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.