H/T to Daniel for sending me a link to Jonathan Franzen's recent Op Ed piece in the New York Times, an adaptation of the commencement speech Franzen delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

The essay is entitled Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. and it riffs off a contrast between Facebook "liking" and the risk of loving real people.

The article begins by suggesting that technology creates an extension of the self and that, to keep this illusion intact, it must undermine what stands opposed to the self: Love.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

According to Franzen, one way technology tries to diminish love is through commodification. An example of this is the Facebook "like":

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable.

But in the end the Facebook "like" simply creates a narcissistic loop:

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

Franzen then turns to contrast the narcissism of Web 2.0 "liking" with the messy work of loving actual persons:

My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

There is much more in the essay worth engaging. And thanks once again to Daniel for the link.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Jordan letting me know he was starting a discussion group built around the topics I discuss in Unclean. Jordan wanted to know if I had any supplemental readings/resources not listed in the bibliography of the book. I didn't. The book contains all the references that I would have mentioned as a "next step" in exploring the topics in Unclean.

But I did tell Jordan that I was fond of various "media parables" that could be shown and discussed in a small group settings. I pointed Jordan to three videos that I think illustrate some of the theology of Unclean. Each could be described as a parable of embrace:







You've likely seen all three videos before. As of this writing the three videos have, combined, generated over 135,000,000 hits on YouTube.

Played back to back the cheesiness factor can get to be a bit much. So let me make a few comments about why I suggested these to Jordan, how each is a parable of embrace that relates to the message of Unclean.

Given that Unclean was my first book I told Jana I was going to dedicate the book to her. She was excited. But then we had the following exchange:

Me: "Sweetie, I'm going to dedicate my first book to you."
Jana: "Oh, that's so nice. What's the title of the book?"
Me: "Unclean."
Jana: "Unclean?"
Me: "Yes, Unclean."
Jana: "You're dedicating a book to me with the title Unclean? I'm not sure I like that idea...."

It was a pretty funny conversation. But truth be told, the dedication was, despite appearances, very fitting. Because Unclean is really a book about love. About how rare, fleeting, precious and fragile love is in this world. So many things threaten to erode what Miroslav Volf calls "the will to embrace." Negatively, Unclean is sort of an inventory of the reasons about why love fails so often, the reasons love is so precious and rare--purity psychology, scapegoating, infrahumanization, the fear of death. But positively, Unclean is simply a call to love, a call to dismantle and overcome all those things that get in the way of a life devoted to radical welcome, hospitality, and embrace.

Which is why I like these three video parables. Let me start with free hugs.

Is free hugs cheesy? A bit. But here's what I like about it. At root, love is about contact. Physical contact is the basic grammar of love. The words we use to describe love--warmth and closeness--all go back to our primal experience of love: being held by our parents. Skin on skin. And that physical touch--what psychologists call contact comfort--frames, physically, psychologically and metaphorically, all subsequent human understandings of love. Love is warm. Love is being close. Love is being held. So it's no accident that Volf describes the heart of the Christian ethic as one of "embrace."

And let's be clear. Hugs are subversive. There are Christians who cannot stand being close to a gay person. Let alone giving a gay person a hug. The point being, let's not let Volf's "will to embrace" become too Gnostic and super-spiritualized. Let's begin with something concrete: Non-anxious physical proximity coupled with warm human contact.

Large crowds followed Jesus as he came down the mountainside. Suddenly, a man with leprosy approached him and knelt before him. “Lord,” the man said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.”

Jesus reached out and touched him...

Finally, you can have a lot of fun with the notion of "free." Unmerited. Unconditional. Grace. A "free hug" as unconditional embrace. As Volf describes it:

[The will to embrace is] the will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, [it] is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into “good” and “evil.”

The other two videos use artistic expressions--song and dance--to communicate much the same idea. Everyone, from every walk of life, joins together in the dance. Voices from around the world blend their voices into the lyrics:

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
And the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

Whenever you're in trouble won't you stand by me...

