Tract-aphorisms for Our Time

February 20, 2020

Perhaps it is a time of honesty to say that we live and have our being in language, since having language is a requisite for knowing anything or even have consciousness of consciousness.  O, but you say, babies don't know language and they are conscious.  But babies are passively coded completely by language by their communities of reception.  We are always already passive recipients of the language which we are not "consciously using" at any given time.

What does this mean?  It means that coming to language is the evolutionary moment of creation for human existence as we can know it.  And John 1:1 seems to confirm that Word is co-extensive with that which none greater can be conceived.  We can say that language is the continuously referring action to what is not language, however we have to use language to do it.  That language continuously refers to a signified which can only appear under the guise of another signifier represents the linguistic treadmill that we are on.  We are moving but not getting anywhere meaning that the Signified can never speak as the Signified, only as manifested in signifiers.

This mean no one has to have faith that they live and move and have their being in language; it is the unavoidable reality of human existence.  If we all have such faith, then what is the function of God-discourse?  It functions as a system of coming to best values so that human beings can be the very best language users, not just in how they articulate spoken and written and artistic language products, but also how they articulate body language products speaking love and justice in action.





Our era requires the rising of the primacy of language qua language being the arche or first principle of human life as we know it.  Every experience involves language users being caught within the web of language's self reflexivity (mutual and reciprocal self referencing endlessly) which occurs within language.  We are at the place of acknowledging human beings as language users with multi-discursive practices pertaining to the variety of meaningful experiences which come to human beings in art, music, poetry, cooking, talking, writing, science and whatever else comes to language, not in presenting language as corresponding to reality or nature, but as being co-extensive with reality and nature.  We are on the endless treadmill of having to use signifiers to be mysteriously linked to something which is not a signifier but being helplessly forced to continue to use signifiers to refer to what is not a signifier, meaning we cannot know the Signified as the Signified.  This is endless production of signifiers about other signifiers while pretending that signifier has a stable and precise connection with something which is not it.  A word signifier cannot exist alone; it implies the endless thesaurus which ripples to the growing edge of the pond of the entire universe of signifiers.




February 14, 2020

Looking for insights regarding the post-truth era.  If truth is in the Nietzschean sense a "well-worn" metaphor, then one is speaking about the duration of a metaphor's meaningful use within a significant solidarity of people.  Modern science has come to fill the the quest for the longer duration for enduring metaphors even while those who use the method admit all "scientific truths" are tentative in that they are open to the future to be disproved by further discovery.  So the duration of a theory having become a stated scientific law means that science within the solidarity of subscribing practitioners has an enduring truth quality which does not prevail in the field of religion, and does not have applicability in the aesthetic realm because the subjective experience of beauty in art, music or poetry has no way to be measured or quantified except by counting people who "like or find pleasure" in a work of art or music or poetry.  The aesthetic meaningful truth have no way to guarantee replication in the experience of everyone (which can happen within solidarity of scientific discourse), so they may be discounted as different than scientific discourse, even though significant solidarities of people confess to the meaningful sublimity of faith experiences, art experience, music experience and the sublime found in textual forms of poetry, song, prose or novels.  If truth was measured by adherents and there are more than 2 billion professing people of faith in our world, then such a solidarity would be in itself a confirming validity of the truth values of the various forms of faith/religious discourse.  This should not be a threat to scientific truth as long as people of religion do not try to claim that all of the textual material in their books of faith conform to the scientific criteria of "having to be empirically verifiable" with the assumptions that the natural laws of the universe are stable across time and geography.  People do not rise into the sky unaided by mechanical force today and so they didn't two thousand years ago either.  But persons who partake of a liminal state of mind can perceive all sorts of things which can't happen in the conscious mechanical world of science.  Hence, there are different discourses which pertain to different facets of meaningful and moving beautiful truth within the aesthetic experiences which are of a different order than the rather stable and meaning propositionalized truths of scientific theory.

The post-truth era in a practical sense means that significant mobs of people find public lying generally okay, if it is an expression against their enemies and if it doesn't have to be tested in a juridical situation, under oath and with cross examination and proof.

A preacher or a politician does not have to be under oath or cross examination.  They can make "hit and run" statements to try to influence people for their product or party or religious line.  A religious huckster is selling a bottle of cure for the coronavirus which has not even been fully understood by medical science.  Yes, it could be fraudulent practice but in claiming freedom of speech about his "faith" in the project, such a huckster can game a system, just as a president can claim that if he believes his election is best for the country, then he can literally do anything he wants as long as he is sincerely claiming he believes it in the best interest of the country.  The problem of freedom without any responsibility, means that license becomes equal with all other heretofore regarded virtuous things to do with freedom.

February 13, 2020

One explanation for the post-truth era is that in the Nietzschean sense of truth as simply a "long used metaphor," meaning truth has a democracy because people choose or don't choose to continue to use it.  In the informational age it is difficult for such "truths" to have a very long shelf life.  What seems to be the hidden truth are the scientific and technological engines which drive the media for making "truth" traditions available to "subscribers" and ironically it is not what is being subscribe to which is the lasting truth; rather it is the engine of the media which is the lasting metaphor.  McLuhan once proclaimed that the media is the message.  Such could be restated as the "The media is the lasting truth which serves up many messages."

 February 12, 2020

If the uninterested people in religious participation are called the "nones," being a "none" is also what a large number of eligible voters are, they are "nones" as in "I don't vote."  Why don't people vote?  Probably for the same reason people don't go to church.  In the informational age the sensorial over-load is so great and dazzling and complex that the religious perspective and the voter perspective which arose in simple agrarian America do not grasp people in a way that is able to bear the kind of desire which leads to participation.  To vote one has to desire and in the post-modern era there are too many available objects to bear the projections of desire.  By sheer vast competition for catching the projection of desire, there is less energized desire resulting in actual church attendance or voting in elections.  We've gone from the good ol' days when there were but three television networks to our day of thousands of media opportunities and so accessible in screens of varying sizes.  Screen presentations have a greater omni-presence than religious participation or voting.  The ad wizards and propaganda hackers who can colonize a base to control election end up creating minorities which rule the majority because the majority gave up their rights since they had seemingly better entertainment to command their attention and kept them from church and the polling station.


The complexity of the deluge of information in our time means that people who were brought up on limited media have not made the adjustment to the complexity.  They allow themselves to be colonized into seeming populist simplistic answer and they look to branded by a "mob grouping" so as to have an identity, even if they end up seeming to support things that they would never support as a single individual.

February 4, 2020

The Trump era has now come to be called the "post-truth" era, with the politician even saying that you can't believe your eyes.  It is an era of sophistic news whereby if a politician disagrees with a factual account, it is called "fake news," and the accuser of such offers what he or she calls alternative facts.  The free press of our country has taken a hit; we've relied on the free press to assert journalistic standards with the equivalence of the scientific method in journalistic discourse being, "Something is only meaningfully and reliably true, if and only if, it is something that can be empirically verifiable through direct observation or documentation of the sources which provide the evidence for such reliable truth."  With Trumpian "hyperbolic truth," he states or makes up stuff convenient to his moment or speaking or tweeting.  He documents with phrases like "people are saying," as if such were reliable.  His National Enquirer friend publishes a total myth about an opponent and he uses that myth as proof to attack his opponent's wife and father.

A pronounced irony of the "post-truth" era is that the group of people who are called fundamental evangelical Christians who are supposed to be people committed to "biblical truth," end up being their own "fatalistic apocalyptic elect who are deceived" by someone who is arguably the most prolific liar in American history.  And who in the Bible is called the father of lies?  The most prolific voice for the father of lies should be tellingly obvious to those who purport a biblical standard of truth, but by their own apocalyptic standards they themselves have become the "deceived elect by the one who is acting in a most anti-Christly lying way."  Why do they choose to serve the political power of a liar?  Perhaps it is a pragmatic, better the liar we know who gives us what we want regarding abortion and gay people, and who lets us build our tax-free financial kingdoms than someone who would have the audacity to promote a governmental program to bring help to the least of these mentioned by Jesus, who borrowed good news from the prophet Isaiah to bring it to poor, the captive and the ill.

One might suggest that the "post-truth" era is nothing new in history.  It has attended many political regimes in history, notably the ones which gave rise to Nazism, Stalinism, and current Putinism et. al.  Such post-truth eras are characterized by the over-association of significant media with a singular personality in power.  The conditions for the unchecked rise of such singular personalities might wrongly be due to the growing nostalgia and ignorance of an aging populace.  It is not ignorance; it is the inability of people to process the enormous complexity of the post-modern informational age.  The deluge of information has threatened the hermeneutic capacity of a significant group of citizenry.  They find comfort in simple answers and simple interpretation.  They still want to process the mathematic deluge with their hermeneutic abacuses.  It is easier for them to turn themselves over to their preacher gurus and a person of such limited complexity that he utters simplistic slogans for complex matters that uses the formula, "I, good, and greatest; anyone who opposes me is dirty, bad and worthy to be labeled with my profound junior high name calling gift."

What has arisen in the failure of a significant mass to process complexity toward wholistic and omni-present just outcomes, is the shadow of evil which can inhabit a society if the right conditions prevail to allow it to be release.  Good people, unable to process complexity have allow easy answer "liars" to release the shadow of evil and people begin to openly support leaders who do bad things with the blessing of people who would not do such things in their own neighborhood.

