gracious. The mother of my flatmate even drove me around town and took me places like the Queen Mother Rose Garden, just so I'd know my way around town. It's different from the States of course. I mean, I feel like they should put up signs to tell you when you're not being filmed or on camera. It'd be cheaper than all the signs which tell you that you are being filmed. I don't mind a lot, but if I think about it, it's a little creepy how much surveillance there is. I think I would choose surveillance over policemen with guns, though. There are a lot of little things that are different. Like the @ and " are switched on keyboards, and people are much more into their cell, ha, I mean mobile phones. It's practically a cult or religion. I like that sex is less taboo and there's more of a concern about violence over here and I like the idea of a pub more than a bar for some reason.

DR: Are you completely settled then?

AYT: Yes and no. I have everything I need, but not all of my stuff has arrived yet. So I don't have access to all my books or music. I only have the three albums I had on my old Mp3 player: Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, New Pornographers' Twin Cinema, and The Futureheads' News and Tributes. I love them. For example, If You See Her, Say Hello, always gets me because I have at least one person like that in my memory, and I've really started to dig the Futurehead song Back to the Sea, but I'm getting a little sick of listening to the same albums over and over. I don't have my office from the University yet, either, so I don't have a steady place where I can research at the moment.

DR: You've said that you want to be able to straddle the Anglo-American / Continental divide in philosophy. Any plans to do any work on the continent?

AYT: I'll just have to see how my research progresses. I'd like to spend next summer in Paris, with another theologian and possibly a friend who is a New Testament scholar. At some point, I'd like to do some work in Germany, but that's farther off. There's great stuff out there. I just picked up Jean-Luc Nancy's work from 2000, Être singulier pluriel [Being Singular Plural], where he deals with the question how we can still speak of a 'we' or of a plurality, without transforming this 'we' into a substantial and exclusive identity. He argues that being is always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence is essentially co-existence. My advisor is pretty open to whatever I feel like I need to do.

DR: Well, we have to conclude somewhere, what question would you ask yourself, if you were me?

AYT: What makes you smile?

DR: ...and?

AYT: The curiosity of children...umm...and beauty.

[AYT would like to thank Mr. Rain for his time and for supplying the transcripts found here.]

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Life]

books | Karl Barth - Summer of 1907

"This sumer also took on a special glow because of Karl Barth's first great love - a Berne girl called Rösy Münger. He had discovered her a year earlier. 'I spent the happiest hours with her' and, of course, also 'wrote her a lyricall (!!!) poem as long as your arm.' 'Meeting her was one of the profoundest and most mysterious events of my whole life.' Soon, however, all kinds of grievous complications began to come between them. It was like the song, 'They just could not get together.' Their parents were not in favour of their friendship or an engagement. And in an argument over the question, Karl Barth was even presented with the inexorable view: 'The will of your parents is the will of God.' Above all because of pressure from, Karl parted company with Rösy in May 1910. 'I have never been able to forget this girl - she died in 1925.' She was 'always in my thoughts: she had her questions, but she was loving and kind.'" [1]

Karl Barth was 21 in 1907.

==========
[1] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts (London: SCM Press, 1976), 42.

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Karl Barth]

misc | On Dylan and the Midwest

Perhaps it was a sign that I need to let Dylan sleep for awhile, but on the same day that I finished Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, my copy of STOPSMILING found me in Scotland. STOPSMILING, as they like to say is The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes, and I think it is one of the smartest periodicals around. The copy arrives and the cover, after listing names like Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Eggers, Laura Dawn, nonchalantly adds + DYLAN AT 65. The article, written by Michael Helke, begins with the sentence: "Nice as it is to see Bob Dylan, who turned 65 this may, take yet another victory canter in celebration of a long and storied career, the intensity of the adulation and scrutiny can be a little wearying." Perhaps true.

