For less than a dollar a day, you can neglect this child

"For the record, minimum wage in Honduras is over a dollar an hour. The rest of Central America is similar.On the off chance you care."

This was a tweet-response that a classmate of mine wrote today as we hit some final topics in our Theology and Culture, while the professor talked about Globalization.  And my immediate response was to jokingly say who does care?  Not because that's what I actually think, but that's how I think we actually operate.  


But then the thought occurred to me.  We get outraged (or pretend to be) by the unequal distribution of wealth.  And I think that reveals an underlying worship of money.  We see our global neighbors living in squalor, and if we're motivated enough, we throw some money at them--or try to.  And how much actually gets to where we think it needs to go, anyway?  How much is our belief system Money Will Make It All Better actually working?


I don't really see money as the actual source of happiness and well-being. Quality of life is not exclusively linked to finances.


So when I see my friend's comment about the wages in Central America, I don't get particularly outraged or saddened.  What I want to know is, do they have access to education? Health care?  Sanitation? Avenues of communication? Vaccines? Clean water? Governments and police forces run with far less corruption?


But Nicky, you say, those things take money.  And yes, that can't be gotten away from, in the current state of our world. But what I am saying, is that if we simply send more money, or get the minimum wage to be doubled in Honduras, the problems aren't going to go away. 


I'm asking, what will it take to improve the quality of life for those people who make $1 per hour? I'm suggesting it will take more than our money.  It takes our participation.  It takes our community. 

At that point, we can bring our cash with us if we like.

About Religion Ch. 10: Indifference

In the end, I find that although I understood Mark C. Taylor’s about religion more than I had expected, I still understood it less than I had hoped.

Having said that, however, I can taste the urge toward Christ that I think he’s getting at in the last chapter. I can hear an echo of the quizzical declaration “I am that I AM” that thundered – however quietly – from the burning bush. We’re familiar with the statement, and so it doesn’t always seem that complicated or profound. But it is.

But as I try to push through Taylor’s closing thoughts, and there is so much in the last chapter, it could pretty much stand alone, my mind ticks along both with and against him.

“With the loss of gravity, nothing remains serious. When nothing weighs us down, we loose our moorings and are left to float freely.”

I suppose that might sum up the things that I’ve been thinking—not just this quarter but all year. In a sense it feels like a mistake to try to push into God, to learn more, to understand more, to wield more. It feels like a mistake because we can forget more, mistake more, hurt more. It has a gravity that you don’t really understand until it’s too late.


*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion Ch 9: Learning Curves

In Japanese culture, there is the understanding that space and time are inseparable. They call this MA. It is a concept that is asserted in the sculpture of artist Richard Serra. The whole business is very complex, and for the most part, I think I follow what Taylor is saying about it. But at the same time, I am distracted by the memory of a scene from an old episode of Tiny Toon Adventures—a cartoon I watched after school when I was much younger.
In the episode, all the characters are presenting student film projects that they have done, and one girl (who’s name I can’t remember—I tried to find the clip for you but had no luck) had a LONG clip that was supposed to be metaphysical, or transcendental or something. Instead, it was so obtuse that no one got it but her.
That’s how I feel looking at Serra’s sculptures pictured in the book.



*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion Ch 8: Apprehension

Here, Taylor introduces us to the minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback:

“When art works, it provokes the return of the repressed by rendering apprehension apprehensible.  The art that really matters turns us toward that which turns away from us and from which we tend to turn away.  This is what Sandback’s empty sculptures to.  They are effective because they are about nothing.  When art is about nothing, it surrounds the nothingness that surrounds it.  By de-limiting nothing, the work of art exposes us to the void in whose midst we are destined to dwell.  In the seemingly tranquil spaces framed by fuzzy lines drawn by thin strands of yarn, nothing is apprehensible.” 

And while I can’t say that I find the installation world-altering, reading about the context in Taylor’s book does paint Sandback’s work as inspired and intriguing.  I find myself staring at that piece of acrylic black yarn and thinking that it is more inspiring than any Thomas Kinkade painting I’ve ever seen. I wish I could be in the space, with the book and just take a moment to inhale the empty space and see the connections made—that must look entirely arbitrary—and just ponder what I might learn about my own life in that moment.

How’s that for unexpected?

*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

California Girl

What follows is an approximation of an actual conversation between a friend and myself in the recent past. It should be noted that  ever since I decided to come to Fuller, my friend has been pessimistic about the prospects of my ever returning to Idaho. Here, she was trying to determine the chances of my return: 

My friend: So, are you a Californian yet?

Me: Well, I was forced to get a California license. Does that count?

My friend: not especially.  What else?

Me: Well, I have lived here for several months and I really do like it. Oh, and I also wear really big sunglasses now.

My friend: ok, what else?

Me:  Um, lets see.  I've taken up yoga, and I only drink soy lattes now.

My friend: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

About Religion Ch 7 The Virtual Kingdom

“When art becomes so abstract that it is irrelevant, it provokes efforts to develop socially useful art; conversely when art becomes so worldly that everything seems to be art, strategies to create critical distance begin to emerge. The history of art in this century can be understood as the dialectical interplay of these two contrasting tendencies.”