I find both these videos to be wonderful metaphorical (and literal!) expressions of embrace and solidarity, of overcoming difference and Otherness in the Kingdom of God. These are poetical expressions of what Jesus did in standing in solidarity with others, his eating with tax collectors and sinners. And you could make a strong case that Jesus' ministry of table fellowship was the most radical, revolutionary, and subversive aspect of his ministry. Like a hugging, singing or dancing, the revolutionary character of Jesus' ministry was built around something rather simple and mundane. He simply ate meals with people. That's it. What made this simple act revolutionary was its radical expression of welcome and embrace. Jesus welcomed everyone to table. None were excluded. And it was this aspect of Jesus' ministry--his welcoming everyone to his table--that led me to pick this poem from Walt Whitman as a theme for Unclean:

This is the meal pleasantly set...this is the meal and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous...I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited...the heavy-lipped slave is invited...the venerealee is invited,
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

In recent months I've been hard on free will and on those who place a lot of theological weight on that notion. Given my criticisms, I thought I'd briefly sketch how I think about human freedom.

To repeat my criticism, I don't think "free will" means "causally unconstrained." I don't see how it is possible for the human brain--the apparatus of human volition--to step outside the causal flux. That ability, as Harry Frankfurt points out, is a question of power, not freedom. Humans are not omnipotent. We are finite, causally bounded creatures. Consequently, we are unable to step outside the system.

So for me, free will isn't about causality. It is, rather, more akin to what we might call political freedom. Emancipation.

There are two aspects, positive and negative, related to this notion. The first is a negative. If I lock you up in a jail you are not free. If I let you out you become free. Freedom here is liberation, a freedom from.

I think this frame on freedom fits well with biblical metaphors. In the bible human freedom isn't about causality. It's about slavery. Freedom, therefore, is emancipation, being set free from our bondage to sin and death.

But this liberation isn't from causality into non-causality. It is, rather, becoming set free to become bound to a new Master. One sort of causality is exchanged for another. We become "slaves of Christ."

If being released from jail is an example of negative freedom, freedom from the jail, then education is a good example of positive freedom, freedom to.

For example, one of the reasons we educate ourselves and our children is to increase our opportunities, to increase our choices. We become free to do this or free to do that. Thus, we become more free with education. Our horizons expand. We have greater knowledge and skill. As they say, "Knowledge is power." That power is the expansion of choice. What was once closed to us is now open. Less a freedom from than a freedom to.

And education isn't the only factor here. Virtue is intimately associated with freedom. Think of self-control. While it seems that self-control--saying "No" to the self--is a form of self-limitation it is actually a form of self-liberation. Contrast the addict or the impulsive shopper with the self-controlled person. Who is more free? The person pushed and pulled by compulsions, cravings, and obsessions? Or the person able to master herself? In short, virtue--the Fruits of the Spirit--creates freedom. In becoming more Christ-like be become more human and more free.

The best capsule summary of how I see freedom is a notion I've borrowed from Buddhism. Specifically, free will is less a matter of choice than a matter of skill. That's the best summary I have. Free will is skill. And the greater the skill the greater the freedom.

And this dramatically alters how I approach my spiritual life. I don't see myself as an omnipotent ego standing outside the causal flux making choices. Rather, I see myself as engaged in practices to increase my skill in the faith, to become a skilled Christian. And as my skill increases so does my freedom.

Any attempt at trying to "discern the spirits" of Web 2.0 needs to wrestle with anonymity and its effects upon the self and relationality.

To start, there is a public good to pseudonymity and anonymity. Particularly in repressive cultures that lack a free press or where speaking truth is likely to be met with reprisals. So it is good that the Internet allows social critics in places like Iran or China to remain anonymous.

In addition, certain forms of social disclosure are easier in anonymous situations, like with the Catholic confessional. Research I've done with my students on PostSecret has suggested that the anonymous nature of PostSecret sharing gives people the courage to begin the process of difficult self-disclosure.

So there are good things about anonymity on the Web. But there are some concerns as well. Here is Stanley Fish in a piece entitled Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet:

The practice of withholding the identity of the speaker is strategic, and one purpose of the strategy (this is the second problem with anonymity) is to avoid responsibility and accountability for what one is saying. Anonymity, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago observes, allows Internet bloggers “to create for themselves a shame-free zone in which they can inflict shame on others.” The power of the bloggers, she continues, “depends on their ability to insulate their Internet selves from responsibility in the real world, while ensuring real-world consequences” for those they injure.