One can say that today in America, the age of post-truth has resulted in the worst shadow of evil to arise, not as bad as in the days of slavery and not as bad in the day when women could not vote or when the powerless were not regarded, but it tempts to leave the truth traditions  of reliable sources which have characterized good journalism, but also the truths which came to have legal embodiment in our Constitution.

The shadow has arisen even to threaten the truth tradition of the Constitution, as recently stated, "If a president believes his election is the national interest, he can achieve that election by anyway he deems possible, including the use of foreign countries."

January 2020

The original Tractarian involved a theologian "meddling" in National Politics even though an "established" Anglican Church involved an accepted blending of politics and religion when the Crown is the "head" of the church as having "veto" power on ecclesiastical appointments and having the papal designation as "Fidei Defensor."   Keble mourned the apostasy of the government in not being responsive to the succession of the apostles.  An argument that the "bishops" were not getting proper respect.  What does religious meddling mean in our disestablished form of government?  Perhaps as the realm of God as proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth was more of Jesus and the Spirit of God doing an inside job on the hearts of people, and not as a political or military king in the kin of a Caesar, forcing spirituality or ecclesiastical priorities upon the populace.

In a representative government, we rely upon the individual faith of a representative to influence their political decision even though the specific faith motive cannot be instantiated as a faith prerogative within a specific legislative action except as one can find the coincidence of faith values and the general good of the electorate.

What might be more crucial about our national apostasy would be that the faith communities have lost all leavening influence on behalf of those who Jesus called the "least of these."  Our political system has allowed our "free market" economic system to concentrate the general wealth of society into the hands of a few wealthy persons even though they seem to say it is dispersed to their corporate stockholders.  As elected officials directly or indirectly are beholden to economic interests in our country, and it results in a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, then we nullify the historic advance of democracies as the preferred forms of enlightened and participative governance and we slide into subtle oligarchies parading under guise of democracies.

One can say that corporatocracies as an expression of oligarchies have the wealth to purchase the best of human genius to deal with the modern complexities of our technological and informational age and they have proven adept at manipulating our constitutional form of government which derived from time when economies in contrast with economies today were run out of a cigar box with the calculating tools of a abacus.

Post-modern persons of faith need to develop strategies to convert the leaders of our industry to creativity devise a truly "free market," which would mean that such leaders would hire the genius of creativity to include in a free market, the free choice to provide living and health and sufficient life benefit for all person.  Our national apostasy is that the "least of these" are not be cared for.  Caring for the "least of these" should be the expression of a free market.  A market is not free if it result in the "dictatorial" control of the small minority who control most of the assets

May 31, 2018

One can honestly embrace the postmodern eschewing of total world views with humility since each can only say with St. Paul, "I know and see in part."  If partial seeing assumes that there is a counter-total to one's part, the one who sees "in part" cannot presume to speak from experience on behalf of such a "totality."  Perhaps the appropriate way to make room for the "total" view is to say that total discursive universe is implied in any particular discursive product whether, seeing, speaking, thinking, writing, or being seen, being thought about, spoken about or written about as some passive object of others' language use.  So totality may be an unavoidable discursive trope of language users though no one language user is linguistically all comprehending to be omni-polyglottic.  

I have adopted the aphorism as being true to the flicker insights of seeing only "in part."  Yet, honestly my aphorisms have grown to be more often like paragraphs, and only claim their aphoristic identity by being stand alone islands of thought in the sense of the writing occasion.

The social media adaptation of the aphorism might  called the "Tweet."  A Tweet is limited to a certain number of spaces, though one can do serial and connected Tweets.  Tweets feed the esteem of people who think that none of their thoughts should be unpublished but Tweets surely are highly censored by the Tweeter and if one is shocked by what is shared, one would probably be even more shock by what thankful did not come to published text of a Tweet.

Tweets can serve that nomadism caused by living in Time and offer reductive reflections of one's perception of what is happening in situ.

Tweets as political discourse of late have been used for polemic purpose to feed the megalomaniacal personality to chew up the media scenery and reinforce propaganda effect by the repeating of thing that one wants for  one's hyperbolic "truth."  This repetition of the same ol' same ol' over and over again instantiates what Nietzsche wrote about truth: It is well worn metaphors.  In the age of postmodern media, truths are only well worn for x number of news cycles and the megalomaniacal narcissistic person only desires to control a continual series of news cycles.

The traditional notion of "truth" as opposed to something being a "lie" has recently taken a beating.  In postmodernism, there is a sense that everything is fiction and deconstructable, in the sense that every statement is "contextual."  Shifting context and acknowledging the multiple subject positions of all who experience an event or events implies the perpetuity of "competing" versions of truth or reality.  For those who rush to the judgment of relativistic nihilism, they do so only from a subject position founded within a paradigm or traditions of words, religion or philosophy.  And the judge is one who is speaking on behalf of some essence below "turtles all the way down," which is indeed an oxymoron.  It is more honest to say that "truth, of the more and most adequate sort" resides within human solidarities and competing human solidarities should be committed to articulate truth as statement and lifestyle in accord with what the community regards to be the most adequate standards.  The human solidarities which propose traditions of love and justice rendered to the most persons have the right to enter the competitive quest for the most adequate way to live according to the most adequate standard for the most people in our world.  Such a resort to the standard of solidarities cannot be rightly rendered as a cheap relativistic nihilistic amoralism with no foundation.  Solidarities of human beings who admit that in time we are committed to surpass ourselves in excellence admit that totality involves being open to a greater, better and more adequate becoming.

May 30, 2018

The parish church or the local congregation faces new challenges in the post-modern era.  It used to be that each local congregation could have an "ethos" around which an identity was formed.  In the Episcopal setting a parish could be "evangelical," "low church," "Morning Prayer Parish," "High Church," "Charismatic," "Liberal," "Social Outreach Parish," "Social activist," "Identity Political, as to sexual orientation or feminism," et. al.  Since many local congregations have diversity of membership, the safe posture has been to be "non-political" in politics and in theology and rely on the aesthetics of liturgy and music to be the attraction to "check individual identity egos at the door" for the maintenance of the parish community.  The parish priest cannot be omni-competent to all of the pieties and faith stages represented in a parish and often the people most visibly passionate about their faith tend to be persons in the mythical-literal stage of faith development whereby they live in the state of "primary naivete" in interpretation of biblical texts.  Many priests and pastor have been trained to the secondary "naivete" of biblical texts due to their seminary studies in biblical exegesis and even though they return in homiletical appeals to matters of the heart of faith, they in their leadership cannot actually be in the same faith stage as their congregants.  In this disjunction the lack of commitment to traditional community ethos means that people of faith are nomadic and pragmatic in seeking the contextually relevant ministries to fulfill their exigent faith needs.  Postmodern faith means rampant nomadism for those who choose faith communities at all.

 May 22, 2018

Traditionally, theology has been regarded to be "negative" and "positive" in a presentation of God.  So, God is not anything that we can say.  That is the negative.  When one says God is love, holy, transcendent, all powerful, omniscient et al, one is going "positive."  I think in our time, an honesty about God means being honest about word and language.  Language or Word is always already the positive condition of being human and knowing that we are language users who are then pre-coded by our environment with language use traditions; that is, we have traditions of how we cluster "signifers" together for mutual nuancing of meanings.  Because we have Word, we can say God is not this or that but more than this or that and we can also say that God is love, omnipotent, et al.  Language is the prior assumption for knowing ourselves as language users and every language use event, including the naming or articulation of God.  We might believe that God is an extra-linguistic "Signified" but in such a claim we've already used language to set the worded equation of us being believers using the word "God" as the extra-linguistic Signified.  Language and existence as it is humanly known cannot be separated.  It is time for all particular language users to acknowledge word and language as the co-extensive precursor of all.  This is basic honesty required in our time.  This honesty will help us take up the translation of language use traditions in the lives of the adherents so that all adherents of particular language use traditions will submit in humility to the Higher Word that is precursor of any particular word tradition.

April 17, 2018

The future about faith and religion has to do with being honest about having language as the very basis of anthropocentrism and theism.  Every thing starts because of language not in the sense of there not being "extra-linguistic" existence but in the sense that one has to say "extra-linguistic" existence to establish the same.

