Insights: Spring 2021 "Beauty in the Church's Mission" with Professor David White

Beauty in the Church’s Mission

Insights The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

SPRING 2021

White • Goto • Rogers • Quesada-Palm Arnold • Campbell-Taylor • Garrity • Sturgess Reyes • Smith • Park

Insights

The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

Spring 2021

Volume 136

Number 2

Editor: William Greenway Editorial Board: Carolyn Helsel, Eric Wall, and Randal Whittington The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Margaret Aymer Gregory L. Cuéllar Bridgett Green William Greenway Carolyn B. Helsel Phillip Browning Helsel Paul K. Hooker David H. Jensen David W. Johnson Bobbi Kaye Jones

Timothy D. Lincoln Jennifer L. Lord Song-Mi Suzie Park Cynthia L. Rigby Asante U. Todd Eric Wall Theodore J. Wardlaw David F. White Melissa Wiginton Andrew Zirschky

Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: wgreenway@austinseminary.edu Web site: austinseminary.edu Entered as non-profit class bulk mail at Austin, Texas, under Permit No. 2473. POSTMASTER: Address service requested. Send to Insights, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797.

Printing runs are limited. Permission to copy articles from Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary for educational purposes may be given by the editor upon receipt of a written request. © Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary The past six issues of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary are available on our website: AustinSeminary.edu/Insights. Some previous issues are available on microfilm through University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (16 mm microfilm, 105 mm microfiche, and article copies are available). Insights is indexed in Religion Index One: Periodicals, Index to Book Reviews in Religion, Religion Indexes: RIO/RIT/IBRR 1975- on CD-ROM, Religious & Theological Abstracts, url:www.rtabstracts.org & email:admin@rtabstracts.org, and the ATA Religion Database on CD-ROM, published by the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606-6701; telephone: 312-454-5100; e-mail: atla@atla.com; web site: www.atla.com; ISSN 10560548.

COVER: “Hidden life in Nazareth” by Ivanka Demchuk; 40 x 30cm, mixed media on canvas

and wood, ©2019; used with permission from the artist. View more of Demchuk’s artwork here: https://ivannademchuk.wixsite.com/artist/portfolio?lang=en

Contents

2 Introduction

Theodore J. Wardlaw

Beauty in the Church’s Mission 3

Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World

by David F. White

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The Spiritual Significance of Beauty

An Interview with David White

16

Reflections

Create an Altar at Home

by Courtney T. Goto

Searching for Beauty

by Frank Rogers Jr.

Theater as Acts of Uncrippling

by Dessa Quesada-Palm

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Pastors’ Panel Talitha Arnold, Leigh Campbell-Taylor, Hannah Garrity, Mark Sturgess

33 Faculty Books

The ABCs of Diversity: Helping Kids (and Ourselves!) Embrace our Differences, by Carolyn B. Helsel et al, reviewed by Patrick B. Reyes Empire, The British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century, by Gregory Cuéllar, reviewed by Kay Higuera Smith

36 Christianity and Culture The Messiness of Families, Today and in the Bible

by Song Mi Suzie Park

Introduction

A

seven-year-old Church of Christ kid from Mississippi went with his father to Baltimore, where his uncle and dad took him to an unforgettable evening watching the Orioles play baseball at Memorial Stadium. Reflecting on that experience later, he remembered that “it was the most beautiful thing I had ever witnessed. I left the ballpark that night with a mysterious ache to be part of such poetry.” Naturally, the boy went on to play Little League baseball and to learn from it. Years later as a theologian, he kept pondering the beauty of baseball—and the beauty of, well, beauty! With the help of such scholars as Elaine Scarry, John Locke, Simone Weil, J.R.R. Tolkien, St. Augustine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and perhaps especially Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Little Leaguer-cum-theologian now, blessedly, labors on this campus and continues to plumb the depths of beauty. Spoiler alert: it’s about more than just baseball. Beauty suggests, Professor David White says, “an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics.” It is ubiquitous, “a ‘wake-up call’ to the plenitude of life.” It is “a chain joining finity and infinity, this world and the depths of God.” Indeed White says, “We as the church are called to be Christ’s living body, manifesting God’s beauty ‘in the style of love,’ and beauty can be our first word as we advance God’s will on earth …”

White’s lead article beckons us to consider beauty in the church’s ministry— not just by paying attention to beautiful things, but finally by becoming beautiful things. He is joined in this issue of Insights by others manifesting God’s beauty.

Courtney Goto, especially in this pandemic time when all of us are disconnected from the holy spaces where our religious communities’ altars are located, writes of working with her students at Boston University School of Theology to create “home altars,” and she invites us to experience the creativity of building our own.

Expressing beauty as an act of “uncrippling” happens in many ways. Dessa Quesada Palm, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker and the artistic director of theater arts for young creatives in the Philippines, observes that the work of young people telling their stories through theater—“imploring communities to listen, to feel, and to act in ways to change the situation”—is their way of “praising God and inviting people to heed the Lord’s prayer that God’s ‘will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’” Old Testament professor Suzie Park reflects upon the role that beauty plays in mending “fractured familial relationships”—among biblical characters as well as those whom we call family. And Frank Rogers Jr., tells the astonishing story surrounding Sixto Rodriguez—“equal parts street poet, social critic, and troubadour holy man”—which illustrates how, as Rogers warns, “Life’s sacred right to flourish is being marred. Beauty is violated.”

This issue of Insights explores beauty from many angles. Read on—it is beautiful!

Theodore J. Wardlaw President, Austin Seminary

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Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World Beauty and the Church’s Ministry David F. White

W

hen I was a child in the 1960s, most summer Saturday mornings were filled with household chores. As my family cleaned, mowed, and cooked, the air was filled with the rich tones of our Lucite radio blaring the playby-play of some distant baseball game, usually my beloved New York Yankees. When I was seven, my family traveled from Mississippi to visit relatives in Maryland. To our delight, my Maryland uncle had secured tickets for my father and me to see the Baltimore Orioles play at Memorial Stadium. We sat behind home plate about ten rows up. Nestled between my father and uncle, crunching Cracker Jacks, I breathlessly awaited the opening pitch. I can still recall the giant halide stadium lights, the smell of new-mown grass in the outfield, the red dirt in the batter’s box, the cloud rising from the resin bag on the pitcher’s mound, and the growling Hammond organ. When the players took the field, I was astonished by the magnificence of their uniforms, their resplendent knee-breeches, the orange Oriole embroidered on their caps and sleeves, the sensual click of their metal cleats. Although Church of Christ kids were expected to suppress such feelings, to me these players were gods.

When the action commenced, I was instantly drawn into the game’s ballet—the pitcher’s windup, his showdown with a defiant batter, the fielders cheating right or left adjusting to the swing of the batter, the baserunners’ acrobatic hook slide,

David White is The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Chris-

tian Education at Austin Seminary. Educated at Asbury Seminary and Claremont School of Theology, he is ordained in the United Methodist Church. He has written several books including Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry (2020). He served recently as a scholar in the Theology of Joy and the Good Life project at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

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Beauty in the Church’s Mission the catchers’ surgical throw to second base, and the over-the-shoulder-catch of a long fly ball. Ordinary acts of throwing, catching, and running were transformed into artistry that seemed to capture the human longing for excellence, cooperation, fairness, respect, even love. Individual players performed with excellence; their performances were made more excellent by the harmony of the whole team. To my seven-year-old eyes, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever witnessed. I left the ballpark that night with a mysterious ache to be a part of such poetry. The next week I convinced my father to buy me a mitt, and shortly thereafter he signed me up for my first Little League baseball team. Baseball’s goodness was confirmed to me over the next eleven years as I played on various teams in assorted positions, and with variable degrees of success. While my teammates and I never achieved the beauty or excellence of Frank Robinson or Boog Powell, we had our moments in the sun. I still have dreams in which I am swinging my bat and connecting solidly with a baseball. Sometimes now, sitting in my office, I hear the crack of a bat or the pop of a glove from a local park and am instantly transported. I can feel the sun on my face and the wool of my old uniform; I can smell my leather mitt and my sweat-stained cap from all those years ago.

Baseball first appealed to my heart, and later to my body as I learned its good rhythms, and only finally to my mind as an abstract truth. If, instead of taking me to see the Orioles at age seven, I had been given a book of rules, strategies, or facts, it would not have been nearly as compelling. Perceiving the concrete beauty of baseball set me on a path of lifelong enjoyment, play, and study. Participating in baseball’s beauty called forth abilities and virtues—hand-eye coordination, speed for running bases and catching long outfield flies, cooperation with my teammates, the ethics of losing (a lot), and the joy of playing well. Baseball’s beauty obliged me to share nearly every summer afternoon with neighborhood friends in local sandlots. Without beauty, baseball would involve mere technique, its strategies and statistics would be mere information. Rational thought seeks to map reality; beauty invites us to participate in its dance.

Today, a quiet renaissance of interest in beauty is taking shape as theological disciplines resist the Cartesian notion that humans are purely “thinking things” mastering a disenchanted world. In the popular imagination, the notion of beauty frequently calls to mind cosmetic surfaces, sexual allure, or vain triviality, yet beauty was once key to a coherent metaphysics signaling the wondrous depth of a particular being, of being itself, and of God. To reclaim beauty as more than mere decoration, we must attend to its existential, metaphysical, and theological significance. As implied in my baseball analogy, beauty suggests an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics. Beauty is best grasped not by definition, but by multiple partial and halting insights. In the following paragraphs, I will gesture to a more fulsome notion of beauty, especially as it is taken up into Christian faith.

The Depths of Beauty Beauty is ubiquitous. It appears on the vastest scales (as in the amazing photographs taken by the Hubble telescope of distant galaxies) and on the most minute (as in 4

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the Fibonacci pattern in a head of sunflower seeds). While beauty seems to play a role in natural selection, it cannot be reduced to this purpose. Dutch biologist F.J.J Buytendijk writes, “to put it simply, the birds are singing much more than Darwin permits.”1 Beauty’s excess is woven into the fabric of creation.

Harvard aestheticist Elaine Scarry observes that when we encounter beauty we experience a surplus of aliveness, a “wake-up call” to the plenitude of life. “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.”2 Beauty palpably reminds that the world cannot be reduced to its efficient causes, that all things participate in a mystery that cannot be explained rationally without remainder, but exists as an “invisible nimbus of gratuity.”3 There is an overwhelming given-ness in the beautiful, and it is discovered in astonishment, in an awareness of something fortuitous, adventitious, essentially indescribable, only in the moment of response, from the position of one already addressed and only now able to reply.

