Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

To the Farmer-In-Chief

bls points us to this article in the NY Times magazine–a letter from Michael Pollan to the next president. The whole thing is worth a read and here are some juicy excerpts to whet your appetite…:

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler:we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

. . .

We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

. . .

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.  

These last points are vital. We need to teach our children about gardening, cooking, and food in general. We’re trying at home, but school reinforcement is always good. I’ve been looking quite seriously at these resources recently at the National Gardening Association’s site and have been wondering what it would take to get an organic gardening/composting project started at Lil’ G’s school.

A Thought on the Economy

Fr. Haller writes good sense based on working in the Pit. Let me add my negligable two cents worth.

This credit crunch and market crash corresponds—as far as I can tell—concurrently with the end of cheap oil. Yeah, it’s bouncing around $100 a barrel now, much lower than the summer’s $140’s—but do you ever think we’ll see $20 or $40 again? Me neither…

We need a new economic paradigm that takes seriously both communication technology and the energy reality. Here’s my take: Keep data global; keep stuff local.

On Contexts and Biblical Interpretation

Huw and I have been having an interesting conversation at the Episcopal Cafe that I think is worth expanding. It began with a discussion of the parable of the workers in the vineyard with the occasional infusion of the parable of the wicked tenants. In this exchange I was focused mostly on the first… Here are some of the pertinent comments to date:

From me:

I think in speaking about the “generosity” of the vineyard owner of Matthew 20 it’s important to note that the Scripture doesn’t call him “generous”. That’s a liberty taken by our translators; rather the word is “good” (ego agathos eimi)…

I don’t think a traditional meaning “doesn’t fit” the meaning of the text at all. Actually, I think it works better when we consider not only the content of the parable but its literary context as well.

If we look just before this parable we see the account of the young wealthy man who asks what “good thing” (ti agathon) he must do to be saved to whom Jesus responds that “there is one who is good” (ho agathos) (Matt 19:16-22).

Then Jesus speaks of the difficulties of the wealthy who wish to enter the kingdom [“easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God…”] (Matt 19:23-30).

Then we get this parable about the householder who hires laborers (Matt 20:1-16) which ends with the householder saying, “Why do you cast the evil eye [on me] because I am good?”

How do we interpret the householder given the rest of the discussion around wealth and the good? Is he a negative example that confirms the difficulty of the rich to do good or a positive exemplum of one who uses wealth as a manifestation of the nature of the kingdom?

If he is a sign of evil what, then, is the sign of the kingdom thus displayed?

I agree that we must always be on our guard against the domestication of the sharp edge of the Gospel. I just disagree that this reading strips the story of a Gospel challenge.

From Huw:

 

Donald – As you noted in your reply, “It is exciting when scripture pushes us to a kind of arguing that seems rabbinic”.

When I first read your post my guts knotted up a little. Your reading of the text comes at such a different angle to what is traditional that I felt as if the floor had dropped out on an exciting carnival ride. THAT’S what I like about this sort of Rabbinic Conversation! It’s like a roller coaster with the Holy Ghost at the switch as long as we trust each other.

Derek, your description of the text works well with my ex-Orthodox comfort level – which is therefore suspect. Thanks for that tracing of “good” through those passages. But does that literary context say anything about what *Jesus* intended by this story? Or does it tell us more about what the Matthewite community wanted to focus on in the hearing of this passage? Mind you – I don’t think it’s possible to make that choice in a satisfactory way; and I think such a realisation opens the doors to the possibility that there are many other ways of reading this text.

And this is even more true if the traditional reading is based, in circular fashion, on a context that simply expects the traditional reading.

It’s the use of Allegory that is the problem here: was Jesus intending Allegory? Did the Early Disciples hear Allegory? We may never know in this world, but certainly the Church Fathers saw nearly *all* the scriptures as conveying Allegory. Should we do likewise? Even if we follow in their footsteps, does that mean that only one allegory drawn from the text is right? If we decide to use their method do we need to duplicate their results?

One traditional allegory on the “Walking on Water” has Peter getting out of the boat showing us what happens when we dare leave the Church. It goes on to say that Peter was at fault for daring to leave the boat at all! After the Great Schism this reading becomes laden with political overtones. It’s no wonder we never hear it in the west outside of the Orthodox Church. I head it every year when that Gospel came up. And when Peter cries, “Save me” Jesus puts him in the boat (ie, back in the Orthodox Church). It has nothing to do with Peter “loosing faith” when he tried to Walk on the Water. Attempting to walk away from the boat and the other disciples was, in this reading, the sin.