April 10, 2018

The word "myth" has both positive and pejorative meanings in religious studies.  St. Paul wrote that we do not follow "cleverly devised" myths.   On the other hand, when students of religion like Joseph Campbell spoke about myths, they referred in a positive sense to the range of meaningful stories that help to define the faith identities of people throughout the world.  There are some attitudes and views which attend how the word "myth" is regarded.  Some use the term "myth" to means something that is not true because it does not comport to eye-witness report of the behavior of human/angelic/divine beings acting in ways that conform to the uniformity of natural causes operative at anytime and in any place.  If something is not empirically verifiable now as having possible occurrence, then it is filed into the category of "myth" and therefore is not reliable "truth" as "truth" is defined on the basis of empirical verification and/or falsification.  (Falsification being the openness to future falsification.  Cows don't fly because we never witness it but they might in the future.  That cows don't fly is still open to be falsified in the future).   There are many positions regarding myth and mythological discourse.  Often things that are older and pertain to a pre-historic time, particularly "other worldly" entities and characters which defy current empirical verification seem to have the status of myth.  The more a story seems fantastical the more "mythical" it is designated.  As stories are shared in religious traditions about known people in human history, e.g. Jesus, disciples, Buddha, Muhammad, et al., religious devotees are sure that their particular religious figure has no "mythical" trappings which pertain to their deeds, words and acts.  Scientists and historians according to their own methods have to assume uniformity of causes in a closed system for all history and so they assign the term "myth" as pertaining to discourse which relate to events which do not comply to empirical verification.  It is interesting to note that as science has relegated the uncanny events that pertain to religious heroes to the category of myth, and has influenced our modern cultures to agree to this, the entire entertainment culture has taken up the imaginations of myth on steroids.  We have not purged the so called "mythical" from modern culture; we have just pushed it into art, aesthetics and entertainment.  This may be indicative of the splintering specialization of modern life because the rapid proliferation of total units of world knowledge.  The assumption would be that ancient religious discourse unified politics, religion, science?, entertainment, art and aesthetics within the religious discourse itself, since it was the more singular public discourse unifying the people who had access to it.  There is nothing which prevents people of faith to parse the different truth validity which pertains to the various discourses that one can find in religious texts and other uses of language of our own time.  What is chauvinistic would be the assumption that only one discursive practice has exclusive truth value.  Within the universe of language use and users, there is profound meaningful truth which pertain to each discursive practice.  It behooves all to be humble to avoid the chauvinism of implying, that "my meaningful truth is better or more profound than yours."  This does not nullify the duty that each of us has to live, speak and write, the most adequate version of what we believe to be valid meaningful truths in our lives.  In doing so, we can't avoid mutual judgments of each other regarding the adequacy of how we live, speak and write our meaningful truths.  This process itself should be a welcome crucible for us to fine tune how we perceived the meaningful articulation of the truths as we have received them within the linguistic traditions which instantiate the prior commitments which produce the stories and values for the same commitments.


April 10, 2018

I think the greatest task which faces Christian churches as well as all people is the acknowledgment of the sole identity of all humanity is that we have and use language.  This seems like a "no brainer" but in many ways the continual admission of this is perhaps the important basis of what is often call negative theology or apophatic theology.  In short, the divine is not anything that we can say that the divine is because it is always more.  The problem with negative theology is that we use words or language to say the negative so even using language about the negative is "cataphatic" or positive theology.  Language is the completely affirming theology and it is so ultimately positive to assume the realm of total discursive practice such that it functions as a relativizing and negativizing of any particular statement in language, including the statement about language itself.  By asserting the equality of all language users in being equally participants in the realm of Words, each particular word user can commit oneself to the task of interpreting the ways that words are used by language users to promote the traditions of supreme values that we have inherited in our traditions as language users.  Our task is define what adequate language use means to language users and their communities particularly as language users aspire to the peaceful co-existence of all users of language.  By firmly residing in the prior position of existing in language, one can admit with humility the particularly of one's own use, even if one's own use necessarily resorts of word that pertain to "totality;" God being the main word of faith for a discourse of totality.


April 4, 2018

In looking at the honest survival and perpetuation of faith communities, one must suggest a place where all of the particulars in terms of language products of faith community can resort to assess the nature of how they can be perpetuated in the postmodern era.  The place for all particular faith communities to resort is Word, in the John 1:1 sense.  The Word was God and all things have come into being through Word.   In Word, all particular Word products are equally word, without being free from the further assessment of human values formed within communities of solidarities where word products are subject to mutual judgements based upon the solidarities' criteria for common good, love and justice.

Every particular community, like the Episcopal Church, needs to resort to Word as God, as a place for communal metanoia/renewal/repentance/re-education in what might be called going through the threshold toward General Word in order to be deconstructed, not to escape particularity in the Plenitude of a Word Cauldron of Possibilisms, but rather to be thrown into the realm of infinite word contexts, some of which will provide insights for how one can invent and alter the Episcopal tradition as one goes through threshold from General Word back to the particular future word products that one proposes to constitute the Episcopal Church, going forward.  One sees this as having occurred in Prayerbook revisions where language which was embedded in the details of English culture with courtly language pertaining to earthly monarchs, get re-contextualized in the General Word Pool and cleansed and made suitable for people for whom the courtly language has no current actual/relevant reference.  This cleansing of the offense of ancient language for modern people, particularly as pertaining to the dignity of people in their gender/sexual identities and their ethnic identities is consistent with the "cleansing" of language that Jesus did in his effort to include more people in the "realm of God" than was allowed in the language and practice of his contemporary religious leaders.



Hierarchies of values and places of projected desire occur whether one is conscious of that happening or not.  Hierarchies of values, of priority choices are problematized in the post-modern age of myriads of information events with a myriad of portal access.  Some successful Christian groups are able to build islands of hierarchy to form identity and committed participation by what I would call the "Amish" approach to theology; they try to cloister the mind by censuring the hermeneutical gates for what they will expose themselves to.  This is their interpretation of "not being conformed to the image of the world," and their being "transformed by the renewing of the mind," and it seems to end up being limited to the "talking" points of their pastor whom they treat as omnicompetent in their lives.  For mainline churches struggling to find attractive presentation of "hierarachy of values" to people who aren't so threatened by the "secular" world, each parish needs to localize values of identity by baptizing what is good and useful in the entire universe of knowledge by finding how the universal principles of love and justice in the Bible correspond with values in our current world.  Too many Christian groups try to retain the biblical cultures' details of human sociology as part of their identity which causes them to label gay persons and women in church leadership roles as incompatible with biblical "absolutes," even while thankfully most of them don't hang onto slavery.  Cultural practices of biblical people who have been held up as "exemplars" of faith cannot be seen as omnicompetent exemplars for our practice of faith today.  Abolition of slavery, women's rights, the equal Christian dignity of LGBQT persons cannot be viewed as latter day innovation; they need to be viewed as people arriving at the unveiling of the original dignity of all people.  While this embrace of the original dignity of all people may seem like innovation to some, mainline churches need to embrace these values of love and justice while remaining charitable with the people, of biblical culture, who were not able or free to be open to the unveiling of the fullness of human dignity.  The fullness of human dignity is a new hierarchy of value which needs to become the standard "Council" of the church; that it is not yet so is an indication of the division within the church.  The division is what keeps many out of the church because they find more love and justice in their participation in the cultures outside of the church.  Mainline churches are divided by the situation caused by those who cannot yet embrace the fullness of human dignity in identity and participation of people who have been marginalized in the past.  The seeming formulaic approach of Prayerbook Liturgies, Scriptures, and Church Tradition should not be seen as incompatible with relevant matching of Christly values with the values of love and justice in our world.  This is work and the mission of persuasion that parishes need to embrace to welcome people in our culture who have embraced inclusion of human dignity faster than the churches have.

Many Christians are wealthy enough to be independent free agents and so they want the parish church to be one of the micro-social opportunities for personal and family support.  I would dub this mentality as the Concierge Church mentality.  Some want the local parish to offer Concierge Church service.  People with wealth who can be on the road for leisure at the ski slope, beach, mountain cabin and extended summer holidays to places of choice, like the church to offer full service "when" they are present even though they don't commit to host the critical mass that is so needed for parishes to offer the services in the first place.  Part of the mega-church and "corporate" church phenomenon is that they can be more fully a "Concierge Church" which has money for staff and program to have the "valet parking attendants" on call all of the time and often big enough to have their own "Starbucks or equivalent" on campus.  Concierge Church adherents essentially are indicating that they want church on call for them when they need it.  What this lacks is any sense of baptism as real ordination to actual ministry involving a reliable and continuous commitment.


The postmodern era means that a person has to know how to edit the deluge of information product.  There is so much more competing information product that the diminished significance of the parish church is no longer the compelling option it once was, compared with the 1950's "Leave it to Beaver," family era.  Those who still honor the gathered church times are those who make the editorial decision about the kind of information they want to receive and the mode in which they want to receive it.  But with the glitz of the media being the message, the church does not always have the same competing glitz.  Probably the best practice today in gaining some semblance of control in our time of informational deluge, is the practice of silence and meditation.  Silence is celebrated in music as the rests between articulated notes and the contrast between rest and voiced/sounded notes makes music complete and delivers it from being cacophony.  So too, the pretension of a state that exists without screaming informational language is the "rest" that can help people develop the compositional scores of their spiritual lives.


The local parish has lost its position of being more adequate to Omni-relevance to a person's and family's spiritual support system.  The local parish used to be seen as being a more relevant "village" of support for the person and family.  Now, it seems as the more educated parents are, the less they want to use persuasive force to require their children to participate in church.  In picking their battles as soon as a child expresses disinterest or boredom with a church liturgy or Sunday School or youth group, a parent will not require a child to participate.  In smaller parishes the lack of parental support or reinforcement generally means there is not critical mass to attain "successful" youth programs.  Some people seek to supplement the offerings of the church with virtual and other forms of "Christian" or spiritual education.  When a child goes to a parochial school that has a "chapel," such is deemed to be adequate religious participation for the child during the week.  Other adults will shop for churches with programs that engendered interests for themselves or family member and even endeavor to be "dual" citizens of various denominations.  Such a situation means smaller parishes without numbers for critical mass participation and without budgets for specialized ministry tend to suffer, by closing or merging with a neighboring parish suffering the same condition of "relevancy impairment" in the lives of people to keep them open.