Issue 27 of STOPSMILING is an Ode to the Midwest. So they have articles on T.S. Eliot, Touch and Go Records, and Garrison Keillor. Interestingly enough, Dylan ends his memoir with a long passage about his Midwest home state of Minnesota:

I didn't follow baseball that much but I did know that Roger Maris who was with the Yankees was in the process of breaking Babe Ruth's home-run record and that meant something. Maris was from Hibbing, Minnesota, of all places. Of course, I never heard of him there, nobody did. I was hearing a lot about him now, though, and so was the rest of the land. On some level I guess I took pride in being from the same town. There were other Minnesotans, too, that I felt aking to. Charles Lindbergh, the first aviator to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in the '20s. He was from Little Falls. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a descendant of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner" and who himself wrote The Great Gatsby, was from St. Paul. Fitzgerald was called "the prophet of the jazz age." Sinclair Lewis had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American to do so. Lewis had written Elmer Gantry and was the master of absolute realism, had invented it. He was from Sauk Center, Minnesota. And then there was Eddie Cochran, one of the early rock-and-roll geniuses who was from Albert Lee, Minnesota. Native sons - adventurers, prophets, writers, and musicians. They were all from the North Country. Each one followed their own vision, didn't care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one of them or all of them put together. [1]

As the editors of STOPSMILING say, "Despite the misconception held by some on the coasts, the Midwest is far more than flyover country - it's the land of dreams, some lost, and others fulfilled. It remains the crossroads of America, a large body of (mostly) flatlands where the people are characteristically friendly, down to earth and often stubbornly free-thinking."

With that I can let Bob rest for now, but maybe I'll have more to say about him after further listening to his newest album which I recieved as a going away present from a fellow Midwesterner who knows me well.

============
[1] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 291-292.

[America's Young Theologian][Midwest][Bob Dylan]

film | Jesus Camp

Here's the trailer for the documentary Jesus Camp. I've not seen this yet, but generally think that this movie should get as much press as The Da Vinci Code did in conservative Christian circles.



I grew up an evangelical, but as my evangelical friends and I grew up those who were closest to those depicted in this trailer either seemed to live a life crippled by fear or couldn't sustain their faith as lived under these terms.

Along these lines, listen to Catalogue of Ships: Episode 36 for its honesty on these matters.

For more information see:
the Jesus Camp website
David Byrne's article

Any thoughts? Anyone seen the film?

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Film][Jesus Camp]

life | A Day With Dylan and Barth

I left the house for the first time today at 3:20pm. The morning I spent continuing to read Bob Dylan's book and the afternoon was spent reading the first chapter of Eberhard Busch's book, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts. I thought I'd share a passage from each.

After discussing the recording of "Disease of Conceit," Dylan writes:

Conceit is not necessarily a disease. It's more of a weakness. A conceited person could be set up easily and brought down accordingly. Let's face it, a conceited person has a fake sense of self-worth, an inflacted opinion of himself. A person like this can be controlled and manipulated completely if you know what buttons to push. [1]

The first chapter in Busch's book is entitled 'Karli': Childhood, 1886-1904. There are interesting details in the information about Barth's family. For example, Nietzsche was a teacher of Fritz Barth, Karl's father. However, it was this delightfully human description of Karl Barth as an early teenager that I found most enjoyable:

Since the Barths had moved to the Schosshalde, Karl had grown into something of a layabout. He joined in street fights between his fellow schoolboys and the pupils of the City Grammar School - and also in fights between the sons of the aristocratic families of Berne and boys from poor or immigrant families...Karl was also for some time the leader of a gang which was engaged even then in a bitter feud with another gang led by Martin Werner, a neighbour's child, who was later to become Professor of Dogmatics in the University of Berne (the feud was to be carried on afterwards, in a different way). [2]

---

There's a whole lot of people in trouble tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Whole lot of people seeing double tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Give ya delusions of grandeur
And a evil eye
Give you idea that
You're too good to die,
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit.
============
[1] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 171.
[2] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts (London: SCM Press, 1976), 20-25.

[America's Young Theologian][Karl Barth][Bob Dylan]

life | A Visit to the Shire

September 9th, a plane takes off from Chicago. Seated next to AYT on this flight to Dublin is a man of, let's say, twenty-five, round face, simple clothes, and full of energy like a heated tea kettle. AYT, having finished packing only minutes before the car need to leave for the airport, is not in a chatty mood. The young man leans over to ask if AYT has flown before. After a perfunctory and affirmative response, the man volunteers that this is his first time on a plane. AYT takes a sleeping pill in order to awake well rested in Ireland. Neither a disinterested demeanor, nor the attempt to sleep prevented the seemingly oblivious traveler from tapping AYT on the shoulder throughout the flight to ask "Is it normal for the wings to do that?" or "What is a surname?" or to point out the wing flaps on landing and explain how they work.

On the ground in Dublin, AYT waits for 5 hours for his flight to Aberdeen. This was all part of the plan. He takes a couple Euro out of his bag and buys a cup of coffee and a muffin. Drifting in and out of sleep over the next couple hours, he watches people, pauses outside for a smoke, and explores the airport. One, however, cannot be too thorough when one is carrying or dragging 130 lbs of luggage.