Unlike reason, subject to endless charges of subjective bias, beauty is objective— it possesses a phenomenal priority. We may quibble over how to interpret it, but we cannot doubt its existence.4 There seems to be more agreement over the beautiful than the truth.5 Beauty’s authority is manifestly a public announcement, not a gnostic secret. According to Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, “Beauty proclaims God’s glory and creation’s goodness with equal eloquence and truthfulness in each moment, in each interval within being.”6 Beauty holds a certain ethical significance. According to Scarry, “Beauty establishes a contract or covenant between the perceiver and the beautiful object, compelling the perceiver to attend carefully to and protect the ‘aliveness’ of the beautiful object.”7 In the moment we perceive beauty, we are absorbed into the world, joining the community of beauty. In the words of French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, beauty requires us to “give up our imaginary position at the center. A transformation takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.”8 British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch tells of a day when she was anxious, resentful, and brooding, preoccupied with her problems; but how upon seeing a beautiful kestrel flying above her, all of the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, and advancing the self was now free to be in the service of something else.9 In the aesthetic moment of wakefulness, one is moved to cherish the other. Beauty makes us want to share it with others, friends, and strangers, and thus participate in beauty’s own eros. People gather at art galleries and museums to share experiences of beauty. According to museum gift shops, a common postcard message says, “The impressionists are breathtakingly beautiful; I wish you were here! Come as soon as you can.”10 Beauty brings copies of itself into being. Scarry notes that the philosopher Wittgenstein “says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.”11 It makes us want to reproduce it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes, the imitation of beauty crosses sensory modes, such as when the smooth cheek of a child prompts a caress or inspires us to play with them 5

Beauty in the Church’s Mission or care for them. This crisscrossing of senses prompted Augustine to think of God when he touched something smooth and pleasant. Theorists of child development believe that before the onset of language, young children perceive all stimuli crossmodally. Psychoanalyst Daniel Stern observes that the “child-directed speech” of a parent to their infant involves rounded, alternating high to low pitch, affect-laden speech, such as “helllll-ooooo…bayyyyy-beeee.”12 Such sing-song words offer an aesthetic embrace that invites the infant’s attention, attunes it, and draws it near.

In a recent study, researchers ran an endless loop of a recording of Chinese mothers cooing to their infants. They were surprised to find that graduate students under stress came frequently to sit in the room and listen, to comfort themselves.13 The mothers’ beautiful cooing, even in an unknown Chinese dialect, traversed fields, crossed modes, affected moods and behaviors of not only their infants but also of graduate students in an entirely different culture. Beauty seems not to be, as Kierkegaard supposed, simply a bourgeois affectation that circles in upon itself, but instead it drives toward filling the world with its quality.

Beauty affects a shift in historical perspective beyond present troubles and contradictions. In Only a Promise of Happiness, philosopher Alexander Nehamas concludes that beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it.14 Hart states that “Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time’s tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty seems to absolve being of its violences.”15 In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King we find Frodo and Sam hunted by dark forces taking rest for the night.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.16 Beauty’s light touches the intellect with the initial stirrings of cognition.

According to Hart, The truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates.17 For the Greeks and many Church fathers, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty were transcendentals, qualities of every particular being by virtue of existence which are perfected in God. In his exposition on Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas holds that God, the supreme Beauty, is God’s own existence, ipsum esse subsistens, hence all things only have being by participating in God’s extant beauty.18 As such, beauty is a chain 6

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joining finity and infinity, this world and the depths of God. Because earthly beauty participates in God it marks a spiritual ascent to God. Pseudo Dionysius identifies beauty as the divine perfection that accounts for the good’s allure.19 Beauty is the divine perfection that serves as the foundation for love (as a name for God) and any other that pertains to the good’s attraction.

Beauty in the Biblical/Theological Tradition Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that theology is “supposed to be the study of the fire and light that burn at the centre of the world.

Theologians had reduced it to the turning of pages in a desiccated catalogue of ideas, a kind of butterfly collection for the mind.”20 Philosopher Maurice Blondel warned in 1870 of the danger in treating God in this way: “As soon as we regard him (sic) from without as a mere object of knowledge, or a mere occasion for speculative study, without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have in our hands nothing but a phantom and an idol.”21 For Balthasar the living God must be supremely concrete; not something abstract. He saw this everywhere in the Bible.

Genesis (1:31) speaks of God creating and consecrating creation as good (tov) which can also be translated as harmonious or beautiful. Psalm 19:1 (NASB) tells us “The heavens are telling of the glory [kavod, dripping with glory] of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” According to biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad, Israel’s most intensive encounter with beauty was in the religious sphere. In the priestly tradition, the focus of Israel’s rapt delight was the glory of God perceived as a reflection of the transcendent (I Kings 8:11) or as otherworldly brilliance, “the heavenly robe or light in which glory is clothed which, though fatal to mortal eyes, must with the divine triumph fill the whole earth” (Ezekiel 38:18; Isaiah 6:3; 40:5; 60:1ff.).22 With the prophetic tradition, the term “glory” comes to be charged with moral-ethical significance. It would signify a “holy people” obedient to God’s “holy will.” In the later messianic tradition, priestly and prophetic strands merged in the “figure of divine glory” who, in bringing the historical process to fulfillment in peace and justice, would bring all of creation into participation in the divine glory.

According to Balthasar, the Gospel of John depicts Jesus Christ as the “form of God” or “God’s Art.”23 The cross-shaped form of the Word-made-flesh is a selfauthenticating “disclosure of God.” In the New Testament, the words, actions, and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the “style” of unconditional love. Love is beautiful, because it expresses being and is touched by being’s radiance. Balthasar again, “Before the beautiful … the whole person quivers.

He (sic) … experiences himself (sic) as being moved and possessed by it.”24 When this subjective experience occurs as the result of a genuine confrontation with the dramatic, historical revelation of the Triune God in Jesus Christ, this phenomenon demands the name, not of mere beauty, but glory—as that irreducibly other, uncontainable splendor which breaks forth at the advent of divine presence.

Christian religion begins in the self-communication of the wholly other God 7

Beauty in the Church’s Mission and the thanksgiving offered by the creature ecstatically “overtaken” by what it has received. Balthasar insisted that there is no neutral stance from which to reflect on ethics. Only when overawed by God’s divine glory can we love our neighbors—hence we love others in the measure of love with which God loves. For Balthasar, the hallmark of the true God, which renders the mission of Christ wholly credible as God’s definitive engagement with the world, is love that radiates the quality of “excess,” the “ever greater,” the “yet more.”25 In the face of the recklessly self-forgetful character of God’s crucified love, the most appropriate response is summed up in the Johannine exhortation, “so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers”(1 Jn 3:16). The aesthetic form and measure of God’s action in Christ provide the model for Christian action. Balthasar anticipates our protests: “It will be objected that such a program of action demands the character of a saint. This may well be; but from the very beginning, Christian living has always been most credible, where at the very least it has shown a few faint signs of true holiness.”26

The Church’s Poiesis Out of the breathtakingly beautiful gesture of Christ’s self-giving love, the church built a new form of sociality founded on a message of forgiveness of sins, care for the poor, beatitude, salvation, and eternal life for all. We as the church are called to be Christ’s living body, manifesting God’s beauty “in the style of love,” and beauty can be our first word as we advance God’s will on earth with extravagant gestures of poiesis. Let us look and rejoice and participate in the beauty of God’s creation and Incarnation with a freshness of heart. Let us shed the shackles of abstract argument and pragmatic calculation. Let us re-enchant finitude with infinity even as we open ourselves to being ravished by beauty. Let us contemplate the outrageous beauty, the “shook foil”27 of the created world. Let us create and find succor in stories, poems, songs, and liturgies that make our hearts explode with delight and compassion. Let us learn forms of justice that seek not only utter and empty freedom, but forms of justice striving to realize a vision of a beautiful life together, a vision including confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, hospitality, charity, and the mutual exchange of good gifts. Let us make room for young poets to speak their rage, even as we give voice to hope that can make harmony from dissonance.

We may have been wounded, some severely, within this world of injustice, pain, and discord, yet within each of us, there is a child breathlessly awaiting the visceral joy of smelling the fresh-mown grass and watching an opening pitch, the joyous release of being carried away by song, the empowerment of a gesture of solidarity, or awaiting awakening by the artistry that Christ inaugurated and which, at its best, the church imitates. May we all be given eyes to see the beauty of creation and of the Creator. May our spirits thereby be made newly resilient and may we be filled with joy and peace. v NOTES

1. Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk, Het Spel van Mensch en Diet als openbaring van levensdriften (Amsterdam, 1932); Adolf Portmann, Biologie und Geist (Freiburg: Herder, 1963), 22–29.

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2. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1999), 24, 25.

3. A phrase coined by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 283.

4. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 17.

5. John Locke, The Works of John Locke, Esquire: In Three Volumes, Fifth Edition (London: Birt, Browne, Longman, Shuckburg, Hitch, Hodges, Oswald, Millar, Beecroft, Rivington, Ward, Cooper, 1751), 519.

6. Hart, Beauty, 21.

7. Scarry, 90.

8. Simone Weil, “Love of the Order of the World” in Waiting on God (New York: Routledge, 2010), 98.

9. Scarry, 113.

10. Ibid., 6.

11. Ibid., 3.

12. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 140

13. See Candace M. Crosby (2005) “Intuitive parenting repertoire utilization by Caucasian-American and Mandarin Chinese mothers with two- and four-month-old infants”; unpublished doctoral thesis at The University of Montana, p,. 16. It has been demonstrated that babies’ preferences are not linked to the actual words used by mothers because they will turn their heads even if the speaker is using a foreign language. They report that motherese is a comfort language even if it is listened to in a foreign tongue.

14. Alexander Nehemas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 54.

15. Hart, Beauty, 16.

16. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Ch 2, “The Land of Shadow,” (New York: Del Ray, 2011), 211.

17. David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names,” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Eerdmans, 2017), 26-27.

18. Vernon J. Bourke, trans. Expositio in Dion. De div. Nom. 4.5-6 as quoted in The Pocket Aquinas (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), 269.

19. John Parker (translator), “On Divine Names. Caput I. Section VII.” in Dionysius the Areopagite (Grand Rapids: James Parker and Co, 1897) public domain, 14.

20. Stratford Caldecott, “An Introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Catholic Education Resource Center, last modified 2001, originally published in Second Spring and based on his article in the Catholic Social Science Review v 5, “The Social Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 2000), 183–190.

21. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan translators, Maurice Blondel: The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 93.

22. Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols, trans. J A Baker (Philadelphia Westminster Press, 1965), 1:277.

23. See John 1:1ff and Philippians 2:5ff.

24. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1 Seeing the Form, (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1982), 247.

25. Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 41.

26. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God: The Drama of Christian Discipleship (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 55.

27. “… The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil …”; Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985).

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Interview Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews

David White “The Spiritual Significance of Beauty” Your essay leads off with a beautiful remembrance of the boyhood joy you took in baseball. Do you still love baseball?

I do! I enjoy watching and really get jazzed around College World Series time.

What inspired you to focus upon beauty?