One might note the "shallowization" of American Christian religious experience, meaning there has been a catering to the entertainment and internet standards as to what grabs people's attention.  Traditional liturgies have gone the way of the Bible in that they must exist and hence are dissolved of their previous signifying success because they exist now in the context of much more textuality and cyber/hyper-textuality.   So a pastor needs to be an entertainer with sound byte sermons and create Dr. Phil-oid feel good clichés for the pew dweller.  Religion and politics share the tyranny of the climate which dictates participants in tacit and unseen ways and this means one can be a Luddite if one is still engaged by traditional liturgy and anthems and hymnody.  One might fear the loss of the public pipe organ akin to all those that have been taken out of old theatres and roller skating rinks.  We are arriving in days when Tallis, Purcell, Bach and Mozart will not be widely introduced and become relegated to the club akin to those who exhibit old classic cars as a specialized hobby.


How might one look to the past to characterize the current situation in "mainline" churches?  One could see the nascent Jesus Movement as being a form of evangelical Judaism which became directed toward the Gentiles.  Becoming directed towards the Gentiles happened because of inward stuff of the Spirit occurring without regard to people having the marks of ritual purity.  This evangelical Judaism become so Gentile oriented as seen in exempting Gentiles from ritual purity requirements, the traditionalists believed that such evangelical compromises, compromised the Judaic tradition itself and so there was a separation.  The compromises to the Gentile experience of the Jesus Spirit Movement meant the evangelical event attained a theology in the writing of St. Paul.  He wrote the theology of the Gentile believer into the Abrahamic tradition and he wanted to maintain his "Jewishness" at the same time by arguing that his evangelical Judaism was an "authentic" Judaism centered around whom he thought to be the actual Messiah.  What has happen in modernity and postmodernity in mainline churches has been a pastoral rapprochement  with modern thought but also with the empowering of individual to be who they know themselves to be apart from the way in which they had been defined by the collectivities of the feudal and pre-feudal times.  With the birth of psychology and sociology more people have become  safely protected in knowing themselves to be constituted in ways not fully articulated by previous community categories.  Modern notions of individual dignity have led to the condemnation of slavery and the subjugation of women, and not just condemnation but the counter movement to place all persons on the path toward not only liberation but full empowered participation in all life and in the life of the church it has meant full sacramental inclusion.  This inclusion has extended to persons who do not fit the simplistic category of "heterosexuality" as it has been practiced in "traditional" cultures.  Mainline churches are impelled by prophetism and pastoral response to the previously "marginalized" and from the pastoral response they have attempted a broader systematic theology, including a sacramental ritual theology of inclusion of the formerly marginalized.  The most radical change in the Episcopal Church is the baptismal vow to respect the dignity of all persons and seeing them as Christ-persons.  Not everyone in mainline churches has been comfortable with the pastoral actions and the resulting theology.  And so "traditionalists" have become uncomfortable to the point of believing that such pastoral and sacramental inclusion of people "formerly treated as being embedded within conditions unworthy of sacramental inclusion," to begin their movements of separation from those whom they think have compromised the "tradition" by writing into their theologies inclusion of women, people marginalized for ethnic reasons, and persons not traditional heterosexuals.  All mainline groups have seen this division.  The traditionalists say they must separate from persons they regard to be heretical compromisers of the faith once given and delivered to the saints.  But to those who believe that evangelism and pastoral care to those to whom it once was denied, is the impetus for authentic innovation of the Spirit and worthy to become the new systematic and sacramentally just theology of the church, to wait for everyone to catch up to justice is a sin against the Spirit.  The divide between the traditional and the "innovators" is profound and lots of "watchers" just drop out all together when they see no love abound between warring members of churches.  (Could be the watchers are waiting for what the new situation will be).  For some the issue might be erring on the side of the extending of love and justice to more persons through an actual sacramental justice.  The current upheaval may take years to resolve and as "institutional safety nets" of finance and property decline, one might see more stealth microcosmic manifestations of the church prevail.  In the traditional church the clergy were the "educated" but with knowledge and information as accessible as one's mobile phone and the end of presumed clerical omnicompetence, the era of a true priesthood of all believers may actually come into being.



The postmodern church bears the results of the frustration which has occurred because of the disagreement over the reception of what is regarded to be valid innovation in matters of Christian practice.  The old model of no one can change or innovate unless the entire church can collaborate in Council and declare official Christian practice for the entire universal church, or for a worldwide Communion or Denomination is challenged.  In the information age a practice in one part of the world is instantly known throughout the world and so a prophetic innovator immediately gains a wide variety of international approval or condemnation and various leaders organize their advocates around their positions and so divided "Communions" become the oxymoronic situation.  This has mostly been known in the extending of sacramental justice to people from whom sacramental justice has been withheld in the past.  Women and ordination.  People with sexual orientation other than heterosexual being allowed full sacramental inclusion, e.g. marriage and ordination.  The ancient cultural practices toward women and persons, not heterosexual, prevail in many cultures and churches in places which uphold these ancient practices and such adherents do not wish to fellowship with churches (or members within certain churches) who have embraced a sacramental justice which admits all persons to the rites of the church.  We live in the era of those who believe that justice delayed is justice denied versus those whose practice place women and non-heterosexuals lower on the hierarchy of being able to represent the image of God on their lives in full sacramental ways.




Mainline churches seem to find themselves in the proverbial "rearranging of the deck chairs of the Titanic" while it is going down and in denial they don't realize the band is playing a death hymn, "Nearer My God to Thee."  The institutions which have the resources to appeal to the consumer mentality of religious culture survive.  They can offer music and youth and specialized ministries to continue to attract the lowest notion of "baptismal" ministry, viz., I only come to church to get something.  Lots of other churches are searching to have enough significant relevance in the lives of people who live in a world smorgasbord of too many choices of what to do with their time, talent and treasure.  While some might tout the revival of the Church as recapturing the nascent energy of the "Jesus Movement," or the time when there was no "institutional" baggage, the church may really have to disappear in the sense of having institutional trappings and return to the small home gathering of people who relate to the message of personal transformation and face to face hospitality.  The  retaining of institutional, political and social totemic identities is nostalgia for places where the heart was once engaged and touching the heart of the Jesus Movement may need to be clergyless and without visible institutions with old architecture fragments expensive to maintain.  The internet age is an age of rhizomic word experience which is not a simplistic arborescent linear mode of thinking, interpreting and processing human experience.  The rhizomic word experience of the complicated mixtures of discourses has and is happening and denying the relevance of omni-discursive word mysticism in favor of simple clichés of the past will only delay adjustment to the postmodern situation.




A cursory glance at parish success, one can note that parishes which host a variety of 12-step programs benefit in attendance and participation because the particular parish is accessible to those in recovery and can give a particular theological identity to the otherwise more "generic" Higher Power whose aid is crucial in the quest for sobriety.  The New Testament valorizes the one who has become shipwrecked upon the rocks of uncontrolled desires manifested in destructive addictive behaviors and who has made a "heroic" conversion or recovery.  The poor older brother of the prodigal son who "stayed" at home and followed the rules seems to receive a rather "ho hum" response from the forgiving Father. (You never needed my forgiveness).  If a parish is comprised by "older brothers to the prodigal son,"  they can seem to be lukewarm in their faith since they do no know themselves as having the effects of "extreme desire" to reverse and tame and who "need" severe discipline to remain sober.  People seeking sobriety are more natural evangelists because they find themselves to have ministerial relevance to those who are on a similar quest.


The postmodern Episcopal Church in the West has become a collection of persons who function as economic free agents and so it is easy as free agents not to "need" the church or other group identities for networking and advocacy for one's well-being in society.  Such economic free agents with above average education are becoming both political and ministerial "quietists" in their willingness to perform sacrificial proportional giving acts.  With enough economic well-being, they can negotiate any political environment because they have the assets and the intellectual wherewithal to adjust to how issues end up playing out on a liberal to conservative political continuum.  With social, economic and educational power a person can be more of a centralized manager in determining how one's vows and commitments can be articulated to maintain one's own socio-economic advantage.  The offspring of the Episcopalian "free agent" are increasingly eliminating any role of the parish church in their lives.  It used to be that new parents would return to the parish to be a part of the village to help in the mentoring of their children but now persons wait longer to get married and have fewer children and have a longer period of time away from the church that they are less likely to find a reason to be involved.  As progressive educated people, Episcopalians are less likely to build their parish around the controversial social issues which drives so many of the one or two issue voters of other Christian communities.  Educated introverts have lost the "fan" in fanatic which is an expression of desire that impels action and participation.  



