books | Churning Through The Reading List

I haven't been writing for a while but have turned my attention to my reading list. There are books on it that I simply need to read. If you're anything like me, there are those books that you know are important to you, that you've purchased, that you perhaps have opened and read the forward or preface, but have never actually read. I'm trying to polish off a few of those. I read Michel Henry's I Am The Truth, a lovely book. I'm still puzzling why, though employing arguments that I find similar to Karl Barth's theology, they don't irk me in the periodic way that Barth does. Read Hauerwas' With the Grain of the Universe to see if there was a potential take on Barth and natural theology that I could use in my dissertation. Today, I started Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural, which will probably be followed by Agamben's The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans since I've read Infancy and History and wanted to round out some of his thinking on temporality.

Commenting on the epigraph, Agamben provides a long list of violent encounters around the world and writes:

It is an endless list, and everything happens in such a a way that one is reduced to keeping accounts but never taking the final toll. It is a litany, a prayer of pure sorrow and pure loss, the plea that falls from the lips of millions of refugees every day: whether they be deportees, people besieged, those who are mutilated, people who starve, who are raped, ostracized, excluded, exiled, expelled.

What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.

If only I read more quickly, oh well...happy Monday!

quote | Obedience and the Triumph of God

"The relationship between the obedience of God's people and the triumph of God's cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection."

John Howard Yoder, "The Politics of Jesus," 238.

theology | Interview with Stanley Hauerwas

I've been reading Stanley Hauerwas over the last couple weeks, the second half of his Gifford Lectures for my dissertation and his memoir that was just published, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir, which I'm finding delightful reading. The latter has delightful passages of biographical detail as well as theological insight:

Discussing his first teaching job at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL:

The students were, however, mainly white and from the middle and upper-middle class. Many of them came from North Side Chicago, which meant they were city kids who thought of themselves as far too sophisticated for a river town that bordered on Iowa. They were in a generalized way Lutheran, which meant in some vague way that they thought they were Christian. At least one of the missions of Augustana was to reinforce that vagueness. Or as I learned to put it -- our task was to give parents the impression the by sending their daughters to Augustana they would not lose the virginity they had already lost in high school.

I had not been at Augustana long before I was drawn into a controversy about whether the doors of coeds could be shut during the times Augustana males were allowed to visit in the women's dorms. A reporter for the campus newspaper asked me what the new Christian ethicist's view might be about this crucial issue. Drawing on my experience as a Texan, as well as having just come from Yale, I responded, "Well, I guess it's a good way to avoid grass stains." I was quoted in the weekly edition of the paper. I later came to understand that such an observation was not well received by the administration (77).

The book is full of interesting passages that provide information that one could not know otherwise:

I still carry in my wallet my history with the Selective Service System. On November 21, 1962, the year I entered Yale Divinity School, I was classified IV-D. In other words, the Dallas draft board assumed that because I was in divinity school I should have a ministerial deferment. I wrote to tell them that I was not going into the ministry, but they did not bother to change my classification until 1967, when I was reclassified II-S, a student deferment. I thought this classification was also inappropriate, so I wrote again, suggesting that I be reclassified I-A. I received a I-A classification on February 17, 1970. I was finally vulnerable to the draft and would remain so until I was thirty-five. But I never lived in fear of the draft. The students I taught did.

I remember one student in particular. His name was Bill Sampson. At another time and place, Bill could have been Bill Clinton. He was extremely handsome, had the manners his upper-middle class background demanded, and was quite smart. He was also the president of the student body...He went to Harvard Divinity School, where, he told me, he never had to study because the reading course I gave him taught him enough to get through most of his courses without studying.

Rather than studying theology, he took courses at Harvard on the side, in the hope that after the war he could get into a medical school. He did go to medical school, but during his residency he became attached to a lady who convinced him to come to North Carolina to organize workers. Bill was killed in Greensboro, North Carolina, by the Klan. I have never forgotten him, not only because I was quite fond of Bill, but also because he seemed to me to exemplify what a strange, terrifying, sad, yet wonderful time "the Sixties" names (83-84).

If you are interested, you can read my interview with Hauerwas that was just published by Wunderkammer Magazine. We discuss his memoir and greed in the US economy. There are also some clips on YouTube that would only be interesting to a more theologically inclined audience.

Enjoy!