When I was young, I was introverted, shy. I was drawn to baseball and also painting and music as ways of being seen, heard, and known in the world. The deeper I got into art and music, the more I began to recognize that there’s something beyond the mere resonant frequencies of strings, there’s an inarticulable depth and meaning. I had a guitar teacher who had synesthesia, an unusual blending of the senses: he would play a chord and see a vivid color. For him music crossed boundaries, and it occurred to me that music was crossing boundaries for me, too. I was playing music and finding spiritual meaning and resonance.

So, you considered what was spiritually inspiring to you as a kid: playing baseball, camaraderie with teammates, watching with family. Then, as a teen, you found jazz guitar a spiritual resource. And now as a Christian educator, you realize that in all these unexpected places you’re finding spiritual significance in beauty.

Yes, and let me note the danger of a performative contradiction in trying to theorize the very reality that I’m saying is finally mysterious and inarticulable. When I look back at what I’ve written, I can say, Yes, this captures what I think and feel about beauty, but at the same time, in a very real sense, it doesn’t come close, because I’m trying to talk about something that has depth and mystery.

This is the pertinence of you saying that knowing the statistics and strategies adds to the beauty of baseball, but that factual knowing is not the primordial sort of knowing that comes with actual engagement with the game …

Yes—and this goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius and his observations about beauty— there’s something about beauty that does not allow us finally to grasp or articulate it, but at the same time, there is something about beauty that sparks a desire to know.

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Interview

Terminology centered around beauty is an attempt to try to reclaim something like contemplative awareness. For me this is not esoteric; there’s real urgency. We have to reclaim this if we’re going to live in a world that isn’t violent and hostile. We need practices that call us to attend to the beauty in each other.

This connects to you saying beauty creates a desire for imitation and production of beauty and creates a desire in us to share the beauty?

Yes, beauty is not neutral. We don’t know beauty dispassionately or clinically. Beauty calls us beyond ourselves and makes us want to share in it with other people. At the end of the day, and this is from Elaine Scarry, we are joined in a covenant with beauty. In my own music and art, I have found that to be true. It is also a way of knowing which bears resemblance to what we hope to be true about the gospel. The beauty of the gospel claims us, draws us into itself, and compels in us a desire to share it with others.

Are secular and theological aesthetics distinct? Are both good, but for different purposes?

Historically, from Thomas Aquinas all the way back to Augustine, theology was the queen of sciences, so all things were considered to have theological significance, and I affirm that claim. Beauty is not just an anomaly, not just a peak experience.

It speaks to us of the glory of a creator. It points toward the perfection of God. The same holds for the beauty of the incarnation of Christ. Theology makes the connection to the Creator, to the creation of all things ex nihilo, all of which God called good (which can be translated as “harmonious” or “beautiful”). So, beauty is at once something that is recognizable by everyone—and let me say, almost everyone now in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences is writing about aesthetics—but 11

Beauty in the Church’s Mission theology is what names its depth that finally connects to God. You talk about Elaine Scarry’s appeal to the “surplus of aliveness,” and you also speak of beauty’s “excess” being woven into the fabric of creation …

Yes, I think this issue is best articulated as a response to modernity. I think we are at the far end of a historical era in which the modern idea of pure reason had overwhelming appeal, but postmodern philosophy is discovering its flaws and unveiling the way it hides biases that can serve as sources of oppression. And it does that in part by objectifying things. I look out my window and I see a tree. And when I try to think about it in the terms of modern rationality, in terms of cellular biology or photosynthesis, or in economic terms, such as in a board foot of lumber, then it doesn’t have significance beyond its use value. This is what I’m trying to speak against, together with Hans Urs von Balthasar and many others, this disenchantment of the world. With terms like “excess” or “surplus” we’re trying to say there’s something about this tree beyond its use value. We’re trying to say that something is lost when I parse it in terms of biology or economics, for that tree also speaks of mystery, and it speaks of God. This is an attempt to re-enchant the world. Charles Taylor says we are porous to the world, not just the buffered selves pictured by modern rationality. What’s at stake here is reclaiming a sense of how we engage a world that is sacred, sacramental, that is alive with God, alive not just with fact but with value.

Is there something distinctive about beauty that speaks to Christian ministry?

Christians have always had beauty embedded in our liturgies, embedded in our songs, in our language for the glory of God. This is a way of restoring to Christianity something that was lost in the modern retreat into pure reason. That’s what is at stake for Christians, trying to drink from our own wells again, finding something understood by the Patristics, especially the Cappadocians, understood by Maximus the Confessor, by Thomas Aquinas.

How is beauty or decoration understood in a way contrary to how you understand it in terms of its spiritual richness?

Balthasar was the twentieth century’s leading advocate for reclaiming beauty. He says that in the modern era, beauty has been flattened into surfaces, reduced to decorative appeal. The grand tradition that he’s drawing from is much deeper. For him beauty is a way of speaking about wonder and the beauty of creation that opens onto something beyond it. He thinks that beauty in the modern era has been coopted by advertising or relegated to the margins by reason, so that it does not connect with transcendence.

When we see beauty, Balthasar says, we perceive its form and its “splendor.”

We’re drawn in by the shape given by art, by the unity of dark and light, the unity of the elements of an artistic or a natural scene of beauty, we’re drawn into its form.

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Interview But he says there’s also something beyond that, its lumen, the light that’s beyond it, that prevents us from ever exhaustively comprehending it. Here it can be helpful to think of an icon, how an icon draws us in but also draws our gaze beyond it, evoking our desire, ultimately, to its source in God. You cite David Bentley Hart, saying that beauty places time’s tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning that absolves being of its violence, and also that beauty proclaims God’s glory and goodness with equal eloquence and truthfulness in each moment and each interval. But doesn’t this seem a little Pollyannaish? I could name numerous horrors where I would be surprised for someone to say in those moments there is beauty. And I wonder how beautiful moments on the whole absolve other moments of violence, whether this amounts to saying, whatever is happening, ultimately, it’s not actually bad.

You are naming something that is hard to address in a 3000-word essay! But I am in total agreement that to whatever extent anyone is trying to articulate a theodicy that reconciles God or beauty with evil in the world in any easy or immediate way— that I reject out of hand.

I don’t find theodicies of any sort satisfying. Speaking confessionally, I think of Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who says he would give back his ticket to existence if the price that had to be paid were the tears of even one small child. I’m in total agreement that there is no way to finally make meaning out of evil in this world. Beauty does not do that. But beauty does provide a kind of backdrop, a reminder that beauty is the foundation of things. In a sense, what I’m saying about beauty is not different than what Dr. King says about justice, you know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. There is no easy way of making sense of evil in the world. Still, in mysterious ways, beauty points towards God and ends with the beauty of God. All this could also be related, as it does for Jürgen Moltmann, to hope. For Moltmann, hope names a way of reclaiming motivation for works of goodness, works of justice in the world. And I would say in a similar way that to be reminded of beauty reminds us and compels us toward works of goodness in the world. It doesn’t reconcile in any easy way the horrors of evil in the world, but it can compel us to be about God’s work of goodness and beauty and justice in the world.

And there’s a way beauty can be healing, right? You relate a fascinating story about research with graduate students unconsciously being drawn to a study area playing a recording of beautiful sounds in Chinese. This speaks of ways in which beauty is especially powerful when one needs comfort or strength in the face of hardship or suffering.

Yes, in that example I was making the point about how beauty crosses modes. These graduate students find themselves gravitating toward the voices for comfort in a particularly stressful time. There’s a sense—and here I am following Alexander Ne13

Beauty in the Church’s Mission hamas—that beauty offers a promise of more complete healing.

You talk about Balthasar seeing the cross-shaped form of the Word made flesh as God’s art that calls for sacrifice on our part. People may worry about associating the cross quickly with sacrifice—and also with seeing the cross as beautiful.

So, Balthasar along with others before him—Magnus the Confessor, Dionysius— they’re identifying the incarnation as God’s art, as the beauty that finds its origin, its ground, in the infinite perfected in God, which is manifest in a concrete way in Jesus Christ—and not only in his crucifixion, but in his life and teachings. We might say that Christ was always, in the incarnation, about crossing over, about joining in solidarity with the other on behalf of the other. We find this in the stories of the woman at the well, joining with the tax collectors, healing the lepers, the Good Samaritan … all of the parables have something of this ethic of crossing over and joining in an ecstatic sort of self-giving way on behalf of the other. This is what Balthasar characterizes as the beauty of God, the beauty of the gospel, that originates in the self-giving love found in the Trinity. Christ’s crucifixion is in continuity with his life, for it is about giving himself on behalf of others. This is what Balthasar characterizes as God’s art.

The “watchmaker God” of modernity is an engineer, which is a pretty limited metaphor. You imagine God in terms of beauty, as an artist. In what distinctive ways does this metaphor open our thinking about God and creation?

I think it opens up the world as a sacramental reality that compels us to live more fully into our ethics. The modern world has flattened everything into efficient causality, and that tempts us to flatten each other into ideological caricatures. We have forgotten how to see depths in each other. I think the world is crying out for the contemplative practices of artists, who will linger for a long time with, say, a landscape as they paint it. In order to know it well they do study after study, making sure they see it with different lighting and experimenting with different colors as they seek to create it in its truth. This is not a new thought for contemplatives.

Walter Burghardt said that contemplation is a long lingering loving look at the real.

And this is something all artists know. Art is not just trying to pull something out of my head, art is trying to name what is truly there, to show the shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary.

Terminology centered around beauty is an attempt to try to reclaim something like this contemplative awareness. For me this is not esoteric. There’s real urgency.

We have to reclaim this if we’re going to live in a world that isn’t violent and hostile.

We need practices that call us to attend to the beauty in each other.

You spoke of seeing the earth as sacramental, which is a strong emphasis in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Is that a major source for your ideas?

Maybe, but I am no expert on Eastern Orthodoxy. For me, this is in the Wesleyan 14

Interview tradition. John Wesley was trying to reclaim something that had been lost that he saw in the Cappadocian Fathers. He was trying to reclaim beauty in a more expansive sense and grace, prevenient grace, in a more expansive sense. Today it is important for Christians of all sorts to try to mine these resources.

In your conclusion you use the wonderful image of “shook foil”—a vibrant image! You use it to describe the sort of being you are exhorting us toward as children of God …

Yes, well, first, that is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s image, not mine. What Hopkins is trying to get at is the alterity of the earth, that it is other than me, other than us, that there is finally a shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary, that can’t be reduced to what an ego projects upon it. This follows Jean Luc Marion on the idol and the icon. The idol is that which draws our gaze, but in the end only reflects back our own egos. The icon draws our gaze beyond, and that’s what the image of shook foil is trying to speak of: how the world announces the holy in its otherness from us. J.R.R. Tolkien says that those who write imaginative fantasy write about golden apples and rivers that run with wine in order to awaken us to the outrageous beauty and the awareness of the real created order. They use fantastic imagery not to transport us to some mystery land, but in an attempt to awaken us to the outrageous beauty of the created order as it actually exists. That’s what I want to evoke with Hopkins’s image of shook foil.

