The Birth of Love

This post was originally published HERE on Toy Adams's Advent Blog, Imagining Jesus.

Advent is the season of anticipating Yes. It’s the season of the breaking-in of the infinite, and the season of the eternal embrace of the natural. The season of the perhaps-possible impossible. The Event of Emmanuel—God with us, God in us, God as us.

God’s answer to the no of humanity’s un-love is the yes of childbirth, in all its pain and blood and promise. God becomes a human merely being—tasting touching hearing seeing breathing—and perhaps is always still becoming human, as we also are.

During advent, we anticipate the sun’s birthday at the start of winter. And, oh, how long the winters of our lives can be. Sometimes they last for years. And still, we wait for the promise of sun, for those leaping greenly spirits to re-emerge, to become alive again after we have died.

Perhaps this is a hope against hope, for a blue true dream of sky is not enough to assuage the acute and actual pang of sorrow and suffering. But knowing that God is merely being right alongside us—wailing in a manger, wailing on a cross—means that while the depths of human suffering are illimitable, so too are the gay great happenings. Our ears may awake to the no of all nothing, but our eyes may be opened to life and love and wings.

Idols

We are so defensive of our idols.

We handle them with kid gloves, place them gently on their altars. 

If scorned, we may hide them--under a bed, or in a closet. But we never destroy them ourselves. They are too precious to us. 

If we're lucky, someone will find them anyway, smash them on the ground.

It's painful watching your idol shatter. 

But once it's done, all you want to do is pick up a hammer. 

Practicing the Impossibility of Pacifism

Anyone who claims to be a pacifist, or at least to practice an ethic of nonviolence, has been challenged about its application. It’s not practical, people say, it’s not realistic.

The challenge is especially common during times of (imminent or ongoing) war. To combat evil or rescue the powerless non-violently is impossible.

And maybe it’s because we pacifists really are the squishy, idealistic dreamers of our caricatures, but I think there’s something deeply true and promising about the idea of impossibility.

After all, as a Christian, I am marked by a belief in the impossible—the foolishness of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection and the impossibility of meaning in the meaninglessness of life. We reach for the impossible not as a challenge to be grasped, but as a way of embracing existential uncertainty, rejecting fear, and experiencing the kenotic self-sacrifice of Christ in our own lives and communities.

Is the notion of overcoming hate with love and sorrow with joy—really, in our actual world—laughable, impossible even?

Perhaps.

But that’s what makes it worth seeking and worth practicing. Because what if?

We practice by loving our neighbors. We practice by subverting capitalism. We practice by feeding the hungry. We practice by welcoming the stranger.

And a funny thing happens when we practice a thing. After a while it becomes habit.

Erasmus, methodological belief, and intellectual hospitality

If you can get past the groan-worthy first sentence (gimme a break, it was years  ago), there's a lot of good stuff in this paper, I think. The idea of "intellectual hospitality" is something that I strive to enact when I engage with others, and I think we can learn a lot more when we are more hospitable.

Also, I just really love Erasmus. 

Abstract: With the assumption that creative interpretation of the past helps us set a trajectory for the future, I explore the life and work of Erasmus of Rotterdam and his role on the “frontier” of Reformation thought in the Western Church. I will argue that his mode of humanistic dialectic serves as an especially promising manner of education, particularly in the area of theology. Further, I investigate the concept of “intellectual hospitality,” and how people—especially students—receive and process information. I relate the practice of methodological belief (as opposed to Cartesian methodological doubt) to Erasmus’s understanding of education and Christianity, and how theological education should be approached by both students and teachers.

Paper: CLICK HERE TO VIEW 

Bibliography HERE

"Missional" Librarianship

For the last several years, many evangelical seminaries (Fuller and NTS come immediately to mind) and their professors have been pumping out books and courses related to the mission of God, the mission  of church, missional  ministry, etc. etc. The idea that instead of sitting in churches waiting for people to come in, Christians should go out into the world and engage it in love. 

While a good enough idea I guess (I won't discuss the many reasons it can be problematic here), it's been repeated ad nauseam, and so it's what I couldn't help but think of when I was listening to a lecture in the New Librarianship MOOC, and Lankes was talking about getting out from behind the reference desk and into the community.

I tweeted a paraphrase of what he said: 

I got a bit of pushback, asking for some examples of what that looks like. And I was pleased that what I came up with was basically my professional life. I'm not just  a librarian. My network is not just librarians.  I do my best to actively engage in the community I endeavor to serve--that of theologians and clergy. I try to go where the conversations are--on Twitter, at conferences--participate in them, and offer my expertise as appropriate. I try to get my name out there, not as a grab for prestige, but to help facilitate knowledge-sharing, and so that when people need help finding some information (or someone else to work out ideas with) they know who to ask and where to find me.

It's in this way I can appreciate a kind of "missional" librarianship--one that's based more on relational learning-together than a capitalistic transaction of information. I love this idea of embedded librarianship, where I can really get to know my community (and they get to know me) and we can expand intellectual horizons together.

Thirty Seconds or Less

I recorded a piece for my friend Jim Kast-Keat's podcast--Thirty Seconds or Less--and it's live today! 

GO CHECK IT OUT

And listen to the other ones too. It's great! 

On Being Pretty (or not) in Academia

I've wanted to write for a while about the effect of women's appearance in academia. First it started as "Just because I like cute clothes and lipstick doesn't mean I'm not smart." But then I realized that in many cases having a more-or-less conventionally "pretty" appearance can actually result in people being more likely to listen to you rather than less.

And so emerged the double-edged double-standard that women have become so used to facing.

Be pretty--because no one will listen to you if you're plain--but not too pretty, because then people will think you're dumb.

I remember agonizing over this back in March/April when I was preparing to present at my first academic conferences. I painstakingly picked out my outfits, trying on everything in my closet to find a balance between pretty and professional, dressing my age but not too trendy. I wanted desperately to stand out, and also to be taken seriously. My age and gender alone achieved the former, as I was almost surely always the youngest in the room, and usually one of only a handful of women. But the latter proved a bit more challenging.

Would people still hear what I had to say if I wore a makeup-less face and my hair in a ponytail?

Do people take me more seriously when I wear my glasses?

And this is a struggle women are met with every day. It's the performance of femininity in a delicate balancing act with a proper projection of power and meekness, authority and sweetness.

Sure, I can't really know what people think about me. And maybe it's my own neuroses, but so often I get the feeling of people being like, "Awww, look at that cute little girl doing theology." Or, my favorite (which actually happened), "You're too pretty to be a librarian."

There are plenty of pretty librarians. There are plenty of homely librarians. Both and either can be great or terrible at their job. Is there any industry (besides, perhaps, modeling or Hollywood) in which a person's appearance actually affects their job performance? Really?

And of course this is pretty much never an issue for men.

I think I'm beyond asking why appearance matters so much--it's become a given, fostered by patriarchy and capitalism, creating women and our appearance into objects for consumption instead of human beings to engage seriously and honestly. I'm more interested in just challenging this assumption, without overtly bringing attention to it (except for this blog post, of course).

I'm just going to keep reading. Keep writing. Keep at that academic hustle.

I'm also going to keep painting my nails with glitter and wearing bright lipstick.

I'm going to engage you (male or female or otherwise) sincerely and critically.

And I just ask that you do the same for me.