dissertaphobia

The moment is here. For the time being, I’m past the low blood pressures and chemo reactions, I’ve wrapped up my responsibilities at Claremont, and my workload facilitating Fuller’s online ethics course is both light and shared with a coworker—the perfect time to be reminded that the idea of actually sitting down and writing a chapter of my dissertation intimidates the daylights out me.

If anyone asks, yes, I’m working on my dissertation. Specifically, I’m writing the chapter on Chris Marshall, author of Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and a leader in the effort to gain civil rights for the Maoris in New Zealand—but only if you’ll allow me to use the word “writing” figuratively. In reality, I’m looking up resources online, reading & taking notes on articles that Chris emailed to me from New Zealand journals after I had met with him in Dallas four months ago to pick his brain, and checking out books related to the topic of restorative justice. But when I start to write, I suddenly notice that dishes are waiting to be washed, my desk to be organized, and several emails to be answered.

Years ago, in Seattle, a woman who made most of her living writing poetry and short stories gave me this piece of advice: “Step one: apply ass to chair.” In fact, I’ve gotten that far several times. Once seated, however, I’ve found that I am capable of staring at blank screen for well over an hour. Somehow I’ve pulled it together enough times in the last few years to put out several other drafts and papers, and I’m sure it will come back to me. For now, I have to settle for hyperventilating, quaking in my seat and waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

However, on a related topic, I’ve been getting some invaluable assistance on my Trocmé chapter, which will claim the center of my attention in about 3 months. My friend GM Roe, from Seattle, contacted me a couple of weeks ago with an idea that he had been mulling over for a while. He wants to pull together a team of Francophiles, mostly from Bethany Community Church, to help with the translation Trocmé’s unpublished papers and sermons. In addition, he has contracted with a student in Philadelphia to spend a day next week at the Swarthmore Peace Collection locating and photocopying the specific materials I have in mind. Both GM and Glen Stassen had offered to make detours from upcoming trips to the east coast to do the same thing, but now neither of them will need to do that, and we’ll be able to start translating right away.

I suppose with this many people investing themselves this deeply in my dissertation I’d better start writing, panic-stricken or not.

At Semester's End

Last week, aside from a few incompletes that will straggle in over the summer, my TA & I completed the grading for the ethics course at Claremont. For all practical purposes, my semester there is finished.

It was a wonderful, albeit taxing, experience. The most challenging part for me was to come to terms with my own parochialism. For the last ten years I’ve become so accustomed to standing at the far left fringe of the group that represents the far right fringe of American society that I’ve never thought to ask how I would fare in a more pluralistic setting.

My first inkling that I was no longer in Kansas probably occurred the week we discussed the contemporary relevance of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully expected some debate as to whether or not Jesus’ commands were to be taken at face value, put into practice, applied to secular social concerns. What I did not anticipate was the handful of students who were put off by the notion that Jesus would command us to do anything in the first place. This in turn led to a larger discussion as to whether authoritarian words like Lord, kingdom, obedience or submission held any currency at all for modern day Christians, in light of the ways that such language has been used throughout the church’s history to legitimize patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, and various other forms of domination and social stratification.

I left class a bit discouraged that morning. If in a Methodist school of theology we could not assume a priori that we shared a basic belief in Christ as Lord (and not simply as friend), what was our starting point for further inquiry? Fortunately, our mid-semester break fell on the following week, so I had some extra time to reflect and regain my bearings. I want to be—have to be—attentive to the struggles of those whose subjugation has been justified or ignored by my faith tradition. At the same time, I can’t simply relinquish what I consider a central feature of the Christian confession: that my life is not my own, that I am accountable to Someone who is not in turn accountable to me, that God’s thoughts are higher than mine, that to flourish as a human being requires a subordinate relation to our Creator. To hold to this conviction does not require that I dismiss the criticisms of those who consider it an oppressive worldview. It requires, rather, that I remain attentive to other ways of thinking about Christianity, that I listen to those who might be able to see my ideological blind spots, and that I still speak confidently on the basis of the faith as I’ve known it thus far.

A few of the ministerial students live openly in long-term relationships with partners of the same sex—again, a phenomenon that doesn’t come into play much at Fuller. For the last decade or so, I’ve been moving toward a more embracing posture vis-à-vis homosexuality, a shift inspired in part through research and in part by watching the cruel treatment that the gay pastor of the Old Stone Church in Carnation received from the hands of his local colleagues in the early-mid 1990s. I would still not consider myself “welcoming and affirming”—a position I fear might too quickly excuse us from asking difficult questions about sexual ethics in general. But I am becoming convinced that whatever stand a local church takes on homosexuality must be hammered out in dialogue with the gay and lesbian people within its own sphere of ministry. If we heterosexuals haven’t enough acquaintance with specific homosexuals to listen to them, know their stories, and understand their interpretations of Scripture & theology, I don’t see how we can contribute anything insightful to the discussion.