In a sentence, what is the essence of your hopes about the reality and promise of beauty?

I hope the church, especially, can break its bondage to reductive and objectifying forms of thought and action. I hope that we can once again live and move in a world alive and enchanted, a world where fact and value are united, where all things point to God, and where God points to the goodness of all things, including to the joy and gift of creative human work. v

Insights, The Podcast To listen to the full interview with David White about beauty in the church’s mission, tune into our new Insights podcast at AustinSeminary.edu/Insightspodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reflections

Create an Altar at Home: A Pandemic Invitation Courtney T. Goto

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nce in a great while, and if you are lucky, a teaching angel delivers an idea for an assignment that blossoms into learning outcomes you could not have imagined.

For me, it began with a series of photos sent by my advisee Erin, a talented visual artist. She had built a mixed-media, multi-level altar in response to Holy Week, explaining the elements and what they meant to her. Inspired by what she had created, I devised a final project for my course, “Doing Theology Aesthetically.” The assignment was to “create an altar that honors a person, season, event, story, or idea with theological, cultural, personal, and/or social significance. An altar is a small, aesthetically marked, sacred space that serves as a focal point for the senses.

Reflect on how you might communicate your theme powerfully through multiple elements (color, shape, texture, space). Be creative.”

Inviting students to build an altar at home during the pandemic for a fully remote course had multiple implications. With most religious communities worshipping online or outdoors, students were (and still are, at this writing) separated from and disconnected with the holy place where their community’s altar is located. Tasked with creating a home altar, learners were literally and figuratively “creating with the stuff of their lives”1—with materials that they had on hand or found. The context of learning meant that students worked on their own time, at their own pace, and possibly in the company of members of their household.

Rather than being constructed in a classroom and removed because another class Author’s note: Thanks to the August 2020 students of “Doing Theology Aesthetically,” especially Erin, Joann, and Beth, who generously allowed me to reflect on their work, and also to my colleague Chris Schlauch, my conversation partner in developing this essay.

Courtney Goto is associate professor of religious education and co-

director for the Center for Practical Theology at the Boston University School of Theology where she earned the 2020 Metcalf Award for Teaching Excellence. She is the author of Taking on Practical Theology (Brill 2018) and The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning into God’s New Creation (Pickwick, 2016).

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was scheduled, their altars “lived” where students lived for however long they felt appropriate and/or practical.

In this brief essay, I wish to reflect on the “ritual labor” that constructing and practicing with an altar revealed.2 Anthropologist Raquel Romberg uses this notion of ritual labor to discuss how Haydée, a Puerto Rican healer, employs a series of ritual steps to transform an ordinary space into a sacred space for a home altar.

This “labor” is accomplished through what Romberg calls “spiritual technologies.”3 As a practical theologian, I interpret these technologies as spiritual practices that coax the divine to take up residence in the altar that the healer has constructed (hence the term, “altar-home”). To be clear, I don’t imagine that this is exactly what my students were doing. None of the students belong to religious traditions where building an altar in one’s home is commonly practiced. None are ritual specialists.

It might be more accurate to say that creating an altar became the occasion for potentially transforming the space (and therefore the students themselves) by making tangible that which they hold sacred. Building an altar was an opportunity for students to engage in spiritual “work” that was unique to each person and that could only be accomplished by practicing contemplation with their hands, as one can do when making art. I give two examples to inspire you to build your own altar.

The Altar River Beth built an altar representing the river of her childhood, where she played with her sister for countless summer hours, watching and playing with the flow of water.

Comparing the river to a teacher, she wrote, “[The river] created an environment that was prepared from disparate elements (rocks, mountain grade, dirt, leaves, etc.), but from its flexibility and movement an ‘incarnated subject matter’ could arise that was revelatory and powerful for my sister and me as we re-created our world around us.”4 To recreate this river with water continuously running through it, Beth enlisted her children to help with the construction, an unexpected gift to her and their family. By involving them, Beth served as a teacher to her daughters, creating an environment in which they could play with the altar river, changing its course by manipulating its shape. In terms of reflecting theologically, the altar gave Beth an image to work with that came from her own lifeworld. Beth reported, “Using this memory, and the lessons 17

Beauty in the Church’s Mission learned from my childhood river as a foundation, I worked to recreate the river as a landscape for how to build and reflect on my own theology.” For example, she described Spirit’s movement as “free” and “mysterious.”

I am struck by an unlikely parallel between Beth’s construction of the altar river and Romberg’s case. The healer incorporates a freshwater aquarium into the altarroom, to “recreat[e] in the space of a living room the natural abode of her Santa, the river [deity].”5 Of course, there’s an important difference. Romberg describes how the altar works by “proxy”—that is, the deity associated with the river takes “ownership” of the representation.6 In contrast, Beth created a river as a symbol to evoke memory and, by association, clarify and elaborate her theology. However, I find it significant that both altars make tangible a distant, even mystical, place outside the home, thereby transforming it. It requires ingenious creativity (or elsewhere I have described it as playing) to bring a sacred, natural element indoors, while expressing what is true to life in the original.7 Using mundane materials on hand, Beth and her family managed to summon the sacred at home, creating a place that was especially meaningful because it was where her childhood, her family, she, herself, and the longed-for divine could meet.

In Honor of Dad Joann’s altar was a tribute to her father, who had Parkinson’s dementia and was living in a care home. Early in the pandemic, she could not visit in person, and later, only in a limited way because of public health restrictions. She said, “He is still with us but in many ways he feels lost to me.” To create the altar, Joann had gathered artifacts associated with her father—a wood planer from his workshop, one of his pipes, a toy white Mustang, a model like the one he bought and then she drove as a senior in high school, and many other objects. She lovingly narrated the significance of each piece, displaying them against the background of a painting that she made for him. Sadly, Joann’s dad passed two months after she created the altar.

Joann’s altar inspires me to reflect on how building an altar invites presence— creating the conditions for what is otherwise unseen to be seen, but also focusing attention so that the practitioner herself might be present to the holy. Joann made her father present through things or representations of things he touched, used, owned, or even ate. She included a sunny-side-up, fried egg with the whites eaten away, exactly like her dad was in the habit of making and eating. She writes, “The process of building this altar—from curating the items I would include, to where and how I would set it up—made me realize that in a very real way, Dad will never be lost to me. My very body is part of his legacy and I will always carry him with me.

I can look at some of these mementos or simply eat an egg to evoke his presence.”

Even as her dad was less able to “be there” in the last weeks of his life, the altar brought him to the space and perhaps most importantly, the realization that she had the power to evoke his presence.8 Joann’s memorial altar is perhaps not so different in function to the altarhome studied by Romberg, despite the contrasts. In the Puerto Rican case, the 18

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altar serves as dwelling place for divine-human encounters. Of course, in Joann’s case God does not take residence in the artifacts, but nonetheless the altar serves as a powerful meeting place with her dad when she seeks him. Her altar is sacred in the way that a cemetery is, where one can commune not only with a departed loved one but also with God or the mystery of which the deceased are a part. At her altar, Joann summons not simply Dad but God-with-Dad, who responds to being summoned.

An Invitation I invite you to build your own altar because the process might allow you to do some spiritual work that you can only do experientially and creatively. Especially during the pandemic and likely after, you might need to contemplate with your hands some of the big issues—life, death, identity, love, and memory—that two of my students took on. By creating the image of the river with her family, Beth strengthened familial relationships and engaged in theological construction. Joann gathered artifacts to honor her father as she prepared for his passing. Both of these altars were deeply personal and proved to be creative labor each student needed to engage. For me, their altars exemplified the important work of concretely imagining the sacred into being in our homes, especially at a time when we feel most vulnerable.

My students have shown how building an altar at home is both doable and potentially a source of spiritual riches. Choose a theme. Use materials that you have on hand. Set up the altar where you can live with it for a while and let it evolve. Involve other people in your household. Engaging in such ritual labor in 19

Beauty in the Church’s Mission order to summon the sacred into your home may be among the meaningful and empowering spiritual disciplines you practice during these bewildering, and for many devastating, times. v NOTES

1. Cynthia Winton-Henry, founder of InterPlay.

2. Stephanie Palmié, “Fascinans or Tremendum? Permutations of the State, the Body, and the Divine in Late-Twentieth Century Havana,” New West Indian Guide, 78, no. 3/4 (2004): 229-68. Cited in Raquel Romberg, “Ritual Life of an Altar-Home: A Photographic Essay on Transformational Places and Technologies,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 13, no. 2 (January 1, 2018), 250. https://magic.pennpress. org/home/;; http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lsdar&AN=ATLAiFZK18122400 0649&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

3. Romberg, “Ritual Life of an Altar-Home,” 250.

4. The notion of “incarnating subject matter” comes from Maria Harris, Teaching and Religious Imagination: An Essay in the Theology of Teaching (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 132, 134, 157.

5. Romberg, “Ritual Life of an Altar-Home,” 252.

6. Ibid, 253.

7. Courtney T. Goto, The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning into God’s New Creation (New York: Wipf & Stock, 2016).

8. Beth’s altar likewise makes present her sister and the river of her childhood.

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Searching for Beauty: Art in the Midst of Ugly Frank Rogers Jr.

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n the 1960s, poverty, segregation, and violent social unrest plagued Detroit, Michigan. Redlining separated the races, police raids targeted communities of color, and political corruption kept inner-city ghettoes impoverished and disenfranchised. The riots of 1967 were so severe that the United States military was called in to quell them. Both riots and military were back the following year.

Sixto Rodriguez endured it all. The son of Mexican immigrants, he dwelt in a dilapidated house he had purchased from the government for $50. In response to the violence surrounding him, he made music. Equal parts street poet, social critic, and troubadour holy man, he wrote protest songs and mournful ballads that gave voice to the pain, foretold revolution, and envisioned a world of equity and peace.

On street corners and in dive bars, he sang to inspire the subjugated.

The Motown producers who discovered him compared him to Bob Dylan—a gritty, soulful prophet of the times. They recorded two albums, certain the LPs would resonate with socially conscious young people across the country. They were wrong. Radio stations gave them no airtime; sales were abysmal. The setback’s impact on Rodriguez is unclear. The stories that circulated about his suicide are contradictory. Both have him killing himself while performing on stage: in one, he shoots himself in despair, the tyranny so intractable; in the other, he sets himself on fire like a Buddhist monk protesting political oppression. Either way, Rodriguez the man faded from our world.

His music, however, lived on.

Most likely smuggled in by college students, bootleg copies of Rodriguez’s albums found their way into South Africa in the 1980s at the height of apartheid. In

Frank Rogers Jr. is the Muriel Bernice Roberts Professor of Spiri-

tual Formation and Narrative Pedagogy and the co-director of the Center for Engaged Compassion at the Claremont School of Theology. Also a spiritual director and retreat leader, he is the author of Practicing Compassion and Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus.

