Archive, Anamnesis, & A Real-Beyond-Presence in the Eucharistic Liturgy

The latest issue of Practical Matters journal is live, and I have an article in it!

You can find the article HERE.

Abstract: The purpose and goal of the liturgy and of those participating in it is making space. Space for welcome, for hospitality, for movement, for freedom, for lament, for exultation. Space for absence, certainly; space for presence, perhaps. Without the presence of the people, the presence of elements, expectantly returning to the self-defeating, being-toward-death archive of the liturgy, we cannot experience the Real-beyond-presence we may encounter in Christ there. What I am proposing is that there is a deep interweaving of dependencies at work in the Eucharistic liturgy and the possibility of Real-beyond-presence therein: the text of liturgy, a model of the archive, is necessary as the holding place for forgetting in order to enact the anamnesis—remembrance that requires forgetting. The remembrance requires an absence, an opening, a khora. And it is in this absence, seen in the broken bread and the poured out cup, that we may, perhaps, encounter a Real-beyond-presence.

And definitely check out the Table of Contents--there are a lot of great pieces in this issue related to worship and liturgy. I'm honored to be a part of it.

American Religion and Violence as Sacrament

By now you've certainly watched the video or read the transcript or at least seen a tweet about Sarah Palin saying that if she were in charge, "waterboarding is how [we'd] baptize terrorists."

Almost immediately there was an outcry about the statement's sacrilegious nature, the disregard for sacred liturgy, and the general blasphemy of equating the holy sacrament with torture.

But, like, isn't she exactly right?

Isn't initiation through violence into the American Religion of submission to capitalism and oppressive power structures exactly the colonial MO we expect of the United States?

The unwilling catechumens are forced into the waters of death only to be raised into a new life of state-sanctioned violence funded by greed and white supremacy and "Christian" triumphalism in which they may ultimately be exploited and discarded as examples, as collateral martyr-foils.

The horror of Palin's metaphor serves to reveal the horror of the reality.

In the American Religion, violence is a sacrament.

And as long as we are worshiping Caesar, we are administering it.

Church and Sacraments and Being Christian as Fuck

I just got a flyer in the mail from a new church in town (as if Nashville needs any more churches), and it seemed like your garden variety nondenom emergent outfit, but what caught my eye, and actually made me grab the flyer out of the trashcan after I’d tossed it, was that it was called Sacrament Church. And yet, something that surely will not surprise you if you’ve spent any time at all in or around so-called “progressive” “post-evangelical” circles, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly sacramental about it. Nothing particularly sacred. Nothing particularly Christian. No mention of actual sacraments. No mention of scripture. No mention of God.

Now don’t get me wrong, a crusader for orthodoxy I am not. I’m not really interested in an ontological Higher Being; I’m not about to die on the hill of biblical inerrancy or primacy; but if you’ve known me for longer than five minutes, you know I have a thing for the sacraments—especially eucharist, secondarily baptism, and well, the rest I could take or leave. Except marriage. I definitely just want to leave that one.

Anyway, the thing about the sacraments is that they are inherently and irrevocably Christian. The Church catholic establishes and practices them in various manifestations, but we all partake and participate in them together, and that is what makes us Christ’s body—what makes us Christians.

Do I think everyone needs to be a Christian? No.

Do I think Christianity is the best religion? No.

But I’m a Christian. And it’s my religion. And the way I know that and the way I practice that is through the sacraments.

I don’t go to church to feel good or to get in touch with my “spirituality” or to practice being nice to people or to have my intellect stretched. I go to receive the sacraments, to be reminded of my identity and my place in this weird, wonky, messed up Church.

If I wanted any of this milquetoast, commercialized self-help, I’d go somewhere else. So if you’re going to call yourself “Sacrament Church,” you’d better be Christian as fuck.

The Cardboard Cathedral & the Absurdity of Temporal Aesthetics

“Cathedrals usually stand as enduring monuments to human skill and inventiveness, and magnificent pointers to the presence of God among us,” says the website of ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch NZ, but this cathedral is “slightly different.” It’s made of cardboard.

CC photo from Geof Wilson

After a magnitude 6.3 earthquake left the original cathedral badly damaged, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban was commissioned to design a temporary structure for worship. Ban is known for his construction of shelters for refugees of natural disasters in Japan, Rwanda, Haiti, and other countries, using cardboard, paper tubes and shipping containers.

But what’s striking to me is that Ban is not just a humanitarian or an architect, but truly an artist. His pieces—structures, buildings—are beautiful.

And I mean, of course an architect wants his work to be beautiful. But Ban’s work is not typical architecture. His pieces are not “enduring monuments.” They’re temporary. Putting such work and such care into the aesthetics of something made of trash, which will ultimately become trash again, is the kind of faithful absurdity the Kierkegaard in me can really appreciate. It reminds me of graffiti artists putting their work on the side of a train—they’ll probably never see their work again, but the beauty is in its loss.

I think this absurdity of temporal aesthetics (sidebar: is any beauty actually enduring?) is compounded by the fact that this structure is a place of worship. “A Cardboard Fortress is our God” certainly wouldn’t get the same airtime as the original hymn. But I suppose that’s why this is so fascinating to me of the “weak theology” bent. Why shouldn’t we practice faith in the absurd, the fleeting, the may-as-well-not-be? And why should that be any less than beautiful?

CC photo from Forgemind ArchiMedia

Click here for more photos of the Cardboard Cathedral, and here for the cathedral's Wikipedia page.