This is an extreme example, but it gets at the underlying issue: We behave badly on the Internet, particularly when we are anonymous.

Humans are social creatures. Consequently, much of our behavior is regulated by social norms and social approbation. So when these social controls are removed, when out actions cannot be connected to our identity, we find it easier to behave badly.

Internet pornography comes to mind. Back in the day you had to have a social interaction to get access to pornography. You had to purchase a magazine or a video from a clerk. And there was just enough social shame in this interaction, along with an associated fear of someone you knew walking in the store, that helped people fight the temptation to purchase pornography. If not consistently, at least from time to time.

And so, as most people know, the Internet was the greatest thing that ever happened to the porn industry. Largely because of the anonymity. The few social controls that existed are now gone.

But it goes further than porn. If you're a blogger, blog reader, or blog commenter you are very familiar with how people treat each other online. And the bad behavior is largely due to the anonymity Web 2.0 provides. We treat each other differently when we are face to face. Even if we disagree. But online, where we are communicating through an impersonal medium via pseudonymity, the social controls are missing and, thus, the nastiness comes out. Some have called this the online disinhibition effect (or, more profanely, the GIFT theory where, yes, the F stands for that f-word; see here for pictorial depiction of GIFT).

This nastiness causes a lot of people to give up on Web 2.0. Either that or we change try to avoid the nastiness as best we can. For example, a friend of ours writes a popular blog and whenever he writes on a hot-button topic related to the Churches of Christ the comments tend to blow up. So much so that my wife now only reads the posts and refuses to read the comments. She knows reading the comments will make her angry and depressed. It's just not spiritually healthy to get too deep into some comment threads.

I think this is why a lot of people seek to limit their participation with Web 2.0. They find face to face interactions more civil, humanizing, and uplifting. And, if they do use Web 2.0, they try to step around the nastiness, limiting their exposure to certain comment threads, blogs, or even Facebook friends who post too much nasty stuff, politically or religiously.

This is a follow up to my post The Labor of Grace about the Christian response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

What I want to wrestle with here is how the vengeance of God fits in with the command to forgive others, even our enemies.

The relevant passage is Romans 12.19:

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.

The thing I want to think about is how my willingness to forgive Bin Laden is contingent upon my confidence that God will kick him in ass. The "Welcome to Hell" sentiment expressed by Mike Huckabee.

There are two issues I'm wrestling with. First, am I really forgiving someone if I'm simply handing him off to be punished by another? True, by handing the person off I'm forgoing my own right to vengeance. But is that the same as forgiveness? Because it seems to me that forgoing vengeance, while necessary, is not a sufficient condition for forgiveness. They are not the same thing. Forgiveness goes further than "Welcome to Hell." (Not that I blame Huckabee for expressing that sentiment. See my comments on the "moral click" in my earlier post.)

These thoughts about forgiveness bring me to the second issue. Does it make any sense to command me to forgive my enemies when God will not forgive his enemies? As I understand it, Christians are to forgive everyone. However, God, according to some, is only going to forgive a select few. Which means human beings are being asked to do something that even God can't pull off. That humans are to be more merciful, more loving, and more forgiving than God. Which seems odd.

So how are we to think about a passage like Romans 12.19?

I think the most obvious thing to say is that Romans 12.9 is about behavior rather than theology. That is, Romans 12.19 isn't trying to describe God's personality of the nature of Divine Judgment. Romans 12.19 is, rather, a command: Do not take revenge.

This, I think, is the most important thing to take away from Romans 12.9, the call to nonviolence, to hand over to God our hate, blood lust, and thirst for revenge. Justice, payback, reprisals, getting even. All this is to be handed over to God.

I think this is the same logic found in the imprecatory psalms, where hate and vengeance is expressed toward enemies:

Psalm 137.8-9
O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
Happy is the one who pays you back
for what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who takes your babies
and smashes them against the rocks!

What is so shocking about these psalms is how hate is expressed as an act of worship. But I think that's the idea. The hate is handed over to God rather than directed at the perpetrators. The hate is for the sanctuary where the poison can be slowly drawn out.

So we get the general ethical idea behind Romans 12.19. Don't take vengeance into your own hands. Hand it over to God.