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Beauty in the Church’s Mission a country that had become a police state—with “Blacks” and “Coloured’ displaced into segregated ghettoes, abductions and massacres squashing all opposition— the music spoke to the soul of those mobilizing for liberation. Banned from the government-controlled radio stations, cassette copies were duplicated and shared throughout the resistance. His songs—as “Blowin’ In the Wind” had in the States— became part of the soundtrack that sustained the nonviolent protesters. Rodriguez became a musical icon for the anti-apartheid movement that eventually overthrew the government. When democracy was secured, a CD was commercially published.

The music already saturating the people, it sold more albums than the Beatles, Elvis, or the Rolling Stones.

In his own homeland, on the other side of the world, Rodriguez was long forgotten, if ever known. In South Africa, he was a rock star. His music helped set a people free. * * * Pain permeates our planet. Violence, in its many forms, continues to rip away at our wounded world. All these decades later racism still afflicts Blacks in the United States. It would be easy to succumb to despair, to harden our hearts at the heaviness of it all, to deaden our spirits in resignation before powers that appear impregnable. God’s heart, however, remains soft; God’s spirit pulsates with hope and resilience. Like a river of creative vitality, God’s spirit dwells as a lifeforce that infuses all of creation. What Hildegard of Bingen called “the greening power of God,” this sacred current, flowing through everything, is restorative—it invigorates the flourishing of life.

This life-force is present within suffering as well. God sees the brokenness in our world, is moved by the pain, and companions all who are afflicted, aching to heal wounds, buoy hope, embolden courage, and inspire a flourishing sustained by societies of justice, equity, and peaceful co-existence. When Sixto Rodriguez faces the suffering in his world and accesses the creative life-force to make music of hope and peace, he bears witness to and participates in God’s irrepressible power to restore life in the midst of death. The art he creates is sacred. It pulsates with promise. And it takes on a life of its own—inspiring others even on the far side of the globe. * * *

And Then …

In the late 1990s, a quarter century after Rodriguez recorded his albums, two South African fans joined forces to uncover the true story of Rodriguez’s death. Knowing nothing about him—not even where he was from—they followed clues from his song lyrics and emailed musical professionals around the world. No one outside of South Africa had ever heard of him. After hundreds of queries, they stumbled upon his former producer, now living in LA. When they asked him how Rodriguez had died, the producer was taken aback. Rodriguez was not dead: he was still in Detroit, living in the same decrepit tenement building, without a car, TV, or computer, making ends meet as a day-laborer, and utterly oblivious to his rock-star status an 22

Rogers

entire world away.

The fans arranged a concert tour and invited him to South Africa. Rodriguez expected to perform for a few enthusiasts in a jazz club or two. He arrived to a hero’s reception. Limousines greeted him at the airport; billboards boasted his image; fans flocked for autographs, some even wanting autographs across tattoos of him on their torsos. At six sold-out concerts of 30,000, people sang with him word for word the songs that had sustained their dreams for a better world. For ten days, he toured the townships and countryside, playing his music of peace and nonviolent revolution. “Gandhi with a Guitar” they called him. Little did they know—back home, he no longer owned one. The promoters had to hustle up a professional acoustic for the tour. Rodriguez took right to it. Cradling it like an old friend, he strode boldly to the mic in the packed arena. Thousands of screaming fans awaited him. Rodriguez beheld their adoration. Then he offered them his first words,

“Thanks for keeping me alive.” *

*

*

Faith in the face of suffering is an artistic enterprise. Racism, poverty, the abuse of a child, the subjugation of a people—these cry out for an aesthetic response. To be sure, they also demand analytical reflection to root out their causes and ethical imperatives to guide transformative response. Yet suffering is not only a rational distortion and a moral affront; it is ugly. Violence, molestation, and torture are grotesque. They make us wince. They break our hearts. Life’s sacred right to flourish is being marred. Beauty is violated.

Karl Barth understands beauty to be an attribute of God. God’s beauty is God’s inherently radiant glory—the shining that speaks for itself that God is present in all of God’s fullness. When life flourishes, it is beautiful and a reflection of divine beauty; when life is disfigured, it is horrid, and God’s beauty is befouled. People of faith are called to be artists—to face the pain of the world feelingly, to be moved by its suffering, to ache for its healing, and to rise up, fused with God’s restorative power, to coax life out of death, beauty out of ugliness. This not only keeps our own souls alive, it transforms the shadows of suffering into the radiance of God’s glory, a glory that will ripple out and one day fill the earth as waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). *

*

*

And Then … II In 2006, a twenty-six-year-old Swedish freelance news-reporter, the son of Algerian immigrants, traveled throughout the southern hemisphere in search of stories to produce. Wandering into a Cape Town record store, Malik Bendjelloul met one of the men who had researched Rodriguez’s death, had found him alive, and had brought him to South Africa as the anti-apartheid rock star he had no idea that he was. Malik was so moved by the story, he decided to direct a documentary.

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Beauty in the Church’s Mission By all accounts, a young man of self-effacing but infectious enthusiasm, with an elfish charm that befriended everyone he met, this first-time filmmaker raised the funds, scouted locations, and recruited each person involved—including Rodriguez himself, who still lived in the same tenement, still scrabbling as a day-laborer.

For five years, Malik’s indefatigable spirit willed the picture into being. When he ran out of funding, he drained his own accounts; when he could no longer hire personnel, he filmed the last scenes on his iPhone, learned how to edit and score off his computer, and drew his own illustrations.

Searching for Sugar Man was a film that embodied and celebrated the indomitable power of art, even in ways oblivious to the artist. It was also a surprise global sensation. It won the Grand Jury Award at Sundance, a BAFTA in London, and dozens of first-place finishes in film festivals from Moscow to Melbourne, Toronto to Durban. With the film’s success, interest in Rodriguez’s music surged. He played concerts in conjunction with film festivals; he gave scores of interviews alongside the director; his albums were re-released to wide acclaim. Just as his producers had predicted, Rodriguez’s music touched people around the world. It had only taken thirty-five years. Malik’s movie made it possible. In 2013, Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. *

*

*

This is our confidence: as we face life’s brutalities with creative vitality, as we rise up as faithful artists, we not only bear witness to the presence of God in solidarity with those who are suffering, we bring beauty into the world that lives on beyond us. The art of our faith ripples out. It touches hearts, ignites hope, and inspires commitments to healing and liberation. The songs we send into the world are choruses in the cosmic symphony of life, the sacred music that echoes forth inviting all of creation into its restorative rhythms. Through beauty, the ugliness of suffering is transformed; divine glory radiates throughout the world. *

*

*

And Then … III Barely a year after the Academy Awards, Malik Bendjelloul left his apartment and walked to a Stockholm subway station. Still pondering a variety of projects to take on, he gave no indication of his plans to his family or friends. Stunning all who knew him, the eminently likable storyteller entered the station and threw himself in front of a speeding train. He left no note. The silence of his death yields no explanation.

Rodriguez was informed, the following day, minutes before a concert. He lit a candle backstage, cradled his guitar, and went out to share the news with his capacity audience. Then he did what he knew how to do.

For those who wail out loud, and for those who suffer in silence, for Detroit, South Africa, the world, for Malik, Rodriguez played his music. *

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*

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The turmoil that leads one to suicide is agonizing. It is excruciating to face.

Despair is ugly.

Unlike Rodriguez, Malik’s story does not have an inspirational dénouement—a surprise appearance of one thought dead expressing to his fans, “Thank you for keeping me alive.”

The dénouement is left to us. We are called to face the tragic feelingly—to be moved by its suffering, to ache for its healing, and to rise up, with the spark of the sacred, in creative response. Holding ugliness with compassion is, itself, beautiful.

It is, indeed, what keeps us alive in the midst of the struggle. v

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Beauty in the Church’s Mission

Theater as Acts of Uncrippling Dessa Quesada-Palm

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rtists dream and imagine. They intuit a sense of beauty, of goodness, and of the ideal. So when the world around them falls short of this vision, artists bear witness to an undeniable yearning. They confess, they plead, they intercede. Their art becomes an integral expression of their life’s mission.

A melancholia had begun to set in as the reality of an end to things was spoken in hush. But then the Spirit moved and this question was dropped: “Is this theater work something you want to continue to do?” The room exploded into euphoric shrieks of jubilation as the youth realized this marked not the end, but in fact the beginning. The moment was December 18, 2005. The youth had gathered in our home to reflect on this prime experience and to break bread. It was the birthing of the Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts.

Exactly a month before I had co-facilitated a theater workshop in Dumaguete City, Negros Island, for high school and college students from various schools throughout the Visayas, the central islands of the Philippines. The three-day workshop focused on child trafficking for sexual purposes—the Philippines has been declared a global hotspot for child trafficking1—and was part of a nationwide campaign organized by ECPAT (End Child Pornography, Prostitution and Trafficking) and PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association). After the workshop I continued to work with the thirty participants, and we mounted a theater performance on child trafficking at the city’s public park on December 9.

The skits were based on case studies from our own region of the Visayas. The public performance fulfilled the project deliverables, and the youth were to have parted ways. But God had different plans.

Dessa Quesada-Palm is founding artistic director of the Youth

Advocates Through Theater Arts and senior artist-trainer of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA). She received a BA in economics at the University of the Philippines and a master’s in international relations at the New School for Social Research, New York City, as a Fulbright scholar.

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Quesada-Palm The energy of the youth was undeniable and urgent, and closing a creative space that was built in the course of a few weeks because of an imposed project timeline seemed wrong. Yet, there were no more institutional resources available.

In this Kairos moment the youth rose up to mark a new beginning, a beginning that resonated with my own life experience as a teenager.

For most of my childhood, I lived in the shadows of my tiny world, letting the physical debilitation of asthma and a rheumatic heart disease constrict my life. In a form of victim power, a potent narrative would intersect with my diminished motivation in going to school. In many ways my first, if unconscious, acts of roleplaying came when I provoked asthma attacks on mornings when the prospect of going to school was not enticing. That habit quickly dissolved after the first day of the Teen Theater Workshop I attended when I was thirteen. The workshop, facilitated by PETA, combined a process of creative release and self-discovery, collaboration with peers and improvisation, exploration of the role of theater in society, exposure trips to unfamiliar social contexts, an original artistic production created by the participants, and an echo workshop, where trainees learn to teach what they’ve been taught and begin to conduct workshops for other young people.

Each day during the workshop, I resolved never to get sick again so I could complete the program. It was a Spirit-led pivot that changed the course of my life. I always refer to those six weeks as my rebirth, when my life was catapulted to a new, awakened sense of who I am and what I could be with and for others.

The story of Jesus healing the woman who had been crippled in Luke 13: 11-13 resonates with the Spirit-led pivot to rebirth that has transformed my life and the lives of so many others.