There is the well known phrase attributed to the late Tip O'Neill, "All politics is local."  In the Episcopal Church that could be adapted to "All Episcopal politics is local, local to the parish church."  But this probably is not honest in summing up each parish as being completely homogeneous when it comes to any particular religious, social, or political issue.  One might want to even extend this to say that in practice all Episcopal theology is "individual," individual to the various ways in which one's identity subjectivity is constituted.  The effort to be inclusive means that many from their theological identity find such pan-inclusiveness goes too far either in how some people interpret biblical faith or how they interpret how councilor faith should process innovations to include to full participation in the full sacramental life of the church persons who have been excluded in the past.  The post-modern individual as a free agent, handles this often by becoming a "cafeteria" person of faith, going through the menu of choices on all sorts of pieties, practices and social issues.  In a cafeteria crowd, a vegan may not eat with a carnivore even though both comprise culinary inclusiveness.  The Anglican Communion is proof of this practical "excommunication" of others in the same "Communion" because of inclusiveness issues.  A parish without a high degree of homogeneity on crucial identities means that people disagree too much to be open with each other about their views and so it is polite to just say nothing and reduce one's church participation to the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer tradition and biting one's tongue if the preacher's sermon goes contrary to one's views on a host of religious, social or political issues.  The Enlightenment brought about the re-invention of the "individual" and for many in the post-modern Episcopal context Americans have the socio-economic privilege to be individual free agents and they bring that primary identity to their religious lives.  What we need to persuade is that the "individual free agent" is the one who has much from whom much is required in ministry to those who do not have such power of agency.

In the Myers-Briggification of the Episcopal Church, one can find a gathering of too many introverts who are so shy about their faith they look for other thinking introverts to "stumble" upon us.  How's that for evangelism?


As much as the "free market" system has been touted as reinforcing individual freedom and success based upon "meritocracy," in actual practice the "spoils" go to the strong who use skill, strength, and pre-existing conditions to show their "merit" for having more than most.  The free market system ends in uneven distribution of all assets and the unevenness of distribution is justified by using the "meritocracy" argument even when it is well-known that everyone does not begin on a level playing field.  The free market congregational system of church polity has result in uneven distributions across parishes and there seems to be a feast or famine from parish to parish.  Large endowed parishes have more to build programs to keep them "competitive" or they have resources to be safety nets when they decline in actual participation of members.  Churches with strict and central hierarchy have the polity to spread the wealth by fiat.  Does a parish "merit" staying alive if there are no longer enough congregants to keep it alive?  Many parishes hope to stay alive in anticipation of days when there will be a swing back to the values which the church preach.  The question for many parishes involves "liquidating" assets which then means that a mission in a particular location would have to "start" from scratch in the future.  One might observe that in Europe, the governments embracing social programs of health, education and welfare for the general populace have secularize the former diaconal expressions of the church that made the church more relevant to the physical needs of people.  If the governments are providing education, health care, vacation and social security/pensions then the church has lost practical relevance to people's lives and if the church has lost practical relevance to people's life then the God, represented by the church has lost relevance also.  While it is salutary that the diaconal functions have been taken over by secular states, we know that the movement of peoples have created massive situations of human need and there is resistance from governments to expand their coverage to "foreigners," while the best churches can do is advocate and hand out "band aids" on the gaping wound of needs.  




The fault line between what has been called absolute truth and relative truth has become more volatile in the postmodern world in the age of "fake news" and "alternative facts."  Such new terms highlight the subjective factor of information in one's life.  If something is true for me and not for you, it might diminish what "truth" means and it makes everyone an "infallible" pope on what is truth.  And if we move from subjective individual truth into collectivities then we are divided up into communities who hold "truth" differently based upon the particular hermeneutical circle within which one lives based upon having made a commitment first to the various hermeneutical circles and then conveniently finding the rationale to support the truth that one has already been committed to.  Modern scientists in frustration with the clamor of communities of "truths" who disagree and designate orthodoxies and heresies, have used "empirical verification/falsification" as criteria by which one appraises the "true/relevant" meaning of any statement.  Those which do not have the possibility of empirical verification are subordinated to a different/inferior level of "true" meaning.  For a church to live with congruence with what is happening in postmodern culture, we need to first reassess some of the silliness about whether truth is absolute or relative.  St. Paul was a profound relativist; he said "now I only see in part."  Partial seeing is the humility of only knowing what one knows in the ways in which one knows it.  And you might say that to know in part necessarily assumes that the part belongs to a "whole" that can be known, and the "Whole" someway defines the Divine.  But to even say there is a Whole which defines the Divine, one cannot arrogate that any human has the capacity to know and to funnel the whole into the human situation.  The human situation would always remain "partial knowing based upon partial seeing."  Even the divine Jesus, an amphibious BEING, a bi-lingual BEING (Divine/Human) who can only speak the divine in human terms to be partially and "adequately" understood by other humans means that the Divine remains inscrutable in human terms.  What we are left arguing about is the adequacy of what we know to the criteria that is set in our hermeneutical circle as to what constitute "adequate" knowing.  People who want precise and singular meaning of words in a text probably follow Plato and his frustration with the imprecise aesthetic truths of the poets regarding the gods.  Some want to hold to truth being able to be established in propositional format.  St.Paul got really "smoooshie" about what the whole truth was; "I will know even as I am known."  Paul as one who was "contained" by a greater Knower,  believed that the way to know was to love and to be loved. (1 Corinthian 13).  Love is more "smooshie" than it is propositionally precisely true, as in saying, "God is love."  Is that empirically verifiable?  Probably not, but it does have "smooshie" aesthetic and poetic meanings which happen in human experience and propositional phrases are only a small part of the greater field of referential meanings in human experience.  So where does the work of the church lie today?  Sentimental nostalgia for standing on absolute propositional truth that with the Spirit (wink, wink) should be self-evidential to any interpreter with half a brain?  Or are we able to be humble about our partial seeing and knowing and are we committed to joining all "partial seers" in a collaborative and continuing effort to define "adequacy" both in criteria of adequacy and what would stand as being true to how we define the criteria of adequacy?  By criteria of adequacy, I would submit that we deal with what would define adequate love and justice for all people and then accept that the Bible at its best is the effort in biblical times to define love and justice for people because in language there can be discerned the impulse of love and justice.  And without getting bogged down on the obvious cultural failures of biblical people to realize love and justice, we take up the continuing quest to bring love and justice to all and from such a pastoral effort, we are given actual anecdotes of human attempts to apply love and justice to build and expand a systematic theology for the postmodern age.  For anyone who claims more than St. Paul's "For now I see in part...." they risk the idolatrous pride of over-identifying the Whole with but a partial.


The offerings of the God of love and justice to new people result in the Manna question.  Manna literally means, "What is this?"  End of slavery and the offer of freedom.  End of subjugation of women and offering their equality.  End of the discrimination and persecution of gay persons and accepting their equal dignity.  With each expansion of love and justice to persons from whom it should not have been ignorantly and maybe cruelly withheld in the first place has often been met with the disapproving question of the status quo, "What is this?"  Sadly much of the status quo church is still asking, "What is this" in a disapproving and non-welcoming way, and do not really practice that the body of Christ as the heavenly bread which is offered to everyone equally.



Traditionalists who uphold "Traditionalism" do not like the formula, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first."  The last, or the latest have the advantage of being first because in their chronological order of interpretation, they re-define and re-apply the former paradigms in new ways which fit the contours of new life situations.  New life situations reveal that pastoral care is needed and in response to the care, new paradigms of ministry and resulting theological innovation occur.  It really happens even to those who call themselves traditionalist, but they do not know/admit it.


What does one do with a church full of introverts?  It is hard to convince introverts that extroverted forms of evangelism are "natural."  Doesn't everyone just choose what they want after assessing the virtues of faith expression?  If a church of introverts want to be seen rather than heard, then they have to wait for the accidental/serendipitous encounter to share their faith and their faith community.  The introvert cries, "Do look at me; come to the liturgy and be persuaded."  For a society that wants rock anthems and big screens, the liturgies which offers such expression tend to have more curb "appeal."  The introverted church "lost in its own perceived" depth needs to find visible and extroverted introvertedness ways to let their Gospel be known.


In an ocean of lots of socio-political, theological, liturgical and piety identities, some parishes have the ability to gather together enough people who are unified by one or two significant identities.  But since the average Episcopal parish is small and has to appeal to people who have the tradition of using the Book of Common Prayer while being a rather motley collection of nomadic people who have varying socio-political, theological, liturgical and piety identities one is left with the  not so funny Episcopal joke: In the Episcopal Church there are topics you can't preach on because Episcopalians are divided.  The topics are sex, politics, money and, yes, religion.  The liturgy for most Episcopalians has been the aesthetics which allowed most congregants to check their "egos" at the door in the liturgy but the aesthetics of liturgy may not be so persuasive to the younger generation who are a little less committed to Prayer Book liturgies in their search to find the identities which impel political action and liturgical participation.  If commitment precedes belief, piety and liturgical participation, tentative commitment does not result in the kind of commitment to lay ministry that most parishes need.


As technology advances, one might now comically imagine AI praying bots who attain a piety of their own and each non-AI human can have an AI bot to be a continual intercessors on one's behalf.  Absurd?  Did the magic of written words on the page mean that the written word as a technology of memory was continually praying even when the words were not actually being read by a human being?  The written word once had a sort of AI independent magic of its own.  Or what about the spin of the Tibetan prayer wheel with the inscription of a mantra as valid prayer?  As we live in the "brave" new religious worlds of mini-screens, large screens, and speaking not with tongue but our two thumbs on mini-keyboards and when we can access a sermon of our own choosing on YouTube, we can ponder how the way in which we were constituted in our "religious subjectivity" by "old" technology will slowly evolve to the new postmodern religious subject.  Indeed there are many "Amish-like" resistance movements in religion but "Amish-like" buggies on the new informational highway will stand out as the expressions of people with nostalgia expressing the pain of dealing with the present by regressing to past manifestations and fixing them as though they were the last word of God on how life should be lived.


