Good News, Everyone!

I’ve been doing a summer internship at a New York City law firm, and I just had my exit interview where I was informed that I will be getting an official full-time job offer for next year after I graduate.

This is kind of a big deal.  Going to law school doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job, and this year in particular with the economy in the toilet, lots of 2L summer associates are really worried that they’re going to be left out in the cold.  I wasn’t too worried, since my firm has a pretty conservative business model and is consistently one of the most profitable, and thus it has not overextended itself in a way that makes the current credit crunch fatal.  I figured most if not all of us would be getting offers, but it’s really nice to know for certain.

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Placeholder Post: Zen and Christianity in 2008

I am actually writing this post from… the future!

Seriously, in going back and assembling my list of high points along the journey, I realized that there are a couple of spots where important things happened, I didn’t blog about them, and I didn’t go back and explain what happened either. This is one of those spots, so I will try to recap for the sake of historical continuity.  So I am actually writing this post on April 2, 2009 to go back and fill in the blanks, and I am inserting it timewise into the summer of 2008.

In the spring of 2008, I headed east, spiritually speaking. I read a lot of the Baghavad Gita, I watched a lot of Heroes, and my daughter was born. For awhile, I thought that a kind of quasi-Dharmic Hinduism was going to be the path for me. I even went and started a new blog called “Dharma Bum” which I subsequently deleted (after bringing the important posts back here, so they wouldn’t be lost).

My brother came to visit with his wife in April, and he brought a bunch of books about Zen Buddhism, which I had never really considered seriously before. In particular, the book Hardcore Zen struck me as relevant and important. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Zen Buddhism was the right path for me–the truths that it espoused were, for the most part, things that I believed to be self-evident truths about the universe. I had some semantic concerns about distinguishing the Hindu Atman from the Buddhist Anatman, but that was more the kind of thing that could produce long, quirky debates later on. Important was the Zen universe was a universe I believed in, and Zen meditation seemed rally helpful to me.

But there was still a nagging feeling that this wasn’t really the right thing for me. Maybe it was jsut my fear of spiritual commitment, I don’t know. But it seemed to me that the problem with Zen was not that i thought it was untrue, but that it did not provide me with things I wanted and needed, spiritually speaking: a culturally relevant context with ritual, compelling mythological framework, professional clergy, etcetera. Although I couldn’t make myself believe that Christianity was true, I still felt an attraction to the Episcopal Church that in my opinion contradicted my Zen inklings.

My brother’s advice was just to pick one, go with it, and see what happens. And eventually that’s what I did.

While studying for final exams last April, I read C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy, which is an amazing book. I was surprised to see how unconventional Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was, and in the end, I started to feel like the Episcopal Church really was the place for me–a place to be, in fact, even if I was not sure about my belief in Christianity.

So when we moved to New York for the summer, we started attending an Episcopal Church in the Village, and I even went to services at Trinity during my lunch hour downtown. It was meaningful and important to me, but there was some critical quality that was just elusive. I read every C. S. Lewis book I could get my hands on, I prayed and did devotions, and I thought of myself as a Christian, a Protestant, and an Anglican.

Maybe the biggest problem was that, concurrent to all of this, I spiralled into what might have been the worst depression I have ever been in. I can’t even describe it beyond saying that it was an absolute nightmare, and finally getting help and eventually climbing out of it has saved my life. My beautiful and sexy wife was there for me in my darkest hours, even when things got scary and that means so much to me. But in a lot of ways, God was distant, and I couldn’t figure out why. I literally cried out to Jesus to deliver me, but things just kept getting darker.

My love affair with Christianity started to enter a period of uncertainty when we came back to Maryland, partly because I was just plain more interested in Led Zeppelin than I was in religion. I still kept Episcopal Christianity in my head as a spiritual placeholder, but even then I wasn’t sure anymore–not because Christianity hadn’t pulled me out of my depression, because for all I know things might have been a lot worse without prayer and devotion, but just because my interest was fading. Again, fear of spiritual commitment? Maybe. But also Christianity honestly just wasn’t punching all of the spiritual buttons I needed to have punched.

Incidentally, I haven’t really felt the need or desire to go back to Zen. It is interesting, and probably, in retrospect, the religion whose truth-claims are the closest to matching reality, but despite being true, it is so stripped down that it actually lacks Truth.

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An Interesting Turning Point?

I had an interesting conversation on the subway ride home the other day (actually it wasn’t on the way home; it was on the way to have dinner and see Rent with my beautiful wife for our seventh wedding anniversary, which is another story). A colleague of mine was on the same train–he’s an interesting guy and we’ve had a few brief but stimulating conversations about politics, society, culture, etc. Anyway, this guy is Greek Orthodox, and for some reason or another the fact that I’m an ex-Mormon came up in the conversation.