And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God (New Revised Standard Version).

I want to reflect on the spirit crippling many young people, including me, in my youth.

In laying down the framework of a theater workshop, we often foreground it with the premise that people are inherently creative. Created in the image of God, humans are endowed with the power to think, to express, to create. And yet this gift of creativity and its immense potential can be buried in the mire of fear and self-doubt or in suppressive environments and structural deprivation. Some may say these layers are merely circumstantial, the result of poor decisions or ill luck to be born into poverty or on the margins. But that would gloss over the systemic dimensions of oppression.

I grew up under martial law during the reign of authoritarian president Ferdinand Marcos.2 My peers and I experienced the clear interplay between militarism and the promotion of cultural values that perpetuate subservience.

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Beauty in the Church’s Mission Militarism thrives on ordered ways in status quo-defined molds of behavior and thinking. Where obedience to figures and symbols of authority is the desired norm, creativity, critical thinking, and spontaneity are powerfully suppressed. This often translates to parallel relationships in family and school settings, where the parents’ or teachers’ approval is regarded as the coveted goal of each child, and subservience is an applauded, default response to authority. In this context, young people are subjected to infantilizing standards of good behavior and must conform to readymade scripts or be regarded as deviant. Under such pressure, many youth enter into a crippling position of being passive recipients of a narrative imposed on them.

When Jesus calls over that woman at the synagogue and declares, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” the emancipation that emerges from this declaration leads to dramatic transformation in the woman physiologically, socially, and spiritually. Three vital aspects emerge in this story. First, despite her pained condition, the woman was present; she found the time and mustered the will to be in a place to encounter Christ. Second, when Jesus beckons her, the invitation that is offered is received. Third, with the declaration of emancipation, Jesus opens a sacred opportunity for healing, an act of disruption, a call to break from a script that has crippled one’s life potentials and capacities. The result of this disruption is heightened empowerment that translates into acts of deepened faithfulness. So, for instance, the woman stands up straight and begins to praise God. God’s invitation to transformative spaces comes not only in the context of synagogues and churches. Junsly Kitay was sixteen when he joined our 2005 workshop. His participation was arranged with Kalauman Development Center, a church-related organization that provided educational support to children living in difficult circumstances. The eldest of four children, Junsly came from an economically disadvantaged community near the city’s port that was beleaguered by the illegal drug trade in crystal meth, locally known as shabu. His mother worked as a laundry washer and his father as a mechanic, making ends meet for the family despite all the odds. But his father was lured into the lucrative drug trade, which led to his arrest, release, and a cycle of recidivism. According to Junsly, many young people from his neighborhood get entangled in the drug trade where they are easily recruited as runners. He says that if it were not for his newfound sense of mission and love for theater, he would, like many of his peers, be in the drug trade, in prison, or dead. It is a tragic script played out by youth in his community that Junsly was able to rewrite. As a result of his creative awakening and newfound sense of agency, he began to examine his options and to recast his life.

Junsly’s transformation, and that of so many others in our Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts program— which through the generosity of mission partners and friends remains an active ministry—reminds me of my own journey. A woman bent and distorted physically for eighteen years now stands straight and with ease because of Christ’s healing; she is now more capable of engagement. In our theater practice, we encourage performers to find their own “actor’s body,” typically pertaining to a state that holds a balance of calm and focus: a lengthened spine, relaxed shoulders and neck, soft gaze, feet hip-width apart. It is an embodiment of 28

Quesada-Palm confidence and readiness, a state that prepares the actor for the task ahead, to tell a story with truth and integrity.

Transforming moments for our young creatives often happen in an ordinary training room, when the Holy Spirit inhabits the space and moves through games, storytelling, music, movement, visual arts, literature, drama. In theater, God provides an opportunity for one to take, in the words of Viola Spolin, “a vacation from oneself and the routine of everyday living.”3 Or, as Augusto Boal names it in Theater of the Oppressed, theater becomes a rehearsal for change, a change that is physical, social, and spiritual.4

Artists dream and imagine. They intuit a sense of beauty, of goodness, and of the ideal, of God’s vision for the created world and all its inhabitants. And so, when the world around them falls short, artists bear witness to an undeniable yearning.

They confess, they plead, they intercede, they are spiritually empowered, and they empower. This is a vital root of advocacy: the work of young people telling their stories through theater, imploring communities to listen, to feel, and to act in ways to change the situation. This is their way of praising God and inviting people to heed the Lord’s prayer, that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” v NOTES

1. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/shipments-children (accessed December 16, 2020).

2 Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in September 21, 1972, amidst growing social unrest. He was ousted in 1986 by what was popularly called the People’s Power Revolution.

3 “Playing a game is psychologically different in degree but not in kind from dramatic acting. The ability to create a situation imaginatively and to play a role in it is a tremendous experience, a sort of vacation from one’s everyday self and the routine of everyday living. We observe that this psychological freedom creates a condition in which strain and conflict are dissolved and potentialities are released in the spontaneous effort to meet the demands of the situation” (Neva L. Boyd, Play, a Unique Discipline, as cited in Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater [Northwestern University Press, 1963], 5).

4. This term is popularized by Augusto Boal, who wrote Theater of the Oppressed (Routledge, 1973), detailing his work in using theater for the marginalized communities in Sao Paolo in Brazil and in other parts of South America.

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Pastors’ Panel We asked pastors and practitioners to reflect on beauty in the Christian life. Here is what they told us.

Talitha Arnold is pastor of the United Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has been president of Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity and the Ministerial Alliance, served on the city’s first Youth Commission, organized Jewish-Muslim-Christian dialogues, and been recognized for her Human Rights work. Pilgrim Press recently published her book, Worship for Vital Congregations.

Leigh Campbell-Taylor is interim pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.

Along with her renaissance-man husband, Clark Taylor, Leigh enjoys the adventure of parenting their wonderful adult offspring, Malcolm and Ethan. She has decided the lockdown was an opportunity to begin her doctor of ministry degree.

Hannah Garrity is an artist in ministry, creating art for A Sanctified Art, Montreat, PAM, APCE, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and churches. She holds a BFA in painting from Cornell University; and an MS in teaching from Pace University. She is liturgical artist for the Montreat Conference Center, founding creative partner at A Sanctified Art, and is an art teacher in Henrico County, Virginia.

Mark Sturgess (MDiv’01) is lead pastor of Los Altos United Methodist Church in Long Beach California. Mark focused on church music in his undergraduate studies before earning an MDiv at Austin Seminary. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister who has served United Methodist Churches in Southern California since 2003, where he is an openly LGBTQ full elder in the California-Pacific Annual Conference of the UMC. Where do you see beauty in your life or vocation?

Talitha Arnold: I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. I also grew up in the Congregational (United Church of Christ) tradition with hymns about “snow on snow,” “flowering meadows,” and “flowing fountains.” My pastoral vocation has been serving a UCC congregation in the high desert of northern New Mexico.

From the desert, I’ve learned to look for beauty in unexpected places and small ways—the hidden seep of water that gives life to a patch of green, the little red flowers that crown a hedgehog cactus. The tiny, stubborn golden poppy that pushes through hard rock has taught me that beauty requires both patience and perseverance.

The desert’s lessons in beauty stood me in good stead as a pastor for a small, often struggling church. Being open to beauty in small, surprising ways has become even more important in “corona-time” when we can’t experience it as a gathered 30

Pastors’ Panel community.

Leigh Campbell-Taylor: Pondering the concept of beauty has me thinking that beauty is to prettiness what joy is to happiness or love is to liking. In other words: more complex, more profound, and augmented by awe because beauty is an attribute of and a connection with God. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that beauty is most abundant in God’s good creation: waterfalls and snowfalls, sunrises and silver-sliver moons, autumn foliage and spring blossoms, and common wonders like rain or birdsong. Daily, there is beauty even in the simple phenomenon of light in treetops, which, like God’s love, is utterly beyond my control and utterly necessary to life itself.

Hannah Garrity: Beauty is everywhere. The Bible and the world create a constant juxtaposition of surreal contrast in pain and truly stunning balance in joy. There are gradient values in an elderly person’s wise eyes and wrinkles. There is harsh beauty in an imperfect textured foreground against a distant smooth background, perfect only because we cannot see the details. In awe of God’s gifts, for me, beauty permeates both life and ministry.

Mark Sturgess: Earlier in my life I would have answered this question simply: I see beauty in music and the arts. Now, I understand beauty more fully as a window, a window into that surplus of meaning which lies beyond simply looking at the world. Beauty reminds me to pause and behold the world in wonderment. And wonder turns my heart toward God.

One congregation I served was two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. One after the other, Pacific sunsets are easy to take for granted. With scientific reason we understand the physics which make sunsets colorful. But where that knowledge ends, the surplus of meaning remains. If one pauses to behold such beauty, it is breathtaking and a holy gift.

How is beauty a part of the life of your congregation or ministry?

Campbell-Taylor: Authenticity is key. While I was chaplain at a retirement home, we celebrated Baptism of the Lord Sunday with an “affirmation of baptism” liturgy.

I poured those little glass beads into the font and assured my parishioners, each of whom relied on a walker, that I’d happily carry the font’s bowl to anyone who preferred not to leave their seat—I assumed that would be the entire congregation.

Instead, every single one of those frail disciples chose to come forward, reaching awkwardly, eagerly, solemnly into the water to retrieve a reminder of God. May I never forget the beauty of those dripping, gnarled hands.

Arnold: From the beginning, the congregation was committed to offering God’s beauty through flowers, banners, and music whether they gathered in a bar and grill, a school music room, or eventually a sanctuary (with lots of windows). They’ve been equally committed to connecting with God’s sacred creation. The preschool rooms have low windows for toddlers to see trees, bushes, and sky. The church’s xeriscape gardens invite the congregation and our neighbors to experience God’s des31

Beauty in the Church’s Mission ert beauty. We also believe in God’s infinite imagination, and our worship seeks to include diverse voices and traditions as expressions of God’s creativity and beauty.

Sturgess: As a son of the rural Midwest, I found my first years in Southern California to be frightening. On any given trip to a mall I heard more languages than I had heard my entire life. It was Pentecost at Macy’s. Eventually, I began to appreciate diversity as the true beauty of God’s creation. In the face of the need for racial and sexual justice, I have come to realize there is an essential conversion that needs to take place in our spiritual lives. Believing understood as conformity to right doctrine or singular ideas of truth can only take you so far. Empires and tyrants reduce truth to singular images. Creation is an astonishing plurality.

Garrity: Beauty is found in a dialogue, in time and space, between the text, the moment, and the medium. This blend culminates in a visual prayer, a visual sermon, a visual conversation with God.