About two months ago, I stepped out of my teacher role at the beginning of class to tell the students that I would be looking at CT-scan results the next day and to ask for their prayers, since I was unusually nervous at to what I might learn. After class, Marguerite, an older student who had participated in the Civil Rights marches in the 60s, approached me to ask whether I had time after chapel to meet with a few others who wanted to pray with me. About twenty in all, nearly half the class—gay people, liberationists, Unitarians, process theologians, as well as a few who hold to the confessional Biblicism that informs my faith—gathered to lay hands on me, calling on God on my behalf, uttering words of hope and encouragement and specific biblical promises, hugging me afterward, and telling me they loved me and were journeying with me.

Together they embodied an assurance that I’ve held abstractly for several years now: that my faith community is much larger and stronger than I sometimes imagine.

general update

I can run on depleted energy or I can maintain the workload that I managed to juggle a year ago, but if I try to do both it crushes my spirit as well as my body. In recent weeks, completely contrary to the resolve I brought home from the hospital, I have become increasingly self-absorbed and superficial in my relationships as I have fought to come through with responsibilities at Fuller and Claremont. I've avoided long conversations with friends and family members, and have shared little that would invite others to reciprocate with warmth and openness. No, I haven't turned into a shell or a phony, but I have felt myself turning in upon myself, and that is the very thing I cannot do if I am to live with cancer spiritually and emotionally intact. Se incurvatus in se.

The weekend was good for me in this sense. I had promised Karla that I would do no grading on Saturday so that we could have the entire day together, and I decided to keep my computer off until evening on Sunday. Of course, that doesn't decrease my workload for this week--I still have to turn in the grades for Claremont. But it does help to clear away the stench of slavery that hangs in the air when one struggles under overdue assignment after overdue assignment week after week. Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. This is not simply a religious observance. It's part of the rhythm that keeps us human.

Speaking of the weekend, Karla and I thoroughly enjoyed our dinner cruise off Santa Barbara on Saturday. Of course, anyone who has ever been on a boat with me could have reminded me why a dinner cruise might not have been our best option, but for some reason the taste of supper going two directions within a short space of time did not keep us from having a good time together. An inexpensive chewable before the trip helped me to postpone the inevitable a little longer than I would have otherwise, so we were nearly an hour and a half into the cruise before I felt that grumbling in my gut, which, like a gun brandished in a play, had to go off sooner or later. (Karla, incidentally, has more or less conquered motion sickness altogether, a feat that she attributes mostly to her daily commute on the light rail.)

We decided this morning to postpone chemotherapy until next Monday. It was a smart move. The fatigue and congestion I described over a week ago had grown steadily worse until about Wednesday, and by last night, although it had receded, I still was not over it. The whole point of my two weeks on/one week off routine is to give me enough time to regain strength so that the next round doesn't just kick me while I'm down. That's pretty much what would have happened had we gone ahead with treatments yesterday. Tonight, after stepping out of the shower, it suddenly occurred to me that I finally felt like myself again for the first time in a couple of weeks. I'm not dreading next Monday the way I dreaded going in today.

round 6

I took my last Xeloda for the most recent round a couple of days ago, and I'm pleased to say that I suffered no significant side effects this time through. I'm now taking about a fifth the amount originally prescribed in December, and it appears, even at that low dosage, to be working. My next round begins a week from tomorrow, so I have a little time off.

I've been awfully fatigued the last couple of days, though, and have been fighting off some congestion, but that, I think is more heart than cancer related. Plus, I taught my last class for the semester at Claremont on Thursday, and I usually have a short crash time at the end of a long high-stress project. By next weekend, I should have most of the bounce back in my step.

At least I hope so. Next Saturday, I'm taking Karla out on dinner cruise off Santa Barbara for our 19th wedding anniversary. She doesn't know that yet, she only knows that I've made some kind of plan for the afternoon and evening. She dislikes day-of-the-event surprises, so I'll probably fill her in on the details in a few days. My secret should be safe for now, since she never reads my blog, as long no one tells her anything before, say, Thursday.

follow-up on collins

Many thanks to those of you who took the time and trouble to read and respond to my recent post on Francis Collins’ The Language of God. In one response, my friend Greg Crowther (sorry about tacking an “s” to the end of your name earlier) called my attention to Sam Harris and his review of Collins’ book. In light of Harris’ growing popularity and influence, and my own bewilderment as to why he has become such a force in popular thinking, I thought I’d offer a few additional thoughts.