The interesting thing is, we didn’t really talk about Mormonism or ex-Mormonism for very long before we transitioned, and we started talking instead about Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and some of the issues that the two churches face. The big deal about this conversation was that my point of view in the exchange was Anglican. I was speaking not as a Mormon, or an ex-Mormon, but as an Anglican.

It was kind of awesome. We talked about the Reformation, about creeds and schisms, about theology, and about church and culture and the challenges that come from the interplay between the two. But instead of talking from the perspective of an ex-Mormon floundering about on a spiritual quest, I was talking from the perspective of a committed Anglican.

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The Knoxville UU Shooting

My thoughts and prayers are with the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, especially the families and friends of Gregory McKendry, Jr. and Linda Praeger.  It chilled my blood to read that the shooter first tried to get backstage where the children were.

From the New York Times:

It was when the man paused to reload that several congregants ran to stop him. Ms. Bowen said John Bohstedt, a history professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was among them.

“He moved very quickly and he assessed the situation very quickly,” Ms. Bowen said. “He’s sitting on this guy. He had a package with him, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and John was afraid that that might be a bomb, so John was screaming at everyone to get out.”

I took a class on the history of Ireland from Dr. Bohstedt back when I went to UTK.  He was a real friend and mentor at the time, and one of my best teachers ever.  I very nearly became a historian because of him.  I’ve lost touch with him over the years, but I’ve been thinking about him lately for a variety of reasons.  Anyway, after reading this, my wife says he’s a hero, and I’m inclined to agree.

Interestingly enough, and by total coincidence, I was sitting in Dr. Bohstedt’s class when the twin towers were hit.

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The Much-Maligned ACLU

The ACLU gets an undeservedly bad rap from the political right in general, and from the religious right in specific.  They’re targeted as leftist, liberal ideologues (by people such as John Mark Reynolds over at Scriptorium Daily) Usually this is because of high-profile cases where the ACLU takes up the sword against the establishment of religion on behalf of the First Amendment, and this is usually interpreted in alarmist language as an attack on religion in the public sphere.  That is, of course, absurd.

The ACLU has gone to bat consistently on behalf of people who are trying to enjoy their freedom of religion, including Christians.  Here is an extensive, detailed list of examples.

The point of freedom is that everybody gets to have it, even the people you disagree with.  In the end, I think that’s why the right hates the ACLU.  The right isn’t against civil liberties by any means, but the right is offended by the ACLU’s willingness to defend everyones’ civil liberties.

I realize I’m not being entirely fair to Reynolds, since he actually is raising a point worth raising and discussing.  But his jab at the ACLU just betrays his ignorance and small-mindedness, at least on this one issue.

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Something I Have Noticed About Mormon Apologetics

It seems to me that almost every argument I have seen involving Mormonism (where one of the participants is Mormon and the other is not), either online or in the real world, and including arguments I have been party to on both sides of the issue, has essentially boiled down to the non-Mormon party making assertions about Mormonism, and the Mormon denying them, claiming that Mormonism is being misrepresented, misunderstood, maligned, overgeneralized, or distorted.

I wonder why? Are criticisms of Mormonism really so unfounded? Are they really so groundless? While many of them certainly are groundless or deceptive, I do think there are a lot of earnest and legitimate criticisms out there, but I rarely hear a Mormon, when confronted with one of those criticisms, accept it. While I don’t necessarily expect to see Mormons granting the truth of negative assessments of their religion (although it would be incredibly refreshing), that’s not the only option. The Mormon in the fight could always go the “it’s a feature, not a bug” route, and claim that the criticisms about the Church are true, but they are ultimately not negative. I guess, to be fair, I have seen people argue like this, too, and it gets on my nerves as well. So maybe it really isn’t a preferable option.

Assuming that some criticisms of Mormonism are legitimate and grounded in fact and/or actual experience, why then do defenders of the faith not own up to them? Why do they habitually deny or claim that they are being misrepresented? Is it simply the case that so many lies and misrepresentations are in fact made about the church that defenders are just in the habit of playing the “nuh-uh” card, so they do it as a reflex? Or is there something unique about Mormonism that makes it so that its members will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that it has any bad points?

I guess it’s fair to ask if this is really “unique” or not, and how much it exists when talking about other faiths, but in my experience, most Christian denominations that aren’t NRMs are pretty open to internal dissent and criticism from within.

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Churches! Lead! A Duck!