Ephemeral timing, anchored in text, is a signature of Reformed theology. One tenet is the idea that visuals in the worship space must not become idolatry— hence, the perpetual chance to reimagine and recreate. Each visual in the worship space should be placed intentionally in response to the Word of the Lord for that particular service. Thus, an invigorating creative process must be a part of crafting each service, grounding the visual offering in the biblical text.

What practices of beauty have been especially meaningful for you or your congregation?

Garrity: Working on an art piece in response to a biblical text is a visceral and beautiful experience. I yearn to draw the emotion that God is challenging me to explore out of the image that I am creating. I converse with God throughout my work. I read, wonder, and imagine. I draw, research, contemplate, and paint. I reread, correct, improve, and edit. I reflect. When the piece is complete with artistic balance and biblical meaning, it is a moment of great amen. This beautiful dialogue is emotional, interactive, tangible, deep, and challenging prayer.

Sturgess: The late Dr. Stan Hall of Austin Seminary taught me that good liturgy is also beautiful. I have enjoyed attempting and failing to shape worship that is also beautiful. One example was successful by accident. A beloved son of my congregation was in the University of Portland’s all male a-cappella vocal ensemble. They were in town for a competition on Palm Sunday. I had a full Palm/Passion service planned. The one sacred piece they knew was Biebl’s Ave Maria. What on earth was I to do with that at a crucifixion? Remembering the moment in John where Jesus gives his mother, Mary, and the beloved disciple to each other as family, I added that text to the service and put the Ave Maria there. In worship it was astonishing.

At the foot of the cross we wept with Mary, and the church was born in a prayer of compassion for the world. It was beautiful.

Continued on page 40

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Faculty Books Recent publications by Austin Seminary professors The ABCs of Diversity: Helping Kids (and Ourselves!) Embrace our Differences, by & Y. Joy HarrisSmith and Carolyn B. Helsel, Associate Professor in the Blair R. Monie Distinguished Chair in Homiletics, Austin Seminary

congregational setting!

What Harris-Smith and Helsel offer is a grace-filled, careful, and thoughtful response to that speaker. Helsel and Harris-Smith provide tactics and stories that are helpful for parents in talking with their children and why talking about difference is a life and death matter.

The ABCs are incredibly helpful acronyms for Harris-Smith’s and Helsel’s approach to diversity when parenting (or in one’s everyday life). They leverage the ABCs to various ends: “Afraid, Backing away, and Control,” which names unhelpful responses to diversity; “Acknowledge, Be present, and Come Closer,” which names ways to stay engaged; or “Access, Build, Cultivate,” which names an approach to building a more just, inclusive, and equitable society.

They take on issues like race, gender, sexuality, and religious diversity.

Offering heartfelt stories from their lives, the authors bring parents into the conversation with the familiar real-life experiences and curiosities of children.

More importantly, they challenge parents to self-educate about issues of diversity.

The inner lives and curiosities of children expands well beyond the “celebration” of diversity so often found in many curriculums. Children are witnessing a world filled with violence. That is why one of the most important topics addressed in the book is “the talk.” For all those parents from diverse backgrounds, the talk has life and death consequences for children. The talk is precisely the type of education and formation so many Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and people of color have to have with our children about how their bodies are perceived by the majority world. And heartbreakingly, the talk is also about how to navigate in the body God gave them so that they will not be harmed, harassed, hurt, or something far worse. Being able to both be aware of

Chalice Press, 2020, 189 pages, $19.99 (paper). Reviewed by Dr. Patrick B. Reyes, senior director for learning design at the Forum for Theological Exploration.

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y face flushed with frustration. My co-facilitator and I had done everything to set the conditions for conversation and resources about parenting for faith and identify formation. The day’s topic was diversity and why it mattered. The phrase that triggered my emotion and heard all too often in these spaces left the lips of a parent as if almost on cue: “I don’t see difference and I don’t teach my children to see it either. We are all just human.”

Parents are the worst! I thought to myself.

Speaking as one, we simply care too much and listen too little. We had not even begun to share about the breadth of diversity in the room and a parent was already staking a claim.

Facilitating a conversation regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and access with parents in a congregation, I did my best to stay calm.

Moments like these, innocent in the minds of the speaker, are taxing to every person of color, gender non-conforming, differently abled, and neuro-diverse person in the room.

I signaled to my co-facilitator who said they would step up in these moments. It was their turn to gracefully address this alltoo-often comment made by well-meaning and well-intentioned majority culture parents. But they did not say a word. The commenter continued: “I don’t want my children thinking that they are different than other people. Wouldn’t that just reinforce the stereotypes that we are here to stop?”

The ABCs of Diversity is the critical intervention parents need, and frankly, what I needed as a facilitator in this

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Faculty Books the various talks parents from different communities have to give and how to do it well in our communities are important for developing a narrative around diversity that starts from the current reality.

The challenge with any book addressing parents, of course, is time.

The authors are very aware of this fact.

While the book can be finished in a single sitting, the depth of the pain and suffering communities who survived (or are currently surviving) violence is missing in this text. Similarly, as the planet faces conditions where the diversities of plants and animals are rapidly decreasing, the ABCs is a starting point, but it cannot be the ending. Helsel and Harris-Smith have prompted each of us to go deeper in our own understanding of diversity.

What is most helpful is they provide both practices and resources for readers and reading groups to do so. Adopting the principles and insights lifted up could not be more important in these times.

If parents of majority cultures do not start doing the work outlined by Helsel and Harris-Smith, the burden continues to lie on those of where the stakes for “the talk” are high. Helsel and HarrisSmith have offered an excellent starting place for parents and adults alike.

being. Arguably, no archive is more relevant to the development of the study of the Bible than that of the British Museum, with its vast collections of “Oriental” antiquities.

The task of the archive is to convince the populace that it is supporting the “common good” of the social body. Cuéllar argues that it does so both through “collective remembering” of ancient artifacts but also through “collective forgetting,” the conscious act of overlooking material that supports claims not benefiting the Empire.

Cuéllar’s claim is not new. What is new is how thoroughly Cuéllar supports the claim. He does so by examining not only the collections, but the architecture and even the spatial and ideological mapping that go into the archive’s activities.

There is a secondary claim made in this volume, which is that the field of the academic study of the Bible is itself a kind of imperial archive in that it stores and organizes information and material evidence in a way that also supports Empire. Biblical Studies, as an academic field of discourse, emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the heyday of the British Empire and the time of developing nation-states. During this time, Western military advances, especially to the traditional regions in which the biblical stories emerged, included the confiscation of biblically related manuscripts, antiquities, and material evidence, all of which needed interpreting. By the same token, just as the antiquities collected in other fields produced new fields of inquiry and discourse based on the assumptions of Western modernity, so did the field of biblical studies. Not only was the British Museum, in supporting these advances, able to “claim ownership over a foreign group’s cultural heritage” (18), but it also legitimized a set of assumptions that were drawn from the natural sciences—assumptions, for instance, that these Western biblical scholars had the

Empire, The British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century, by Gregory Cuéllar, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Austin Seminary Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, 201 pages, $41.40 (hardback). Reviewed by Dr. Kay Higuera Smith, professor, Department of Biblical and Religious Studies and program director, Religious Studies Minor at Azusa Pacific University

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regory Cuéllar’s recent book, Empire, The British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century, shows how an archive is one of the most effective tools for displaying and classifying artifacts that underwrite Empire and its attendant colonial ways of thinking and

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Faculty Books training and ability to efface their own particular interests and to assess the texts, manuscripts, and material evidence with objectivity expected. Notably, despite assertion of objectivity, during this period the natural sciences themselves were awash in now-debunked racial claims which served to confirm that Anglo-Europeans were mentally and constitutionally more stable and more rational than people from other social-ethnic racial groups.

Cuéllar argues that another way that the guild of biblical scholars supported Empire is based on particular interpretations of history (133). Hegelian philosophy had advanced a notion that history was inexorably advancing toward the good, as interpreted by Western European norms. The chronologies developed out of these interpretations, in turn, determined architectural decisions as to how to arrange and organize artifacts within the Museum in order to reinforce the implied assumption that European Imperial power was the apex of biblical and historic time.

It is no surprise then, that a scholarly field which developed using these assumptions, even when those assumptions were later abandoned, has been unable even to perceive, let alone abandon, its established discourse—a discourse in which the interests of Anglo-European male clerics remained unchallenged for so long. This was the group that sought to answer the urgent questions asked and, not surprisingly, the answers at which they

arrived were those that seemed plausible to that self-same group. In all of these ways, the beneficiaries of Empire created a discourse of the academic study of the Bible which, to this day, primarily represents and supports their own interests.

In this system, only Europeantrained, Anglo-European male academics were trusted with having attained credible scientific acumen. This acumen was then applied to the interpretation and arrangement of texts as well as artifacts. This control over knowledge production, notes Cuéllar, “involved a concatenation of encoded discourses, expert alliances, and technical maneuvers” (135), all of which benefited Empire.

In the end, Cuéllar’s book teaches us that we have much work to do. First, we must re-examine the assumptions within the study of the Bible that we have taken as given—assumptions related to the development of history, to how we assign epistemic authority to interpret the Bible, and to how we organize and create taxonomies of knowledge. The field is ripe for young scholars from the Global South, including subaltern men, women, and gender-nonconforming scholars worldwide, to begin to reassess and rewrite the urgent questions we bring to the study of the Bible, to archaeology, and to the material evidence and antiquities associated with them. Gregory Cuéllar has given us a path upon which to embark, and for that we should be grateful. v

Coming in the fall issue:

Professor Bridgett Green “Just the Right Words?

The Promise and Peril of Language” 35

Christianity & Culture

The Messiness of Families, Today and in the Bible Song-Mi Suzie Park

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or many months now I have ended every phone call with my elderly parents with a reminder to refrain from going out of the house. I don’t know if they listen to me, but I suspect they do so only partly. Having not seen them over the year, I don’t really know what they are doing. Hence, the phone call ends with lots of mixed emotions: anger, frustration, fear, sadness, and also, to some degree, understanding and resignation. I understand it is difficult to isolate. For some, like “essential workers” from Amazon warehouses to hospitals, it has been impossible to do so. And many people are forced to make complicated evaluations about risks and rewards where livelihoods, solvency, and last chances to see loved ones hang in the balance.

As experts have frequently discussed, in increasing isolation and stress, the impact of this pandemic upon those most vulnerable, such as the elderly, children, or single adults, is particularly cruel. Covid-19 turns wonderful parts of a full life— contact and connection—into poisons, transforming the very things people need to survive these difficult times into things that can potentially harm or even kill.

Miscalculations are deadly, and their consequences may inflict devastating wounds.

Suzie Park is associate professor of Old Testament at Austin Seminary.

She earned her PhD from Harvard in 2010 and began teaching at Austin Seminary the following year. Park is the author of the new book for the Wisdom Commentary series, 2 Kings (Liturgical Press, 2019), in which she engages the latest in feminist biblical scholarship. Her newest book, The Flawed Family of God: Stories about Imperfect Families of Genesis, is due in 2021.