Which reading is right? Does one need to be right and the other wrong? Do we need to pick one over the other other than as needed for a sermon in a given situation? Which one is intended by the Gospel writer? Which one would have been heard by his first community? Or would they have heard just a cool story? Do we need to know those answers beyond prying new, interesting readings out of the text? 

From me:

Hey Huw,

Yes, a both/and reading is typically preferable over an either/or. I do think, however, that certain readings are to be preferred based on the principle of edification. I need to be challenged by readings like the ones Donald and Deirdre offer. At the same time, others need to be challenged again by the meanings that endure in the traditional readings. I do not accuse Donald or Deirdre of this at all, but there are some who believe that the Bible was entirely misunderstood until the 1960’s and I think that’s a mistake.

As for the parable and its setting, What you and Donald are doing is stripping away one setting and replacing it with another one. The one that you are discarding comes from the same general time-period and culture as Jesus himself, written by a people far more familiar with their cultural and interpretive practices than we are. The setting that you are replacing it with is a 21st century recreation that some scholars think might be possibly what Jesus was like. Or not. Personally, I’d rather work with the setting that we actually have and, since Matthew is the only gospel who preserves this parable, it’s the only one we have to go on.

From Huw:

Derek – ” I’d rather work with the setting that we actually have”

If by that you mean *only* the literary setting, then ok. As I said I thank you for drawing out the line on “agatho” through the preceding several scenes. It was something I wouldn’t have noticed without your sharing.

But, again: that only tells us about the text. Not about the community or the intent of the writer(s). It tells us nothing about Jesus. We don’t even know if the community would have heard those several passages read together. Even our assumptions about who that community was are mere guesses.

Any attemt at a cultural reading or a setting (New or Old) is a reading-into the text of material that isn’t necessarily there. Our choice, as you’ve noted, is to find out if it is a reading towards the edification of the people – and ultimately to their deification in Christ.

From me:

But, again: that only tells us about the text. Not about the community or the intent of the writer(s).

True. And the text is what we confess as part of the mystery that is the Word of God–not the community nor the intention of the writer(s).

It tells us nothing about Jesus.

Au contraire, my friend… It tells us how Matthew and possibly other pre-Matthean sources communicated who Jesus was. It may not give us historical “facts” about Jesus but it does tells us how the author and the transmitting community understood the ethos, aims, and point of Jesus. That’s pretty important in my book.

Speaking simply, we make meaning from a text based on two primary factors: content and context. I think that Huw and I both acknowledge that the more malleable of the two is context and the discussion here is not about what one context the text belongs in, but what we should consider the primary context (or contexts) and which should be secondary, tertiary or beyond. So we agree that there are  multiplicity of legitimate contexts; the normative context is the one up for grabs. 

From a scholarly point of view, I’m a literary guy. Thus, my intention is to give the text pre-eminence over other factors. Theologically, I do believe that the biblical text is the Word of God, inspired by God. I see it as something more a kin to a hypostatic union where it is simultaneously a limited human word and a revelatory divine word rather than following a dictation model. As a result of these convictions, I argue that the normative context for any pericope/section of text is its immediate literary context, the larger context of the book in which it is found and the wider context of the whole of Scripture. Another primary context for me is the history of interpretation—how the Church has understood, incarnated, and wrestled with the passage through the centuries.

I see Huw and Donald (who started this discussion) assigning a primary—perhaps normative—context of historical Jesus research to the parable. That is, they are suggesting (and do correct me if I’m reading you wrong, Huw) that a (if not the) central context for the parable is based in Jesus-as-he-was rather than the gospels which are texts that transmit not the pure Jesus—Jesus-as-he-was—but Jesus-as-the early-church-viewed-him.

I take issue with this. I’ve been trained in the New Testament guild. That means several semester-long in-depth seminars on the history of New Testament research and on the whole “Quest for the Historical Jesus” problem. I know where we’ve come from and where we are now. And frankly, I see most historical Jesus research as problematic. We have very limited data that we can say is “historical” in nature. Our main sources were not primarily interested in giving us the kind of historical data that we are after. As a result, most of the research greatly outstrips what I believe our sources give us. Whenever that happens, we begin wandering into the realm of fantasy. Historical reconstruction as wishful/hopeful thinking. Albert Schweitzer was the first to expose this for what it was at the turn into the 20th century and while we’ve progressed into new areas and sociological models he couldn’t have dreamed of, his central charge still holds true. The Jesus we go looking for is the Jesus that we find.  I do not believe that the sources that we have—the gospels—contain the data for us to access Jesus-as-he-was and therefore any attempt to do so provides Jesus-as-we-wish-him-to-be mistaken as Jesus-as-he-was. And that, in my opinion, is why using historical Jesus research as a central context for understanding the parables is misguided—we’re not giving them a contemporary context, we’re giving them a modern context that masquerades as historical.