Still, this doesn't help us understand the asymmetry between divine and human forgiveness. That humans are commanded to forgive where God will not. That human love is to exceed God's love.

Here's a first pass about what I think is going on with all this, psychologically speaking.

Psychologists have studied for some time a phenomenon called just world belief. Just world belief is the psychological tendency to believe that the world is seeking to find a moral balance, that through God, karma, or fate everyone gets what they deserve in the end. That is, when bad things happen to people we are tempted to suspect that they "had it coming." You see this sort of thinking all the time and it's often expressed in religious language. For example, when a tsunami hits New Orleans you seem someone like Pat Robertson suggest that the Big Easy "deserved" what happened to it. And while it is easy (very easy) to see Pat Robertson as a nut job, the psychological research on just world belief suggests that we are all vulnerable to this sort of thinking. When something bad happens to our neighbors we darkly wonder, if only briefly, what might have been going on behind those closed doors...

Just world belief also explains why we tend to put halos around the rich, beautiful, talented or successful. Our tendency is to think that good things happen to good people and that bad things happen to bad people. So we moralize the rich and the poor, the successes and the failures.

The point in going into all this is that I think just world belief tends to frame how we think about God's vengeance. Specifically, everyday we look out on a world full of moral loose ends, a world full of victims and perpetrators. And in the face of all that injustice we want God to be the fixer who will make it all balance out in the end. On this earth we can't get every score settled, every rapist prosecuted, every murderer executed. Every Osama Bin Laden killed. And so, wanting the world to be a just world, we posit a god to make the mechanism work. If not justice in this life then in the next.

The problem with this idea is that it reduces the Christian God to a form of karma. And this isn't too surprising because just world thinking is simply another example of how Christian belief gets captured by what psychologists call magical thinking. (Just world belief is a form of magical thinking as it posits causes and effects that aren't rooted in physical laws. See my book Unclean for other examples of magical thinking in the Christian faith.) But even if it is natural, psychologically speaking, to posit God-as-karma, this isn't the Christian understanding. The whole notion of Divine love, grace, forgiveness, and self-offering ("Father forgive them.") suggests that the accounting books of justice are not "balanced" through a just world, God-as-karma mechanism. Rather, the "balancing" comes through God absorbing the wound of sin, dissipating it in the Divine love. I think this is what it means to say that Christ "became sin." The life and love of God, symbolized by the blood of Jesus, soaks up and absorbs the sin of the world. The residual of evil isn't balanced out via karma and just deserts. Rather, it is soaked up in the love of God. The violence that killed Jesus doesn't get a payback. It isn't balanced out with more "eye for an eye" violence. Rather, that sin is absorbed and dissipated by the love of "Father forgive them." In this sense, our love for our enemies isn't doing anything God hasn't already done. Our mercy shadows God's mercy. There is no one we can forgive that God won't forgive.

So where does that leave God's vengeance? If God isn't going to balance it all out with tit-for-tat then what is Romans 12:19 talking about with "vengeance is mine; I will repay"?

I can't say with any certainty what it all means, other than to express the worry that if Romans 12.19 is interpreted to mean "everyone gets what they deserve" we aren't, as best I can tell, talking about the God of Jesus Christ. We are, rather, talking about something quite different, something that seems primitive, pagan even--the just world belief of a balanced cosmic accounting.

To clarify, this isn't to say that I think perpetrators are going to get a free pass. That someone like Osama Bin Laden gets to waltz into heaven without any sort of reckoning. On this score, Huckabee has a point. There is hell to pay. But I think hell has to be understood against the background of God's love. Hell isn't a form of karma.

Let me end with this. I like the way Romans 12:19 says "leave room" for the wrath of God. It suggests, to me at least, that the wrath of God is a bit bigger than what I think it might be. That it includes some stuff I wouldn't think would be a part of the picture. It suggests that I might be a bit surprised about what the wrath of God looks like. And that only makes sense. My notion of vengeance is very small, very bound by my just world biases, my tacit belief in karma. But God's wrath? I suspect it's a bit different. A larger, more expansive view.

So I step back. And make room.

One of the most profound lessons I learned on our ACU Freedom Ride came from Dr. Bernard Lafayette--a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a founder of SNCC, an original freedom rider, and close associate of Dr. King.