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Park

We have all heard stories about families who went to a small gathering after quarantining for months only to infect themselves and those with whom they live; in some tragic cases family members have died.1 We also know of people who have been forced to leave their house so that they can earn a living, only to become infected themselves. Many people have lost businesses or livelihoods and face the stress of bankruptcy and fears over eviction or affording health care—and we know that these risks and losses have fallen disproportionately upon people of color and the poor.

Needless to say, these past months have been a difficult time for families. The pandemic has raised challenging yet unanswerable questions about what it means to be in a family, both narrowly and widely construed. What kind of appropriate behavior should we demand and expect from our family members? What do we owe each other communally so that everyone can stay safe, so that undue risk is not borne by the most vulnerable? How should we feel and what do we do when family members behave in ways with which we are uncomfortable? How do we balance the need for safety with the need to be with each another?

Not just the pandemic, but the contentious political situation in the United States has weighed on family ties, at times leading to further distancing of family members. In contrast to those who are willing to risk their life to see and be near their family and friends, we have also heard recent accounts of people who have unexpectedly ended relationships or cut off contact with family members. Political disagreements, especially as it concerns issues of race, came to the fore this past year with the protests surrounding the killings of Black Americans by police and by an extremely divisive presidential election. Our need and desire for connection with our families has thus been countered by our need to distance ourselves from those family members with whom we have divergent opinions, especially on sensitive topics. Indeed, it has been pointed out that because of the lack of shared and trusted news sources, we often cannot even agree on facts or feel that we share the same reality with our own family members.

These disagreements undoubtedly led to fissures in the family and even breakups. In the lead up and aftermath to the 2020 presidential election, stories about the ending of familial relationship and friendships due to political divergences were rampant. A story in The Atlantic discussed how one such family, the Sayers, decided to refrain from taking down their Black Lives Matter sign when more conservative members of their family visited. The Sayers stated that political disagreements have led to a “cold-war” situation within their larger family where communication has stalled and relationships have frayed.2 Indeed, bespeaking the impact of politics on intrafamilial relationships, a recent story on National Public Radio notes that political polarizations have intensified so starkly of late that almost “80% of Americans now have ‘just a few’ or no friends at all across the aisle.’”3

I’ve been thinking a lot about families, having recently co-written a book examining the stories about families in the Hebrew Bible and the ways in which these stories overlap with, reflect, and at points guide us toward a better understanding of families today.4 Of course, while writing this book, I had no idea how relevant 37

Christianity and Culture this topic would become, nor can I offer any easy solutions to the many problems that families are currently facing. Rather, as a Biblicist, my impulse is to turn to the stories in the Hebrew Bible as a means by which to examine and better understand the current situation.

Take for example the story of Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37–50). Joseph is the talented but (at least initially) tactless son of the Israelite patriarch, Jacob.

His mother, Rachel, dies while giving birth to Joseph’s younger brother, and it is her premature death that likely plays a part in the favoritism that his father shows him. This blatant favoritism, tangibly demonstrated when Jacob gives Joseph a coat, is further exacerbated by Joseph’s own uncouthness. When we first meet this figure, he is depicted as unwisely blurting out to his family two dreams he’s had that foretell his future greatness. So intolerable is Joseph that his brothers get rid of him by selling him as a slave. As a result, Joseph ends up in Egypt, where, after a series of disappointments and successes, he becomes a vizier.

This story demonstrates the enormous and sometimes tragic ramifications that small mistakes can have on the family. Joseph’s father, Jacob, because of his favoritism of Joseph, exacerbates the fractures in his family and ends up losing his favorite son for most of his life. Eventually the entire family is reunited, and Joseph ends up forgiving his brothers for their bad behavior. The story is usually remembered as evincing a clear theological message, stated at the end of the story

by Joseph, who has become not only more powerful but also wise: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Gen 50:20).

This story is beloved by many for this putatively hopeful and satisfying theological message. I would love to say this message is an always-applicable answer to the problems that families are facing right now. But here we have to be careful. This text reflects but does not necessarily parallel real life. Insofar as there is a distinction between this text and our lives, it is dangerous to cover up the difficulties of present realities with an overly positive theological message from these stories, even if they stem from the Bible. Not only does it fail to take into account the current challenges that families face, but it sets unrealistic expectations. Unlike in the story, many people have lost family members during the pandemic—sometimes because of a tiny mistake like a seemingly safe get-together. And unlike with Joseph, these lost family members will not be returned to their families in this life.

In short, unlike the biblical story, we do not know whether there is a positive pedagogical or theological motive behind all the harm and suffering that we are enduring. Though we may want to find a positive divine purpose behind the difficulties that we are going through, we might be unable able to, and there might not be one.

Sometimes bad things happen to people for no good, justifiable, or just reason.

The story of Joseph, like other stories in the biblical text, does not offer a theology or message that we can and should simply plunk into the modern context as a kind of panacea to our problems. Indeed, even the theological message for which the story of Joseph is best remembered—“God intended it for good”—is actually more complicated when we look at the story as a whole. According to the larger 38

Park

literary context, Joseph tells his brothers about the divine purpose of his suffering precisely because his brothers, after their father’s death, are fearful that Joseph might hold a grudge and exact revenge for their earlier crime (Gen 50:15). Terrified that Joseph has only refrained from punishing them for the sake of their father, the brothers, shortly after their father dies, tell Joseph a conspicuous lie. The brothers tell him that before his death, their father had told the brothers to tell Joseph to forgive them for their earlier misdeed (Gen. 50:17). It is at this point that Joseph, saddened by his brothers’ distrust (and likely their lack of honesty and emotional development), tells them that he is no longer angry and will not avenge himself for their earlier mistreatment because a larger, positive divine plan ultimately came to fruition because of their unbrotherly act (Gen 50:19-20).

It is in the larger, more complicated context of this theological statement that we can discern the subtle messages of this rich tale. This story shows that, as in the biblical text, families still are incredibly complex and that perfect actions are impossible. Indeed, perfect reconciliation with some family members might never happen. There might be some forgiveness and some attempt at healing. However, ambivalent feelings, distrust, and scars may linger. As the behavior of Joseph’s brothers illustrate, some family members may never improve or develop emotionally, and the family, as a result, may remain fractured.

Additionally, and especially pertinent in this time of the pandemic, the story of Joseph shows the lingering impact that the death of one family member can have on the entire familial unit. Joseph’s supposed death affects the whole family.

His brothers never seem to recover from their guilt, and his father seems to have become rather paranoid about the possibility of losing another child. The death of Joseph’s father also has consequences for the family, revealing the familial relationships that remain unhealed. Indeed, though Joseph is never said to have punished his brothers after their father’s death, they might have lived in fear of his retaliation for the rest of their lives. Perhaps the death of their father prevented the family from a full reconciliation, leaving all the brothers in a state of abeyance.

Most importantly, in a time of pandemic fears, political fracturing, isolation, distress, and distancing, these stories offer us, the reader, alternate ways to deisolate and come together. First, these stories, by telling of the complicated and fractured familial relationships among biblical characters, gently remind us that our problems are not unique. We are not the only ones who are confused and filled with mixed emotions about those whom we call family. Second, by compelling readers to mimic and live out different realities and other lives, these stories help us to become more empathetic and more attuned to the thoughts, suffering, and feelings of others. These narratives offer the reader a kind of needed liminal space where we can inhabit an alternate reality, encounter various personalities, go through different challenges, and learn to overcome them and endure. They help us to experience a variant kind of connection. And in so doing, they help us feel a little less alone during this time of isolation and physical separation from our families and loved ones. v (notes on following page) 39

Christianity and Culture NOTES 1. Dana Branham, “‘Please don’t be like my family,” The Dallas Morning News, November 23, 2020. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2020/11/23/please-dont-be-like-my-family-arlington-familywarns-others-not-to-gather-after-15-relatives-got-covid-19/ 2. Kiley Bense, “How Politics in Trump’s America Divides Families,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/how-politics-in-trumps-america-divides-families/576301/ 3. Tovia Smith, “‘Dude, I’m Done’: When Politics Tears Families and Friendships Apart,” National Public Radio, October 27, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/27/928209548/dude-i-m-done-when-politicstears-families-and-friendships-apart 4. Carolyn B. Helsel and Song-Mi Suzie Park, The Flawed Family of God: Stories about Imperfect Families of Genesis (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2021).

Pastors’ Panel Continued from page 32

Arnold: In our commitment to care for the wider community, we provide both food and “dignity kits,” Valentine’s cards, and other gifts of beauty for the guests of Santa Fe’s shelters. We advocate for access to parks and open spaces. Musically and with art, we try to reflect our region’s spiritual traditions, in particular Native American and Hispanic Catholic. Our virtual worship incorporates biblical stories as imagined by Italian Renaissance painters and Mafa Christians in Cameroon.

Since we can’t gather inside, we take “wonder walks” to remind ourselves that God is still present and at work in this wilderness time.

Campbell-Taylor: Music is probably the most widespread practice of beauty in the churches I know. I’ve witnessed the beauty of the organ accompaniment’s inventiveness, the beauty of the bellringers’ stationary dance, the beauty of the choir’s glorious song. Still, no music has so utterly swept me away as when Bob would sing.

A survivor of traumatic brain injury, Bob persevered in the bass section where he would clasp his hands over his heart, gaze ardently upward, and sing directly to his God. That was pure beauty.

I can’t leave this survey of beauty without recalling the church that formed me: the beauty of its architecture and stained glass, the beauty of its liturgy and music.

For all that, the beauty that still moves me most is the beauty of people who had all sorts of other stuff to do, and yet they chose to enter that beautiful sanctuary to worship God and then exit to serve God’s beautiful but broken and beloved world.v 40

Theodore J. Wardlaw, President

Board of Trustees Keatan A. King, Chair James C. Allison Lee Ardell Janice L. Bryant (MDiv’01, DMin’11) Kelley Cooper Cameron Claudia D. Carroll Katherine B. Cummings (MDiv’05) Thomas Christian Currie James A. DeMent (MDiv’17) Jill Duffield (DMin’13) Britta Martin Dukes (MDiv’05) Beth Blanton Flowers, M.D. G. Archer Frierson II Stephen Giles Jesús Juan González (MDiv’92) William Greenway John S. Hartman Ora Houston

John A. Kennedy Steve LeBlanc Sue B. McCoy Matthew Miller (MDiv’03) W. David Pardue Denice Nance Pierce (MATS’11) Mark B. Ramsey Stephen J. Rhoades Sharon Risher (MDiv’07) Conrad M. Rocha Lana Russell John L. Van Osdall Michael Waschevski (DMin’03) Teresa Welborn Elizabeth C. Williams Michael G. Wright

Trustees Emeriti Lyndon Olson, B.W. Payne, Max Sherman, Anne Vickery Stevenson

Spring 2021

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