The parable of the equal pay for the late hired with the early hired provides some insights for the postmodern church.  Is the church willing to grant equal status to new insights that have arisen because of the recent experience of people who do not find the "experienced traditions" of the church pragmatically relevant to their postmodern lives?  Will the church lose out by "good ol'boyism" holding that these young whippersnapper have to "put in their time" until they can have equal authority with the "good ol' boys?"  If pastoral theology, or caring for people is the start of systematic theology, then caring for people within their identity structures necessarily must change our systematic theology.  Systematic theology must be fluid process and not a final branding of the new with the old of the past.  Maybe we could change like molasses flowing in hot July rather molasses flowing in January?


The postmodern era which pressures the individual to be an individual agent of one's information allows us to avoid personal face to face contact.  Amazon.com means that no one has to enter a store and interact with people.  DIY, self-help and YouTube means that we access information to repair or fix things which we used to have to get done by the visit of a repair person.  DIY religion via the internet is now the way for people to inform their religious subjectivity with the "authority" of "individual selection."  One does not actually have to go to church and interact with people to present oneself as a "religious" or "spiritual" Subject.  We believe that we are "free" even while the Pan-Optic voyeurs and tracers of everyone's web hits subtly place before us bait for our next purchase or information event. (Bentham and Foucault wrote about the panopticon as architecture made for surveillance.  The internet is a new architectural space for surveillance).  The end result is a new hybrid of subjectivities.  Pan in the Greek world was a "goat man" being.  The new informational situation allows all sorts of hybrid religious subjects.  New Age spirituality with Catholic beads.  A publicly amoral and lying person embraced by Christian fundamentalists as their hero who can actually feed their apocalyptic fatalism proving that the father of lies can deceive those who think they are "elect."  We are in the age of such mixtures of identities which can be found in a single person and we are encouraged to be intrigued by these identities.  When one takes on too many identities and the codes of discourse which pertain to each identity one can find the seeming "schizoidal" presentation which makes one wonder if in the rapid switching in seeming "non sequitur" ways from code to code, an underlying unifying spiritual subject is lost because too much energy has floated to the surface of such changing identities.  Certainly the renewal of interest in meditation is one of the antidotes to panoptic purveyors who wish to draw one's desire to a thousand objects.

While we cite divine providence in the success of the Gospel and the Gospel communities we can also look at socio-economic factors that are ingredients of that success.  In the nomadic movement of people, such as in urbanization, identity "clubs" provide a landing place for lodging behaviors of people who have arrived in new places.  Home churches in the Roman cities were such "identity" clubs for the newly arrived in a new place.  Such identity clubs become the extended family of support.  One can cite the current success of both Christianity and Islam in Africa as related to the process of urbanization.  Leaving the village to come to the city can be lonely and the established religious gatherings in the city become havens of welcome where the newly arrived are given practical orientation to living in a new city.  In the Christian "clubs" in the Roman cities, the ritual purity requirements of the "mother" religion were dispensed with to make the churches more inclusive and accessible than synagogues.  A similar phenomenon occurs on the coat-tails of significant immigration.  This is particularly known in Roman Catholic parishes in the West with Roman Catholic immigrants from the global South, Eastern Europe and Asian countries like the Philippines and Viet Nam.  Immigrants in a new place find churches to be meeting places for networking with their own native language speakers.  Needing the church for lodging behaviors and networking and actual physical meeting places does help the church be a successful gathering.  In a pragmatic that might be counter to the Gospel preference for the "poor," the triumphant churches of Christendom often have been co-opted by the ruling elites and monarchs.  As liberation theologians have noted, the church and its message can actually be used as an ideology on behalf of the wealthy to maintain the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, who happen to be patrons for the trappings of the church.  The Enlightenment brought about the gradual re-birth of the individual who had been buried in the collectivities of feudalism.  Today, the "successful" individual has the knowledge, money and authority to be an independent agent who can use the church as one of the items on his or her menu for "personal enrichment."  The pragmatic function for the church for the postmodern "independent" economic person is often minimal and used for Christmas and Easter, "church" baptisms, weddings and funerals.  The independent "agent" understands that he or she "pays" for the services of the church.  What is lost in the "Christian" as independent agent is the notion of baptismal ministry and the lay apostolate.  An unheard word of the "independent" agent is: "To whom much is given, much is required."


What about liturgy in the postmodern age?  Does Common in the Book of Common Prayer mean a standardization for all Anglicans everywhere to be using the exact same words in the liturgy as a "textual" proof of unity?   Or does Common have a more expansive meaning referring to it being the mission of the church to provide prayers in language, in all its diverse use, common to the actual socio-cultural experience of the people whom one wants to invite to pray?  Is the public articulation of individual extemporaneous prayer the making of prayer common to each individual?  Is public extemporaneous prayer for the "prayer gifted" and does it exclude the participation of the corporate gathering of members who offer the prayers with "enhanced togetherness" when there is a common text?  Does the proliferation of public extemporaneous prayer lead to some of the strangest individual theologies be given a public voice such that some "theological" censorship/editing is required for community discipline?  What about when congregants are using the Prayers of the People to pray against the petitions of others on a particular issue?  Such would not be expressive of the "two or three agreeing" on something that is supposed to be bound in heaven?  Should liturgy be a combination of both, common text and extemporaneous? (One could argue that both happen even with a common text since the unspoken thoughts of the congregants don't get published).   The "commonization" of prayer dove-tails with what is called "identity" politics.  Is "identity liturgy" the provision of liturgical texts for the voices that may be marginalized by the "one size fits all" prayers of the Book of Common Prayer?  One's use of certain words can be seen as dismissive of the identity of some members who cannot identify with the prescribed texts that are supposed to be common to all.  When do all of the supplemental rites require a Prayer Book revision to produce a Prayer Book to be at least a 1000 pages long?  How much can a Prayer Book include to provide prayer common to the identity of all who want to pray with us?   The Book of Common Prayer was generated in conditions of an assumed homogeneity of the congregants; such homogeneity can no longer be assumed.  



There are many corporations and so there are Corporations that have an identity as a single person in the eyes of the Supreme Court, even though a corporation is a "community" of many members.  Does the Supreme Court regard the church as the Body of Christ to have the equal juridical status of Corporations?  There are many church bodies; do each have the status of being a corporate person?  Does the status of being a corporation as a "Person" mean that such a "Person" is the abbreviation for all of the members?   The authority for the corporation as a Person resides in the hands of the very few who make the decisions unless there are democratic procedures in place which allow the Corporation as Person to  represent truly the composition of its membership.  Probably in the Corporation as Person, it is deemed to be too unwieldy for all the members to be properly represented even though proxy systems for shareholders falsely imply legitimate stockholder input.  Shareholder anonymity does not allow a shareholder direct and equal participation in the decision of the Corporation as Person.  In pension funds and mutual funds, monies are invested on behalf of individual shareholders and so monies can be invested in businesses and financial practice which run counter to the morals and ethics of the shareholder.  It is hard to say that one's money is "clean" in the same way that one might think one's values are ethically enlightened.  The solution is to convert the few who make economic decisions within the corporation as Person to  make creatively, Care for the Common Good a main component of how a corporation as Person defines their ethos, standards in earning profits and the conducting of their business.  It is time for the conversion of the decision makers of the corporation as Person to define profitability in terms of the Common Good.  This is good business if survival into a more distant future is to be regarded as a valid goal of doing business.  Short term profit thinking may be apocalyptic fatalism; "let's take as much as we can now because it won't be here in the future."



We are told we cannot serve God and wealth.  We don't "see" God and yet we can see the "wealth" of the diversity of our world.  The wealth of the world has been progressively turned into "products" that are bought and sold.  The practice of buying and selling products have become global such that borders of nations and national identity no longer pertain.  We have a world of "multinational" corporations.   The corporation has become a Hobbesian Leviathan holding passports in as many countries as possible.  Corporations promote their products as being "catholic" in that they want them to be used by every citizen of the world.  Coke or Pepsi, Toyota or BMW?  Corporations have the power to get most governments do their bidding since the world has become so complex, politicians do not have the expertise to even write cogent legislations without the aid of the corporations who provide the brain power to craft the legislation to deal with the complexity.  But in such an arrangement the corporations as now Supreme Court designated postmodern persons tend to write the legislation to their own advantage.  The corporation as person need not be vilified for what the corporation as person does in providing employment and livelihood.  At the same time, the corporation as person needs to be the target of the conversion activity of the church, since governments tend to be the two party systems of the corporation as person.  One party is the "Yes party" and the other party is the "But of course party."  Corporations depend upon governments to fund the infrastructures which are rivers on which the corporations deliver their products.  The church's conversion of the postmodern Corporation as the main person means that we should persuade them about their own best self interest in deeply caring for people and the care of our world.  We should be persuading the corporation as person that he or she is proportionately responsible for the infrastructures on which their products are carried.  Trying to go through the government is like trying to get the receptionist in the office to make a decision for the boss.  



