Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love

During the High Middle Ages, Troubadour poetry composed primarily in southern Europe included themes including of courtly love, which became associated with marriage. Before then, that institution was associated mostly with property and progeny rather than with romantic love. Interestingly, it was just as love was becoming associated with marriage when the Roman Catholic Church ended its centuries-old gay-marriage liturgy, which, sans property and progeny, was uniquely associated with love (for why else would gays marry?). The irony is that “modern” gay marriage in the West in the twenty-first century may have more to do with sex than love in the sex-centric gay culture of today, though obviously gays are fully capable of genuine romantic love that transcends such superficialities as lust that can be prioritized too highly at the expense of romantic love. Fear of emotional intimacy can exascerbate such misordered concupiscence. Adventurous exuberance combined with this fear need not eclipse more meaningful intimate relations. Indeed, married gays in loving, committed relationships even raise children in loving homes. Although utterly obscene to more conservative folks, such “mixed families” grounded in love warrant respect and even admiration for being based in genuine love even though emotional intimacy can be scary. This is what should be preached from the pulpit. Antipodally, the sex-centric approach to “relationships” in the gay “culture” justly warrants condemnation for being superficial, short-sighted, and utterly self-centered. Yet, whether gay or heterosexual, romantic love need not be selfish. The distinction in Christian theology between caritas and agape is relevant in making this point.

The full essay is at "Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love."

Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge

A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1] By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations, including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria. To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very closely related, domains of human experience.

The full essay is at "Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge."

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1. Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2011), p. 2.

Overriding Selfishness by Experiencing Awe

As biological animals, we are genetically and even behaviorally programmed to be self-centered, even though we can “self-program” to override this instinctual urge, which is geared to self-preservation. We are naturally economizing beings, oriented like squirrels to store up as any nuts as we can for winter, given the natural conditions of scarcity and uncertainty in the human condition. Yet we eschew selfish people and generally expect some extent of generosity from benevolence (benevolentia), which in turn is based on good will (benevolentia). To be sure, we can take measures not only to hold us back from abject selfishness, but also override the instinctual urge even for self-preservation. One such way has to do with experiencing awe.  

 

The full essay is at "Overriding Selfishness by Experiencing Awe."

Religious Violence as Hypocritical

In the movie, Boy Erased (2018), the director of a church’s conversion therapy program invites the immediate family members of one gay boy to hit him with a bible to drive out the underlying demon. The boy subsequently commits suicide. Lest this notion of using violence to remove a sin in the twenty-first century is assumed to lie in the realm of fiction, John Smyth, an Anglican, was accused in 2017 “of subjecting at least 22 teenage boys to savage beatings in his garden shed” at “an elite Christian camp for boys. His intent was “purging them of perceived sins such as masturbation and pride”[1] A Christian charity group oversaw the camp, yet I contend that the camp was not Christian.

The full essay is at "The Anti-Christian."

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[1] Ceylon Yoginsu, “Doubt Cast on When the Archbishop Knew of Abuse,” The New York Times, October 15, 2017.

On the Particular Kind of Love Evinced by Jesus: A Better Criterion for Christianity?

The film, Paul: The Apostle of Christ (2018), carries great weight theologically in that Paul describes a very particular kind of love that Jesus preaches and lives out in the Gospels. In so doing, the film shows an overlooked criterion by which people who claim to be Christian can be ascertained as such or not. One implication from the film is that Christianity has contained (and still contains) a number of nominal Christians who are not in fact Christian. A related implication is that the historically (and modern) criteria by which people are considered (and consider themselves) Christian is not as useful (and valid) as the overlooked criterion that is so salient in the film.

The full essay is at "Paul: The Apostle of Christ"

A Megachurch Pastor and Sexual Assault: A Compromised Christian Leader

“A Memphis megachurch pastor received standing ovation during a church service on Sunday after he admitted that he had engaged in a ‘sexual incident’ with a high school student 20 years ago in Texas.”[1] That the woman had made the man’s prior misdeeds public just days before throws into doubt whether the pastor deserved the ovation by his loyal flock. Prompted by the firing of Matt Lauer, the anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, the woman emailed the pastor more than a month before his public acknowledgement at his church; he had not responded to the woman’s email to apologize. Letting his flock in on the secret hardly added much value to the man’s character, for damage-control is not laudatory. The standing ovation connoted not only praise on the man and a revalidation of the pastor’s continuance as a religious leader. That a Christian leader could be validated as such, rather than invalidated and thus shown the door, throws into question the integrity of religious leadership itself.

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1. Matthew Haag, “Megachurch Pastor Admits to Illicit ‘Sexual Incident’,” The New York Times, January 10, 2018.

The full essay is at "A Megachurch Pastor as a Christian Leader."