So, once again it comes back to tension. Conflict and tension. Apparently it is the very thing we run on—we need it to create, to motivate, to inspire, to move. Without it we are bored, lethargic, gluttonous, lazy, passive and cruel. This must somehow be hard wired into us, right with the impulse to bite that first apple.

We aren’t self-starters after all.

“The Fall”, as we put it, wasn’t a surprise to God. But it is to us.

And not to credit God with the creation of Evil or anything so extreme, but it seems to me that he knows how he built this crazy, complex existence with far more intricacy than we could possibly ever realize.


*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion Ch. 6 Christianity and the Capitalism of Spirit

What is the Currency of God?

Does He deal in inflation?

Does the price of art fluctuate in the Kingdom?

This is a total play on a sub heading in this chapter—and not really what the chapter is about, but Mark C. Taylor heads a section here with the phrase “The Currency of God”.

It makes me wonder, though, because the phrase “economy of God” is so dang popular. I use it—and I use it with purpose. I like the phrase, frankly because it usually helps me make a point.

And Mark C. Taylor makes another: our Protestantism is married to our capitalism in ways that we don’t even want to acknowledge.


*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

Quote of the Day

"People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."
~C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Quote of the Day

"In a world where illusions are real and the real is illusory, creatio ex nihilo becomes 'I create nothing.'"

Mark C. Taylor
About Religion

For Your Consideration: Derek Webb - "I Love/Hate You"

About Religion Ch 5: Terminal Condition

We like to look at our current condition with both fear and awe, and at any given moment, we are either terrified at the coming dawn or inspired by it.   We hold our past in a kind of glorified nostalgia tempered with distain: where our origins were both more pure and simple, but also darker and more primitive.  It is a tension that we are generally unable to maintain simultaneously; and so we choose to either vilify or exalt whatever helps us in our current position. 

When we recognize our trajectory as characterized by reckless speed and abandon, we cannot help but see the past as a comforting home that we’ve all but abandoned.  We certainly had it better then. 

When we recognize the inadequacies of our current context, we cannot but hope for the champion of the future to come and make our problems go away.

*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion Ch 4 Minding the Brain

“As technological innovations hasten the globalization of culture, the need to cultivate channels of communication that effectively cut across social and political boundaries grows ever more urgent.”

Could this be more evident in the current state of affairs within generation gaps? Of course it has (largely) always been the case that from one generation to another, there seems to be an inherent default setting toward misunderstanding one another. But I see this truly present in the moment. There is a whole generation who are completely at home with the phrase “global village” and who understand that to function in the dawning millennium is to engage the global village and find one’s constructive place in it.

There is also a generation who know the term quite well, and frankly, vilify it.

Where are you?

Why?



*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion: Ch. 3 Politics of a Theory

An interesting and obviously complicated man, Freud had the majority of the surface of the desk covered in figurines of ancient deities and other anthropological curios. Apparently, although not a religious man himself, these little statues and the ideas they represent were inspiring to him. It makes me wonder, what nicabrick do we allow to overrun the spaces in our lives, and to what end?—Especially when we profess that the religious ideas that those items represent aren’t in line with the tenants of our belief systems.
I haven’t really studied Freud, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that those little figurines and the ideas they represent were much more influential to him than he was ever willing to admit.
And so I wonder: how many false idols are scattered around my living space? How much do I secretly cherish them?


*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

About Religion: Ch. 2 Denegating God

In Chapter 2, Taylor takes us through an exercise in a kind of home-brewed double-negative cryptology.  My roommate is a psych student, and she was recently telling me about why the phrase “I am not a crook” was a total career-disaster for Nixon.  Basically, our brains don’t process negative statements (as in to negate) as quickly and easily as positive ones.  Our knee-jerk reaction to a statement like “I am not a crook” is to doubt it’s true.  We would be more ready to believe a statement like “I am honest”. 

Beginning this chapter, I doubted if Taylor had ever had the privilege of living with a psych student.  Granted, I realize that his words are carefully chosen, and that the point he’s making wouldn’t be made if he’d chosen the easier phrasing for his sentences. 

Still, it was exhausting to fight through.  

*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

Quote of the Day

"If in our pursuit of greater theological knowledge God has gotten smaller, we've been deceived along the way."

~Beth Moore, Believing God

About Religion

As you have seen previously, several of my classmates and I are participating in a little academic experiment.  Instead of turning in a lame, obligatory, just-to-prove-I-read-the-book two page paper (which isn't really enough space to do anything but prove--hopefully--that you actually have read the book) many of us are choosing to respond to our required reading through alternative methods:  Twitter and blogging.

I have chosen to alternate between both virtual mediums, and over the next few days you will probably see posts from a few selected chapters of our next book, Mark C. Taylor's About Religion.  I've begun to look at this book already, and it's a doozy.  I don't promise I'll understand the point he's making, but I'll do my darnedest to at least find something I can sink my teeth into and write about that. 


If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500

For your consideration

An interesting video I stumbled across this morning.  Perhaps even an interesting lead-in for the discussion we'll be having today in my Theology and Culture class about Body.