In the postmodern deluge of information, people have to choose the rafts of identity on which to live. The rafts may be such micro-identities whose composition are informed by factors of socio-economic and cultural factors, including religion.  So there are many rafts of "Wittgensteinian-oid" Language Games with game rules only understood by those who inhabit the particular identity.  In politics, the one seeking to lead tries to build an "armada" of these rafts of identity in a coalition to attain political power.   There is a raft of liberal educated critical thinkers who believes everyone should be such critical thinkers and be truly "free agents" to choose the most "rational" program of action.  There is another raft of information merchants who may be critical thinkers but who have sold their critical thinking abilities to the highest bidders.  These critical thinkers are so smart that they present themselves as chameleons to appear to fit in with unsuspecting identity groups so as to help promote the interest of the parties that have bid the highest for their services.

October 10, 2018

One of the problems in the post-modern era for organizations such as churches which rely upon a continuing commitment of people expressed in the kinds of behaviors which still make them viable, is that commitment itself is a nostalgia for something that is truly stable enough to be committed to.  In post-structuralism, there has come to be no binary of signifier and signified; there are only signifiers.  The old notion of signified has been exposed as nothing more than a cluster of signifiers that have attained the status of truth and objectivity because they have been frequented enough by enough people to be communally regarded as "the truth."  Nietzsche did expose truth as being but very popular metaphors.  If there are only signifiers in the world of language then we can begin to regard all reality as temporary; what is real is surface and style and style is what one changes based upon the latest fashion.  The play of signifiers mutually affirming the temporal and limited duration of each other, lend to the atmosphere of non-commitment.  What is it that gives to a signifier the sense of duration or the sense of truth?  A stable community that is willing to make the signifiers into clustered concresences that attain truth status because they give "identity" to a community as a solidarity of people who recognize their identity as distinct and distinct meaning that they hold to a hierarchical elevation of adequacy of their "truth" over the lesser "truths" of other communities which they do not commit to.

In the post-modern juxtaposition of so many people, so different becoming aware of their differences and yet by physical proximity needing to be together, the different solidarity provide micro-identities and social and cultural paradigms through which people come to define their existence.
Crucial in the age of information is how one chooses sources of authority on which one is to be a political agent.  Sometimes the "cheapest" and most accessible information is provided by information merchants who release the information, analysis and conclusions that are designed to guide and direct political action.  We may think that we are free but the freedom may be limited to the information that we're receiving.  Informational merchants study markets and micro-markets and target audience.  They may feign their interest in certain political, religious or moral issues and take public stances as a lure to draw the "public support" even though the merchants themselves are completely amoral but use such appeals as a bait and switch.  They "appear" to appeal to the "moral" sensibilities on a particular interest so that they can elect someone who will do their will for their business ends.  They actually make their target audience "feel" like they are getting their way when they in fact have used the audience to gain their financial goals.  One can reflect how people worldwide with sincere (and maybe naïve) religious and moral perspective have been used by information merchants who do not really care the particular moral or religious issues; they just want their votes to achieve some other financial goals that may be completely immoral in the sense of the social justice which most religious ideals are supposed to be promoting.  We are used to politicians being willing partners in the charade of "appearing" to be "with" religious issue voters while they in fact represent the interests of the information merchants and the entities for whom they work.


Postmodern hermeneutics is about understanding how to juxtapose various word paradigms and make the translations between the paradigms for meanings which offers mutual understanding but also mutual judgments between different ways in which word contexts constitute the users of language in a given context.  The biblical world is full of monarchy; the biblical writings and apocalyptic writings romanticizes a perfect, super hero king, the Messiah.  In our modern era of participatory government by a more or less informed public, the notion of a monarch is Luddite thinking.  It is retained in countries as totemic nostalgia of national identity and good for tourism or in some countries it still functions as an expression of dictatorial kleptocracy where the monarch dominates a widely disproportionate amount of the national wealth and the monarch assumes everyone in "his" society is in a symbiotic relationship with "his" highness and when he thinks about sneezing everyone does it for him in unison.  The first Book of Common Prayer and most of the subsequent editions use the language of monarchy as worthy of being a metaphor for God and Jesus.  (the Psalter assumes a divinized monarchy) Yet, we in "enlightened" democracies do not regard language of monarchy  (Thee, Thou, Divine Majesty et al) to befit the true value of the individual person who has the equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  So how do democratic exegetes re-appropriate the metaphors of monarchy that we inherited from the biblical tradition and from the roots of monarchy in the English/European situations?  Skeptics might want to consign the nostalgia for the Messiah to the same genre of Disney-think, a magical kingdom of kings, queens, princesses and princes and where magical things happen, stuff like what the Isaian utopian writer wrote about of lions and lambs playing together.  Fundamentalists, having embraced the significant truth of science as recording the empirically verified, import empirical verification back onto the biblical stuff which violates empirical verification and have to admit that God worked differently back then than God does in the conditions of modern feet on the ground gravity.  Protective religionists might be offended if some biblical stuff is placed in the same category as "Disney-stuff" because everyone knows that Disney-stuff is imaginational.  Yet, more sanguine minds might not want to discount the function of "imaginary" stuff as motivational truth toward hope, justice and love.  One might want to note that the postmodern mind has accepted the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time in being honest to multi-tasking hermeneutics; we can embrace the true imaginary aspirational discourses and still be brute fact scientists.  We know how to hold both the codes of science and the imagination at the same time and know how to switch back and forth in individual situations of exegesis.

Here's a novel postmodern prophetic activity of the church: let us work to persuade a truly "free" market to freely choose to make qualitative survival of the maximum number people in the world the goal of a truly profitable market.  If war can be profitable for investors, why can't disaster relief and qualitative survival for all also be profitable?


In the long inheritance of paradigms, epistemologies and hermeneutical circles, it is
happens that we speak something like double, triple, quadruple plus exposures.  We speak in such a mixture that it is not evident what our words mean based upon how same words carry with them all of the paradigms in which they have been used.  The presumptuous speaker may speak with the false confidence of thinking that he or she speaks consistently from one paradigm while pretending to block out every other way in which words have been used in previous paradigms.  Speaking is further problematized because the speaker can never control the paradigms from which words are being heard by the listener.  Such inexactitudes inspired linguistic philosophers to add clarity of meaning by reducing meaningful statements only to those which can be empirically verified.  But such reductions only had relevant meaning to the reductionists as they pretended that such privileging of the empirically verified could comprehend and properly represent the meanings that people know in aesthetic experience.  I doubt if most preachers even know the various paradigms which have constituted the preacher's subjectivity when the preacher preaches.  The injunction of the Delphic Oracle was to "know thyself."  Knowing oneself in the postmodern era probably best means to know how one has been constituted by the language that one uses.  Being in the dark about how certain word use originated in communities of users highlights that language is busy speaking us rather than we being in control of our language. In language use it is correct to say that meanings happen, but that does not guarantee that the same meanings for the same words happens for everyone who share the language occasion.


The words from the well known Collect on Holy Scriptures bears some reflections: read, mark and inwardly digest.  In our postmodern age when most of our knowledge is now carried on the exterior, that is on our mobile devices and we consult the oracles of Siri and her AI voice siblings, we can mistake quantity of information for quality of integration of the information with the ability to raise our practice of love and justice.  We live by sound bytes and headlines as we flit through lots of topics without going into depth.  The serious reading which leads to the Word being made flesh in the actual transformation of our lives toward love and justice, may just take too much time.  We end up flirting with abbreviations which is akin to reciting the Creeds (vast abbreviations of Christian knowledge) without realizing the purpose of an abbreviation is to be drawn to deeper questions and meditation on the part of the "iceberg" which dwell below the surface of the abbreviation.  Flirting with abbreviated presentations of life, means that we maintain superficial connections with what we think we know and we fail to plumb the transformative values of the great treasures.

What is the possibility for liturgy in the age of screens, little and large?  Congregants at megachurches go to church and watch the preacher on a "big screen."  Yes, the preacher may be "bigger" on the screen than what the preacher seems to be from the balcony.  This has become the main experience of major sporting events and concerts.  We go to live events to mainly watch the screen and to be surrounded by the technologies of sound.  If this becomes the standard for what a telling event is, how does traditional liturgy compete with the spectacle which is coming to define desirability for gathering.  We gather and the virtual becomes the message. Mcluhan pronounced the "media to be the message."  While one may be open to all media as being liturgically compatible, the event multimedia or not is judged by the actual outcomes in the lives of those who gather to worship.  It was a really cool show or I'm distraught in conviction because I need I know to repent?  If liturgy is overwhelmed by "entertainment" it is the entertainment that gets praised and not the life changing values which is goal of liturgy.