Over to the right (or maube to the left, depending on if I ever change the format again) where my links are, there’s a section called “Churches.”  I believe it is a complete list of the churches I’ve visited since I started questioning Mormonism.

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Sad About the State of the Anglican Bloggerverse

Everyone’s writing about the big issues in the communion: homosexuality, schism, Lambeth, GAFCON, the global South, post-colonialism, the covenant, etc

These are a big deal, sure, but in the meantime, nobody is really writing about, well, Jesus.  Or anything else.  It’s not that I expect people to pretend that the big happenings aren’t happening, but as I’m more and more certain that Anglicanism is the direction for me, I’m eager to engage in conversations about theology, about spirituality, about God, about prayer, about Church history, about the Bible, about liturgy, about Christian life, about the environment, about poverty, about war, about government.  About poetry, art, mythology, history, music, anything.  There’s so much that is informed by faith that is worth talking about.

Instead, it’s all Church politics, all the time.  It’s disappointing.  Maybe Anglicans, especially in countries like mine where church membership is low and dropping, need to hear this: nobody’s going to want to join a church when the only issue is internecine politics.  Even those who do, like me, are finding it difficult to stay enthusiastic.

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The Space Trilogy

I’ve decided that C. S. Lewis is probably my favorite author, and I’ve been devouring everything by him that I can get my hands on.  I’ve read Mere Christianity a couple of times, bits of the Screwtape Letters, and most of the Chronicles of Narnia.  I think that’s where most people stop with Lewis, and I think that’s sad, because it offers an extremely misleading picture of the man, his ideas, his theology, his philosophy, and how it all fits together.  I think that a great many fans of Lewis would be shocked and surprised by much of what Lewis seems ot have really thought, if they read anything beyond the standard cliched offerings, and I certainly think that Evangelicals and Mormons would be a lot more hesitant to posthumously enlist Lewis as a defender of their faith.  Lewis is anything but an orthodox Evangelical Protestant, and very little of what he says is compatible with Mormonism.

Surprised By Joy and Till We have Faces are two of his more compelling, multilayered, and spiritually textured books, and I cannot overemphasize the massive impact they have had on my personal spiritual development.  But the deeper ideas contained in them are revolutionary and in many ways extremely heterodox.

Right now I’m reading the Space Trilogy, which is science fiction, but also overtly Christian–more so than Narnia because it is set in the real world with real Jesus (called Maleldil in the book’s “Old Solar” language) instead of in a magical world with a lion Jesus.  Many of Lewis’s more complex ideas about religion and theology from other works, especially Miracles, is parroted in dialogue and arguments between characters in the Space Trilogy.

I imagine a Mormon reader, especially one who is attached to the more ”space doctrine” aspects of the religion, would find much to like in the Space Trilogy, but ultimately I think the Mormon reader’s affection would be misplaced and based on a reading of the books that is superficial and divorced from the context of Lewis’s larger corpus.  The Space Trilogy certainly has interplanetary Christianity, and as such there are certain parallels to Mormon doctrines that are basically unavoidable, but in the final analysis I would assert that Lewis’s theology is ultimately incompatible on a very fundamental level with many of Mormonism’s core assumptions.

I’ve just started That Hideous Strength, the final (and longest) of the three, but so far the books are good, the ideas contained in them are compelling, and Perelandra contains what is possibty the most visceral fight scene I have ever read.

Make sure you check out Aquinas’s excellent post about C. S. Lewis on Summa Theologica.

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Toying

I’m thinking about starting to blog regularly again.  One nice thing about blogging my spiritual journey was that in a way, the blog actually helped propel me forwards.  When I came to a new conclusion, or something stuck in my craw, the blog helped me reify the former and work through the latter (or in some cases, see that it couldn’t actually be worked through).  Since I’ve stopped blogging regularly, I’ve made some decisions and come to some new conclusions, but in some ways they haven’t made much of a difference because I haven’t done much about them.  Blogging would be a way for me to make my experiences real, and commit myself to my decisions by announcing them publicly, if that makes sense.

Also, having a blog is a way to, simply put, make sure things that interest me happen in the blogosphere.  Other people’s blogs are fine, but there’s a give and take, an ongoing conversation that is lost when I don’t blog myself.  The conversation suffers, I think.

On the other hand, I have some moderate concerns.  I’ve come a long way since I stopped blogging regularly, and I’m not sure if I would try to catch up, or just kind of pick up where I am now and fill in important details as I go.  I guess the latter is more realistic.

I also wonder if the public nature of the blog isn’t more than a little narcissistic.  Would my needs be better served by something like a diary or a journal?

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