The lesson came at the end of Dr. Lafayette's talk to our students. He was trying to bring home one more story about the foundations of nonviolence:

As a new student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville Lafayette was trying to find some music to study to in his dorm room. But all he could find was this gawd-awful hee-haw hillbilly music on the radio. No matter what channel he turned to all he could find was twangy, country redneck music.

Frustrated, he was about to switch off the radio. But decided to stop, ignore the sound the music, and simply listen to lyrics. And this is what he heard:

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One of the things that interests me most as a psychology of religion researcher is what we might call "folk theology." The word "folk" here is a reference to "the common people." So when we add "folk" in front of some academic discipline--folk psychology, folk philosophy, folk theology--we are speaking of how common, ordinary folk (non-specialists) reason and think about these subjects.

There is a great deal of interest in studying folk understandings. For example, take folk psychology. Let's say I go out on the street and ask people, "What makes people happy?" The answers I get are a sampling of folk psychology, the beliefs people have about the correlates of happiness. These ideas are of interest as they may or may not converge upon the scientific study of psychology. There may be a disjoint between folk psychology and scientific psychology. For example, it might be a widespread folk psychological belief that winning the lottery will make you happy. But the data on lottery winners might suggest otherwise (as indeed it does). Here, the folk psychology is mistaken. People are walking around with mistaken beliefs about the correlates of happiness. Folk psychological conceptions are leading us astray. In situations like this we might try to correct these folk conceptions with the empirical research. Obviously, if people are pursing the wrong things in the quest for happiness that's a problem we'd like to fix.

But this isn't to say that science always trumps folk conceptions. Very often, folk conceptions are found to be remarkably prescient and accurate.

Just like there is folk psychology there is folk theology.

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I'm in Jackson, Mississippi. Our Freedom Ride ends today. We're heading back home this morning. You can experience the entire ride on the ACU Freedom Ride blog. You can also get a quick overview here at the ACU Today blog.

You know what I've learned this week? That it's hard to run two blogs at the same time!

Anyhow, as this amazing week comes to a close, I've kept coming back to the life and work of Will Campbell. Campbell was a Southern preacher who was deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement. He was the only white preacher in attendance when Martin Luther King's SCLC was formed. Campbell was also one of the four preachers who escorted the Little Rock Nine to school.

I've thought of Campbell a lot on this trip because he helps me wrestle with my feelings regarding all the violence and the hate we've seen and heard about on this trip. For example, you see a lot of Klu Klux Klan displays in Civil Rights museums and footage.

How am I, as a Christian, to relate to these people?

One the the things I so respect about King's call to nonviolence is that it is a call to make a friend of our enemy. Late in the movement, with the rise of groups like the Black Panthers, that call to nonviolence was questioned and repudiated by many. And it's not hard to see why.

But for me, as I stand in front of Klan displays, can I see these people as fellow human beings? Worthy of respect and love? Or will I demonize these people and fall into the same trap that created their hate? Slip into the easy story of "the good guys versus the bad guys" that leads to the next iteration of violence?

Will Campbell began to be controversial in the movement because toward the end he started reaching out to the Klan. He did so because the gospel of Jesus was calling him to something greater that the liberal humanism and political activism that had motivated so much of the white religious response to the cause.

Campbell tells the story of his epiphany in his book Brother to a Dragonfly. I've slightly edited, for length, the excerpt from Richard Goode's edited volume of Campbell's work Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance. This story comes in the middle of the Civil Rights struggle:

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[Reposted from the ACU Freedom Ride blog:]

One of the reasons I’m attracted to the Civil Rights movement is the heroism. The heroism of the Freedom Summer volunteer, walking the dusty roads of Mississippi. The heroism of Rosa Parks, refusing to move from her seat. The heroism of Martin Luther King Jr., finding God at midnight in his kitchen after receiving a bomb threat. The heroism of the children of Birmingham, marching downtown to face fire hoses and police dogs. And the heroism of the Freedom Riders, who signed their last will and testaments before getting on the bus.

I know these stories. I’ve read the books, watched the documentaries, and gone to the museums. But rarely do you get a chance to meet the heroes.

Today we did.