First, I readily concur with Greg that in his recent Newsweek debate Harris comes out much better than his foil, Rick Warren. I’ve developed an appreciation for the social issues Warren has chosen to tackle over the last year, but he is a doer and not a thinker. As a result, instead of challenging Harris’ depiction of religion, and of Evangelical Christianity in particular, he fed right into his stereotypes. Harris got to shoot at mice in a bucket and come off looking adroit. He would not have had as easy a time against a more prepared theologian.

I also think that much of Harris’ critique of Collins is on target (Harris, “The Language of Ignorance,” www.truthdig.com). I agree that Collins embraces C.S. Lewis’ approach to philosophy and theology way too uncritically, and I don’t get his choice of moral law as the phenomenon that begs us to move beyond science into faith. (Recent evidence that the earliest humans flourished and survived not by their ability to kill predators but by their capacity to form communities offers a non-religious scientific basis for attributing moral codes to evolution.) However, throughout most of the article, Harris so grossly misrepresents Collins and builds his case on so many logical fallacies that I have to call him on it. “The Language of Ignorance” relies heavily on the kinds of synecdoches, equivocations and straw men that I’ve frequently come across in his other writings. I generally appreciate someone who can put a solid challenge up against faith, or specifically faith in Christ, but I find Harris’ work disappointing on this front for several reasons.

First, in his review of Collins, Harris neglects to differentiate between scientific conclusions and descriptions of a personal faith journey. Yes, Collins allows his theological imagination to turn to the Trinity when he sees a waterfall divided into three streams, but by no means does he put this forward as a reasoned defense of the faith, as per Harris’ accusation. I’ll grant that Collins goes too far when he contends that belief is more rational than unbelief—there is simply no standpoint sufficiently neutral to allow one to make a claim one way or the other—but the intent of The Language of God seems not to be to prove the faith scientifically, but to invite dialogue between believers and non-believers.

Second, ignoring the manifold interpretations of and responses to the gospel, Harris lumps all expressions of Christian faith into a single easily debunked caricature. He defines it as strict adherence to a flat, literal reading of Scripture, young-earth creationism, intolerance toward other faiths, a dispensational view of the end times, and adherence to apologetic arguments that most theologians have long relinquished. Then he decries those who deviate from this description for inconsistency. Returning to “The Language of Ignorance,” Harris implies that Collins rejects evolution, opposes stem cell research, and appeals to Einstein and Hawking as defenders of the Christian faith. In fact, on all three points, Collins specifically states otherwise. The faith that Harris rejects probably should be rejected; but it is not what I and myriad others embrace as the Christian gospel.

Finally, his appeal to religion’s failures and the evils it has spawned could just as easily (and just as wrongly) be turned against the history of Western science. Yes, we are the people who brought you the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Focus on the Family; and no one can ignore the role that religion has played in justifying genocide, ethnic hatreds, colonialism and terrorism. But before we reject the entire category of religion, we need to acknowledge the role that science has played in many of these same developments. The Tuskegee experiments and the biological tests conducted on Jewish captives during the Holocaust were purportedly carried out in the interests of science; scientific advances have put as at the brink of nuclear annihilation and global environmental devastation; and numerous scientific discoveries have been arrived at in ways that exacerbate the economic disparities between the rich and poor (the tremendous wealth and power centralized in the hands of a few pharmaceutical companies and the use of that influence to protect profits rather than to make their products available the world’s neediest citizens are just one example). Of course, such an argument against science would not hold up. In the first place, like good religion & theology, science is committed to the kind of dialogue and self-criticism that allows it to learn from its failures, to examine the ill effects to which it has been used, and to envision models that contribute more adequately to humankind’s wellbeing. And second, again like religion & theology, the human benefits yielded by science, while they in no way justify its failings, still give us reason to believe that it is a worthwhile endeavor.

As I’ve already said, I appreciate a well thought out argument against the faith. Furthermore, I think that the Christian church has benefited from the criticisms of such thinkers as Hume, Marx, Stanton, Nietzsche, and more recently Gould and Sagan, who have been able to point out its hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and ignorance of the natural world. I just have trouble placing Sam Harris anywhere near this august company. He hasn’t given me anything to chew on.