Twitter for Academics: Scholarly Communication

My involvement in the academic community on Twitter--particularly that of biblical and religious scholars--has positioned me in a unique vantage point, where I see the way academics interact and share information and research and identify that Twitter is actually making a difference in the way scholarship is being enacted in this digital age.

Presentation

Here is a short presentation on how Twitter is being used by scholars, and the ways it's changing what scholarly communication looks like.

References and further reading

Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Wouters, P. (2014). Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive  comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective.  arXiv:1401.4321 [cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4321

Darling E.S., Shiffman D., Côté I.M., Drew J.A. (2013) The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e16v1 Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.16v1

Darling, E. (2013). It’s time for scientists to tweet. The Conversation. Retrieved from  http://theconversation.com/its-time-for-scientists-to-tweet-14658

Galloway, L.M., Pease, J.L., and Rauh, A.E.  (2013). Introduction to Altmetrics for Science, Technology,  Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Librarians. Science  & Technology Libraries 32 (4): 335–45. Retrieved from http://works.bepress.com/anne_rauh/27/

McIntyre, G. (2013). Altmetric: Capturing and Measuring Impact in the Social Media Space. ACS WA Conference 2013, 12th November, 2013, Empyrean Function Centre, Perth, Western Australia. Retrieved from http://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecupres/3/

Perez-Riverol, Y (2014). In the ERA of science communication, Why you need Twitter, Professional Blog and ImpactStory? BioCode’s Notes. Retrieved from http://computationalproteomic.blogspot.ca/2014/02/in-era-of-science-communication-why-you.html

Priem, J. and Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proc. Am. Soc. Info. Sci. Tech., 47: 1–4.

Sud, P., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Evaluating altmetrics. Scientometrics 98(2), 1131‐1143.

Young, J (2009). 10 high fliers on Twitter. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/10-High-Fliers-on-Twitter/16488/

Žižek, the "authentic political event," and intellectual freedom

I'm leading a discussion in my intellectual freedom class next week based on THIS ARTICLE and thought I'd share it here to drum up some more ideas and discussion.

Julian Assange’s work with Wikileaks enacts the self-negation of  “spying” by undermining its principle of secrecy and making information public. This is a greater political act than simply selling secrets to an enemy, which would preserve the secrecy of the information. Do you agree with Žižek that this “spying for the people” and the bringing to light of the government’s secrets can indeed lead to creating the self-aware proletariat? The act itself of bringing information into the commons does not create a knowledgeable public. How can we encourage people to exercise their intellectual freedom, in light of people who are risking everything to make information available to them?

Žižek identifies the French Encyclopedia as the symbol of bourgeois modernity, and says that while the idea of Wikipedia is that it be the people’s encyclopedia, it is falling into the same pitfalls of power and privilege one would expect of a publication edited by mostly white North American men (see this article and this article for more about Wikipedia’s biases). He asserts that Assange’s (and Snowden’s and Pussy Riot’s) work is to stir up the hidden and suppressed information, and bring it into the commons alongside the “mainstream,” “normative” information. What are some ways you can think of to promote and support ignored and repressed information--that of the people of the margins and that which the powers seek to purposely keep from us?

Do you agree that the information commons is a “key domain of the class struggle”? Žižek points out that “The World Wide Web seems to be in its nature Communist, tending towards free flow of data” and that therefore the “business establishment” is trying to privatize and monetize that data by any means necessary--including selling individuals’ personal information. We see this playing out in the struggle for net neutrality and in Facebook’s use of its users’ information. Do you think there is significance in saying that the web is “communist” rather than “democratic” or “populist”? What would the difference be? Also, what does all of this mean in terms of the digital divide? Not everyone truly has the unfettered access to the internet that we bourgeois millennials take for granted.

BONUS: Kester Brewin's TEDx Talk on pirates and bringing information into the commons

"Pirates were not hated because they stole. Pirates were hated for refusing to pass on what they stole to the king."

Let me know if you have any thoughts on the questions I pose, or the article in general.

This is my Body: Deconstruction, Eucharist, and Community

This is the paper Joel Avery and I presented at the Homebrewed Christianity session at AAR this year. It was a great experience, and having Jack Caputo respond on the panel was such a privilege.

We're planning to do some revisions, and the goal is to get it ready for publication with the other papers from the panel and Caputo's response, but for now you can find here the paper as it was read.

Abstract: 

As Derrida returned to Plato's writings throughout his life, looking for moments of aporia in each new reading, so too Christians, returning time and again to the Eucharist, open themselves to the possibility of encountering the body of Christ in the presence of the stranger in each new gathering.

Using John Caputo’s work in What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and his interaction with Derrida in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, as well as the work of Louis-Marie Chauvet, we will show how deconstructing the Eucharist in response to the call of the nondeconstructable absent-yet-Real Presence harbored therein yields an encounter in which the Eucharist becomes a deconstructive act that calls into question and breaks down social hierarchies and individualized faith in order to reveal Christ’s broken body in the community that gathers at his table.

We discuss liturgy as a repeated yet singular event--a counterpath of life that we travel as strangers together on our way to the table, where we arrive without ever arriving, and where we see in the face of each stranger the presence of Jesus revealing itself.

We will spend the bulk of the paper demonstrating how these ideas are manifest in the work of two communities-- St. Lydia’s, an ELCA-affiliated “dinner church” in Brooklyn who ground their worship in a deconstructed liturgy centered on a shared meal, and ikonNYC, a group outside the realm of traditional church who explore and deconstruct ideas about faith.

Paper: CLICK HERE FOR PDF