Today was a day I’ll never forget. One of the great days of my teaching career (and I’m sure David and Jennifer would agree).

Today the ACU Freedom Riders got to meet James Zwerg.

In the summer of 1961 the first Freedom Riders started off in Washington, DC planning to drive through the South to New Orleans. Along the way they planned to test the recently passed legislation desegregating interstate transportation, both on the buses and in the bus stations.

Things went smoothly until they met a mob in Anniston, Alabama. At the Greyhound station a mob attacked the bus and slashed its tires. The bus raced out of town west on Highway 78 toward Birmingham. The mob followed in cars and trucks. A few miles outside of town the bus broke down and the driver ran off in panic. The bus was firebombed and the passengers badly beaten. The riders faced even more violence when they arrived in Birmingham. Feeling they had brought enough attention to the cause, the shaken riders stopped the ride, finishing the journey by taking a plane from Birmingham to New Orleans.

This outcome didn’t sit well with many of the college students in Nashville who were veterans of the Nashville sit-in movement. So a group of these students vowed to finish the Freedom Ride, to get all the way to New Orleans on a bus. Schooled and trained in the methods of nonviolence, their reasoning was simple: Violence cannot have the last word. We have to ride. Even if we die. We have to ride.

So they signed their last wills and testaments and got on the bus. They saw the pictures of the Anniston attack. They knew what lay ahead.

One of those riders was a white college student named James Zwerg.

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With summer coming Jana and I start searching around for audio books that we can take with us during our summer travels. We are huge fans of audio books. Nothing makes the miles fly by more quickly than if you are engrossed in a good audio book. In fact, that is how Jana and I read the Harry Potter books, listening to Jim Dale's wonderful audio performance. When I think of how the characters sound in Harry Potter I think of Dale's interpretations rather than the voices from the movies.

Anyhow, the other day I was looking at audio books in a local bookstore and came across The Bible Experience. Generally speaking, I'd avoid an audio book about the Bible. I've heard audio versions of the Bible before and I can't imagine any of them keeping me awake. But The Bible Experience looks like it might be different. I'm intrigued, for instance, to hear Denzel Washington read the Song of Solomon.



So, does anyone own The Bible Experience? What do you think of it?

As regular readers know, I've been planning, for a quite a few years now, to create a class at ACU that would be a bus tour through the Civil Rights south. Earlier this year I announced that the class had become a reality, thanks largely to the work of Dr. David Dillman, my ACU colleague in Political Science (as well as his wife Dr. Jennifer Dillman in Sociology, the three of us are leading/teaching the class).

Well, the class started yesterday! We left Abilene at 7:00 am, heading for Memphis via Little Rock. You can follow our adventures on our class blog here.

One fortuitous aspect of this trip is that this summer is the 50th Anniversary of the original freedom ride. More, that ride was on the road (getting off on May 14th, 1961) during the very week we are on the road. Given the anniversary, if you are in the US tonight (check local listings) American Experience is airing an original documentary about the Freedom Rides on PBS this evening. Even if you aren't in the US the American Experience website has lots of clips from the film that you can watch online.

As I noted a little over a week ago, I decided not to rush any public meditations about my thoughts and reactions regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden. And I still don't want to get too close that subject. What I'd like to talk about is the Christian response to the killing of Bin Laden and why it seemed so mixed.

I think it would be fair to say that the response of the Christian community to the news of Bin Laden's death was one of ambivalence. On the one hand there were feelings of relief, satisfaction, and even joy. On the other hand there was also a call for restraint, a plead for a more sober reaction in light of Jesus' command to love one's enemies. Add into that mix complex feelings about the relationship between the church and the State and, well, reactions were all over the map.

What I want to talk about were those feelings of moral satisfaction most of us felt when we heard the news. Upon hearing the news of Bin Laden's death most of us experienced a moral "click," a feeling that something out of joint suddenly snapped back into place. The moral balance sheets of the Cosmos, ten years in the red, had moved back into the black.

Where do these feelings come from? And how should Christians relate to those feelings?