Today we hear about fake news, alternative facts and this becomes a threat to what was one taken for granted "objectivity."  Eye-witness journalism is perhaps an outgrowth of science influencing the reporting of "history" and we have witnessed the historicism which purports to be able to sort out what really happened based upon no outside interference from supernatural forces in what happened.  Modern science has held to a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, meaning in history, if we experience gravity today, so did the people of biblical times.  We cannot pretend that gravity and what scientific laws has standardized was different in biblical times.  On the other hand, we can affirm that there are truths beyond scientific consensus; there are moving aesthetic truths and these truths are present under artistic presentations where empirical verification does not apply.  It is mythical truths and mystical truths and these truths have their own function when science cannot eliminate the mystery of total effects of the great Negligible, the lack of complete precision in explaining the fullness of why things happen and what they mean.  Two of the criticisms of deconstructive postmodernism are accusations of relativistic nihilism and that without any valid standard of truth there can prevail a political quietism.  Why be politically active for a cause if it cannot be infallibly established?  And critics say deconstructive proponents have no basis for establishing their judgments.   In response, one should be critical of those who arrogate to themselves to speak infallibly upon anything because no one has the complete knowledge of the universe to speak with such certainty.  That being said, we can come to significant community and solid consensus upon the superior values that are adequate to what we define as love and justice.  Love and justice always need application in actual contexts and there can be disagreement about application without denying the value and adequacy of love and justice to be criteria for judgments, juridical procedure and political program.  As Christians we can affirm that love and justice were the great motives of the Bible even when practitioners were faulty or short-sighted in their applications of justice.  We too are short-sighted in our applications of justice but we can still aspire and act toward more adequate expressions of love and justice without having to claim having special access to final infallible knowledge.  That being said, political quietists are naïve if they think that in the free play of all judgments and ideas, just and loving outcomes are just going to win the day without passionate advocacies because love and justice are automatically going to be ultimately winsome.  The quest for justice is not without its ironies; the American ideals of freedom and liberty for all was founded by people who had expelled people from their land and control of it and who could not apply justice to women and slaves.  This means that the clarity of justice is always needed to free us from our own hypocrisy regarding justice.  We aspire to the ideals of justice even while we are blinded about our inability to apply it to all.  The witness of the church should be contributing to solidarities in applications of continuing progressive justice to new situations.  In this age of fake news and alternative facts which turns out to be propaganda for covering injustice, we need to be activists for promoting what will be a more adequate application of justice today and tomorrow.

Is Episcopal Christianity dissolving into the morass of available information?  We, pride ourselves on being educated and engaged in the world.  What is the urgency of maintaining an Episcopal Christian identity?  We need to maintain it because of the dangers of some of the competing identities in our world.  Movements with controlling and fascistic behaviors are building their identity based upon the promotion of infallible certitudes of who is right and who is wrong, and how one treats the ones who are regarded as "wrong."  The threat of the morass of information and identities is for dictators of their own rightness and righteousness manifesting oppressive and suppressive actions toward their ideological opponents.  It becomes the issue of power; who has the power to interpret on behalf of loyal followers and what actions result from those interpretation.  When love and justice only applies to the members of one's own interpretive enclave, the liberty and justice for all aspiration is given up as a worthy ideal.


Christianity, the Bible and Episcopal Christianity suffers the fate of dissolution in the deluge of information in the informational age.   These identities have become like a sugar cube in an ocean; the sugar effect is there but is increasingly negligible and increasingly unnoticed or undistinguished.  The deluge of information demands attention and people only have the capacity to let in so much and what they let in is determined by their selective interests.  The deluge of information can be fearful for many and some maintain the "traditions" by limiting their sources of information and particularly selected interpreters of that information.  Modern biblical scholarship which has flooded us with so many interpretations of any given biblical passage, interpretations that can be endlessly contradictory and oppositional, makes it very difficult to say that one has an infallible biblical view of the world. For refuge people take their identity with spiritual leaders who become the preferred expounder of what one thinks is "truly" biblical.  But for many, the biblical tradition no longer holds the tacit, default, authoritative lens on the world today.  The Bible used to be the dominating book of the Western Christian World; it remains in a place of being a classic.  (Some pundits says the main characteristic of a revered classic is that it mainly go unread).

Phonocentrism, grammatology and now cyber textuality.  Phoncentrism assumes the actual presence of speakers.  Grammatology is the textuality which allows the "absence" of the speaker and in interpretation the interpreter has to re-imagine the speaker who is absent.  This means that the absent speaker get interpreted and makes the writer toward the images of the interpreter who but can rely on the interpreter's words and word experience.  Cyber textuality is a mixture of text and pictures and real time and facetime through cyber means constitutes the "intimate" virtual that mimics being actually present, while absent.  The postmodern subject is constituted by the remnants of phonocentrism and grammatology as even as the virtual products seems to give a more intimate experience of presence.  The church with long histories of assuming phonocentrism and grammatology or graphology has to find effective ways of using the cyber textuality as a way of enhancing actual personal presence.  Virtual experience can seem to "air brush" the all-too-human aspects of human messiness as the energies of forbearance are not exerted because of hassle-phobia.

September 5, 2017

Episcopalians in many American parishes have become constituted by having so many material blessings that they have become in their behaviors "independent free agents" and don't need specific participation in "groups" except as they choose to do so.  This practice of being "independent" free agents means that the strength of such independent status does not get baptized as the strength of baptismal ministry.  How do we convert the independent to the notion of "I have been given" the conditions of strength in order to confess to be able to have the privilege of ministry?  Sometimes it may only be dire circumstances which brings people out of the safe mode of being an independent free agent picking and choosing from the smorgasbord of what one is able to pay for.



As Episcopalians and Anglicans we are Christians and Anglican divided by having a common religion.  We have thought that we subscribe to a common communion but when the postmodern world has forced upon us an "informationally instant closeness" we have elevated the "local" option cherished by Anglicanism and practiced in reality if not in thought an uncharitable intolerance with a kind of mutual ex-communication of each other when the hermeneutic diversity has resulted in irreconcilable differences regarding the full acceptance of women and gay and lesbian persons into what full communion means for a person.


For those who say that if the Episcopal Church would begin to take the rhetorical turn to hermeneutics and the endless rhetoricity because of being a Word Based community, then we would have bear the pejorative accusation of "relativists;" rather we would be those who accept only knowing in part.  And we would not elevate any age or any proposition or interpretation of the same as products of ages when thought and thinkers were superior to all other ages.  We can imagine discourses of mutual judgment between the people of different ages: Those who have seen the indignity of slavery can cite the biblical people who were blinded to such indignity.  People of the past can truly taunt us for now having the superior technology to destroy ourselves and the entire earth because of our own human actions.


If we only had this portion of the Bible: "In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  All things came into being through the Word."  we would have everything.  Word is assumed and is co-extensive with Being and Word is what we use to be truly honestly reflexive about instantiating Word as the prerequisite of all human existence.  And if we are willing accept Word as the beginning place then the automatic habit of word manifestation and word usage is hermeneutics.  Hermeneutics resides within the Word from the Beginning.  Hermeneutics is unavoidable because Word is unavoidable.  Hermeneutics is not a nihilistic "relativism;" rather it is the absolute process of language which prevents or deconstructs the hubris of the "temporally provincial" production of the process of hermeneutics, namely and articulated word products.  All words products, statements and utterances partake of the natural humility echoed in St. Paul's confession, "now we only see and know in part."  Without the capacity for seeing or knowing in total humility is avoidable if honesty is present.  But let it not be said that Word is an inferior beginning since it is open to an endless future of endless generation of meanings many of which become known in applied interpretation as manifestation of God's love and justice.


December 31, 2014  (can be read in any order)

The Episcopal Church needs to be honest about hermeneutic diversity within our midst which creates some very inconsistent paradigms.  Our own creeds and liturgies encode paradigmatic thinking from the ages when they were first generated.  If progressive Christians are accused of having to say the liturgy and creeds with "their" fingers crossed one can simply state the obvious that what we call revelation is already an interpretation within language and we have endless interpretations because we can never be lazy about making the faith applicable in the now.  We recognize something universal and absolute about love and justice even while we always act with hermeneutical humility regarding how the details of love and justice will be manifested in the particular details of a situation.  Love and Justice are always greater than the specific effort to articulate them in a situation but without the efforts to approximate Love and Justice in practice they are but nice theories.  

The Episcopal Church needs to be the equivalent dynamic of loving our grandparents truly while realizing that we have to deal honestly with details of pastoral love to people and situations which did not present themselves to our grandparents because past generations kept so many people and so many issues "in the closet."  If the Episcopal Church cannot invite everyone out of the closet and to open justice worldwide we have the very uncomfortable feeling of making concessions to injustice.

The Episcopal Church: A quilt work or a mine field of hermeneutics when it comes to interpreting the Bible and Church tradition to express both continuity with a tradition and freedom of the Spirit to parse out the greatness of justice and love into new pastorally responsive details in responding to the people who actually want to come and be with us to pray.

The future of the Episcopal Church?  Interesting topic to put in one's navel for gazing.  A topic for anxious people worried about their own obsolescence and irrelevance in a post-modern age?  Or a fear of the shattering of uniformity into the micro-communities to be fluid in local situations.


Papal governance tends towards the view that "all religion is central" whereas the Episcopalian share with the reformers something of the localization of faith expression through a decentralization which allows for more autonomy in national churches, diocesan organization and parish units.  Frankly one can hope that the Episcopal Church resists the damnable lies and statististification of the charism of the Spirit.  One hopes that mustard seed faithfulness flies under the radar of the American penchant for statistics and being numbered.  Remember the book of Numbers?  "O, God, we have counted ourselves and we are far too few and outnumbered by the many who would not be with us, and even against us."  Without believing that we're a "special remnant" we can still be faithful where we are, "loving the one we're with" as the Crosby, Stills and Nash songs implores.


The future of the Episcopal Church?  We may be like the Shakers who couldn't take advantage of the most efficient means of evangelism, i.e., birth rate. As Episcopalians diminish their birth numbers of little baby people who can be passively assimilated onto church rolls through baptism, they must count upon viability of their communities through discerning local relevance.