AYT's plane arrives and leaves. [One would only need to fast forward one short week and one would find AYT alone in a friend's house - waves of flat, slow-moving clouds visible out the window - Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream spinning in the DVD player while he writes this post.] AYT leans back and relaxes. After a twenty minute nap and the same spent starring out the window, the wheels bite the pavement. AYT has landed in Aberdeen. This brings a noticable change of accent, customs must be passed, and cab procured before arriving at the train station. "Open return ticket to Leuchars, please."

The train starts to hum and lurches slightly as the train begins to leave the Aberdeen station on its way to Leuchars, the closest stop to St. Andrews, the birthplace of golf and home of my friend Reno and his wife. The station conjures the image of so many midsize train stations, neither inviting nor repulsive. The youth across from me is "reading" Zoo, Nuts, and FHM, each advertising something equivalent to 100 best bums of the year. AYT doesn't have a book with him, so he reads an article about flying in The Economist and listen's to Dylan as the train dances along the rugged green coast and swings over the Firth of Tay. The train slows as it crosses the bridge and the view is beautiful.

From the train window, AYT sees his friend waiting on the platform. A hug is in order since the two have not seen each other since December 2004 when each left Princeton for other environs. A long journey, a warm greeting. Over the next week, there was plenty of laughter, heated conversation, catching up, taking the dog on walks, and meals shared. Monday morning the two strolled over to St. Mary's College where Stanley Hauerwas was meeting with the theology department. The following two days AYT and his former teacher, now friend, would be in Aberdeen discussing the intesections of theology and disability with Jean Vanier, the man who started the L'Arche movement.

To be continued...

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Life][Travel][L'Arche]

books | Dylan Writing About Woody

I like the history provided in these paragraphs. I've been reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One on the coastal train between St. Andrews and Aberdeen. It reminds me that Dylan isn't born without training, research, and friends, and that one must play to be able to play, one must listen to have ears to hear. Here Dylan writes about his visiting his musical hero Woody Guthrie in the hospital:

"On one of my visits, Woody had told me about some boxes of songs and poems that he had written that had never been seen or set to melodies - that were stored in the basement of his house in Coney Island and that I was welcome to them. He told me that if I wanted any of them to go see Margie, his wife, explain what I was there for. She'd unpack them for me. He gave me directions on how to find the house.

In the next day or so, I took the subway from the West 4th Street station all the way to the last stop, like he said, in Brooklyn, stepped out on the platform and went hunting for the house. Woody had said it was easy to find. I saw what looked to be a row of houses across a field, the kind he described, and I walked towards it only to discover I was walking out across a swamp. I sunk into the water, knee level, but kept going anyway - I could see the lights as I moved forward, didn't really see any other way to go. When I came out on the other end, my pants from the knees down were drenched, frozen solid, and my feet almost numb but I found the house and knocked on the door. A babysitter opened it slightly, said that Margie, Woody's wife, wasn't there. One of Woody's kids, Arlo, who would later become a professional singer and songwriter in his own right, told the babysitter to let me in. Arlo was probably about ten or twelve years old and didn't know anything about the manuscripts locked in the basement. I didn't want to push it - the babysitter was uncomfortable, and I stayed just long enough to warm up, said a quick good-bye and left with my boots still waterlogged, trudged back across the swamp to the subway platform.

Forty years later, these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them. It was all done under the direction of Woody's daughter Nora. These performers probably weren't even born when I had made that trip out to Brooklyn."[1]

============
[1] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 99-100.

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Music][Woody Guthrie][Bob Dylan]

life | Packing...

I'm getting on a plane with two suitcases and a carry-on (sans liquids or gels). This is pretty much how I moved to DC a year ago, and it should work for Scotland as well. I disassembled my desktop and packed the various pieces. I'll buy a new case when I get there. Brilliant idea, perhaps, but I think it pretty much guarantees that my bag will look like it has a bomb in it. Also, I have a one way plane ticket, so I expect I'll get some extra special attention from the security staff tomorrow.

Plan for tomorrow: Fly from Chicago to Dublin, then from Dublin to Aberdeen. Cab to the train station, train south to Leuchars where I will be met by my good friend Reno. Collapse.

I'll post when I can but don't hold your breath for the next couple weeks. I am, however, looking forward to this.

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Life][Travel]