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You hear a lot of Bob Marley on college campuses. Yes, even Christian campuses! Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Marley's death. I found this article--Free Bob Marley! He's been hijacked by stoned suburban teenagers--by Field Maloney over at Slate to be an interesting read. Particularly his comparison of Marley's American fans and those in the third world:

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Tonight is one of my favorite nights of the year as the Department Chair of ACU's Department of Psychology (I know, hard to believe but I'm actually in charge of stuff. In fact, I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that I have a business card. They gave me a box of them awhile back, but I just use them as bookmarks.)

Tonight is the night when we take our graduating seniors and graduate students out to Perini Ranch for a celebratory dinner. For a graduation gift we give the seniors a copy of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (probably the #1 must read in psychology) signed by the faculty. It's special night.

But I was nervous all day because we were eating outside and the forecast was calling for rain. I called my administrative coordinator to check with Perini's about what we might do if it did rain. Nothing much, it turned about. So my admin coordinator signed off her email with "I guess we'll just have to pray that the weather holds off."

Normally, I'd have just read that line and moved on. But today my mind lingered on that sentiment, "I guess we'll just have to pray..."

Two thoughts went through my head. The first was that I wondered if my admin coordinator really meant for me to pray. Most likely she didn't. References to prayer, here in the Bible Belt of America, are very common. Almost idiomatic. That is, the statement "I guess we'll just have to pray" is generally the equivalent of "let's just hope" or "let's keep our fingers crossed." And I wondered if that is a good thing, about how in many Christian communities the reference to "prayer" is just a Christianized version of "keep your fingers crossed."

The other thought that went through my head is that when I read the words "I guess we'll just have to pray that the weather holds off" I knew, immediately, that I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't pray for the weather to hold off. Why? Because I don't pray for things like that.

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Continuing on with our "discerning of the spirits," thinking about the spirituality of Web 2.0, what I'm calling the Angel of the iPhone.

In the last post we talked about the obvious, the true human goods provided by Web 2.0 and mobile connectivity. Here in this post I'd like to think about some of the ways that the Angel of the iPhone might be failing to fully deliver on that wonderful word "connected."

Rather than write about all this, let me simply point you to two TED talks that raise some of the relevant issues.

Eli Pariser discussing "filter bubbles" on the Web and how they can create Web 2.0 ghettos--a Web of One.



Sherry Turkle on her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (H/T to Emma for the heads up about Turkle's work):

I'm needing a little midrash help. Jump in to give any guidance.

At the end of last week's prison bible study one of the inmates asked for my opinion about a curious little story in Exodus 4 where God tries to kill Moses.

Yes, God tried to kill Moses. Here's the story:

Exodus 4.21-26
The LORD said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go. Then say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.’”

At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the LORD let him alone.

You got to love the Bible! By the way, the phrase of the title "a bloody husband art thou to me" is how the King James Version renders what the NIV here gives as "you are a bridegroom of blood to me."

Some background to the story. In Exodus 2 Moses marries Zipporah, a Gentile, who gives birth to Gershom. We can make the assumption that Gershom is the uncircumcised son of Moses in Exodus 4 (yet, 4.20 states that Moses had "sons" so we can't be sure).

So what happened?

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If we are going to "discern the spirits" in association with iPhones and Web 2.0 generally we need to start with the good stuff. iPhones and Facebook are awesome!

Again, as I said in Part 1, these aren't going to be Luddite posts. I love my iPhone, and while I'm not on Facebook or Twitter I am, obviously, a huge fan of blogging--a signature of Web 2.0.

Here's my little Web 2.0 testimonial. In 2006 I was feeling kind of lonely. I had a lot of good friends, but I was struggling, socially, to find outlets for all the stuff that was rumbling around in my head. And to find someone who thrilled to the ideas I was kicking around and would join in. I think people are generally unprepared for the sheer volume of stuff I think about. If you ask me, in a passing social encounter, what I've been thinking about you are asking for a two hour conversation. If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you know what I'm talking about. But given that I have a modicum of social skills, I don't inflict two hour discussions on people. So while my friends were interested in what I was thinking about I had too much to say, too much to communicate. I needed another outlet.

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I don't like to borrow things wholesale from other blogs. Not without some significant commentary from myself to accompany it. However, as I have yet to share my own reactions about the death of Osama Bin Laden, I'd like to share with you something that, among all the things I've read online about this, has deeply affected me. It is a letter from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's The Dish regarding his response, as a 9/11 survivor, to the news of Bin Laden's death. The mix of raw human pathos combined with the profound Christian witness of the final line just needed to be shared. With apologies to Mr. Sullivan, here is the whole letter:

I am a World Trade Center survivor. I was on the 62nd floor of Tower One when the first plane struck and I was in the police command center in WTC 5 when WTC 2 collapsed on top of us. I am also a Catholic.

When I turned away from the Mets-Phillies game Sunday night to watch the President “announce” the news that everyone already seemed to know, I had no mixed emotions.

That son a bitch killed my friends, colleagues, fellow New Yorkers, fellow Americans, fellow human beings. Worse still, he inspired thousands, if not more, to take up a blind nihilism as their credo, ostensibly in the name of Allah, “the merciful, the compassionate”. All the pain he has brought to this world has not been reckoned and may not be reckoned in our lifetimes. I sat on my couch Sunday night and poured a large glass of Irish whiskey and toasted the death of the man who had tried to kill me. “Fuck you" I said out loud.

Then I went upstairs and looked in on my three sleeping children - my oldest born in 2002 - and I kissed them all. Then I settled in next to my wife - my beautiful wife, who will be married to me ten years tomorrow, and who is carrying our fourth child. She for many long hours thought her husband of five months was crushed to death in the towers. I put my hand upon her belly and I closed my eyes and I prayed that Osama bin Laden would know the fullness of Christ’s mercy.

Postscript:
For one of the best theological meditations on Christian forgiveness and the memory of wrongdoings let me recommend Miroslav Volf's The End of Memory.

Last week Rachel asked me to participate, along with many others and the entire Christian blogosphere, in The Rally to Restore Unity. You can follow and participate in the Rally on Rachel's blog and on Facebook (I'm not on Facebook so I don't know where to go exactly, but Rachel's blog has the Facebook link.)

I missed Rachel's deadline to send her few lines on this subject and I've been slow to come up with something of value to share this week.

The trouble I'm having is this. Whenever I tried to write anything on this topic I couldn't stop preaching to the choir. That is, I expect that if you are participating in the Rally to Restore Unity then you think Christian unity is more important than doctrinal distinctives. Which, let's face it, kind of marks you as a liberal. The point is, if you think a bit of doctrine is critical to salvation then you are not going to be able to let that go. Nor should you if this doctrine is critical to salvation. But that's the rub, isn't it? Is doctrine critical to salvation? If you don't think so you can go to the Rally. If you do think so, well, the Rally is going to feel like an ice cube dropped down your shirt.

All this is the predictable product of the psychology of moral conviction. The work of psychologist Linda Skitka is helpful here. According to Skitka a moral conviction is characterized by these three features:

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As most of you know, 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the 1611 Authorized Version, what we call the King James Version of the bible. There have been a host of tributes already this year.

One of my favorite tributes has been the recent one by Christopher Hitchens, yes the Christopher Hitchens, in Vanity Fair entitled When the King Saved God:

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Last night after putting the boys to bed I logged onto Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish and saw he was live blogging something. I surfed around and found out that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by American Special Operations Forces. I called out to Jana and told her the news. We turned on the TV, found Brian Williams on NBC, and watched the President's address and the resultant celebrations at the White House and Ground Zero in NY.

What to say?

Actually, I really don't want to say anything. That's why I haven't posted about this until now. And I'm posting now simply to announce that I don't have anything to say. Well, more precisely, I have a lot to say, but it's all jumbled up inside of me. I have my psychological reactions, my theological reactions, my American reactions, my Christian reactions, my pacifist reactions, my just war reactions, my Yoderian reactions, my Niebuhrian reactions, and on and on and on...

I have too much to say. I have nothing to say. And it has all been said before. Over and over.

I'm opting for silence.

Pax Christi.

I've titled these posts "The Angel of the iPhone." I'd like to explain that phrase.

If you're familiar with the work of Walter Wink, or have read my posts on The Demons and the Powers (see the sidebar), you know where I'm going. Specifically, the idea here is trying to recapture the close association--the parallelism--the ancients saw between the physical and the spiritual. The notion that every physical power is also understood to be a spiritual power.

Three examples from the bible to illustrate this idea:

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