Having said all that, it’s only fair t note that the parables have been a central battleground for historical Jesus research through the 20th century because one of the few things that everyone actually can agree on is that Jesus taught in parables. (Naturally, we get into major arguments when various folks start pronouncing on which parables belong to Jesus and which are from the early church–or, worse yet–which pieces of which parables are from Jesus and which from the early church…) In this discussion, I’m not denying the validity of the work of folks like Jeremias or Perrin who did some careful and important work on the parables with either implicit or explicit ties to historical Jesus research, I just don’t think that even their careful research (not all of which I agree with either…) gives us enough of a solid context to justify replacing the context we do have with the one we reconstruct.

New Cafe Post

I’ve got a new post up at the Cafe today. It’s on the inevitable topic of religion and politics. (I’m a little puzzled by the title, but ok…)

I also want to draw attention to yesterday’s piece on parables. I try to argue for a pluraity of readings when it comes to the Scriptures. That is, the *more* readings that make sense of a passage within the reasonable limits of a passage’s content and context is a good thing. And, on the whole, I greatly prefer both/and approaches to either/or approaches.

In reference to yesterday’s piece and its discussion, I do indeed want to embrace new methodologies and new ways of looking at the biblical text. What bothers me, though, is when we get a sense that a new reading replaces or supercedes traditional readings simply because it’s new and novel. Yes, we should challenge hegemonic readings that insist that there’s only one way to read a passage and I try hard not to fall into that (though being human, I fail at times…). Nevertheless one of the ironies of the modern situation is that those seeking to overturn old hegemonies are at risk of creating new hegemonies. Yes, let’s multiply readings. 

Furthermore when we multiply readings, I think it’s important to keep in mind Paul’s words about spiritual wisdom. The point is not pride but edification. Many readings may well be valid. But it’s our task as leaders and those who care for the church to determine—in humility and to the best of our abilities—which words are most edifying to whom and at what times. Sometimes I need words of rebuke and interpretations that challenge my favorite traditional readings–whether they be early medieval traditions or scholarly traditions. On the other hand, sometimes I need to be re-confronted by a traditional interpretation, challenged to discover why it has returned time and again to Christian minds despite shifting cultures, intellectual currents, and spiritual fads.

In Other News…

I’ll not be making it to SBL this year.

Things are still tight, and at the moment I can’t afford to go to more than one conference per academic year.

‘Cause I’m going to K’zoo…

Actually…I’ve been invited to present as K’zoo—and so I shall!

This is an all around good thing. Not only is it a presentation at a major conference but it’ll light the fire I’ve been lacking to get my edits done and the diss finished up so that I’ll go as “Dr.” rather than “Mr.”.   In fact, the day I should graduate is the day after the conference ends. My presentation is the first half of chapter 4 so most of the hard work has already been done; it’ll just be a matter of sharpening it all and putting it into presentation format.

Solemn Te Deum!!

How You Do It

A solemn Te Deum can be placed at the end of a Mass or Office or may serve as a stand-alone liturgy in its own right. If the last, a procession may well be the way to do it in which case the solemn Te Deum occurs as you leave the station to which it went; the Te Deum is sung on the return to the altar where the versicles and responses are sung but the altar itself is not censed.

The text of the liturgy is fairly simple: it consists of the Te Deum itself sung to a solemn setting. Most traditional settings include the standard versicles with the canticle. The ’79 BCP, however, decided to hack them off and to make them Suffrages B of Morning Prayer. If you’re doing a procession, you may want to append them based on the distance or rate of speed traveled. What makes a solemn Te Deum an act of thanksgiving, though, is the presence of additional versicles which are a mash-up of the Benedictus Es and Ps 103:

V. Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our Fathers :
R. And to be praised and glorified forever.
V. Let us bless the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost :
R. Let us praise and exalt him above all forever.
V. Blessed art thou in the firmament of heaven :
R. And to be praised and glorified, and exalted above all forever.
V. Praise the Lord, O my soul :
R. And forget not all his benefits.
V. O Lord, hear our prayer :
R. And let our prayer come unto thee.
V. The Lord be with you :
R. And with thy spirit

Let us pray:

[Insert here the General Thanksgiving found at the end of the Office]

Needless to say, candles, banners, and at least one thurible are absolutely required.

Why You Do It

Any occasion of celebration and thanksgiving are suitable for a solemn Te Deum. Common historical examples occur at the ends of wars, the securing of lines of succession, etc. It need not be a huge national event, however; miraculous healings were also celebrated by such liturgies.

My reason today is because M has a job!! It’s at a parish fairly close to here where she’ll be the associate. We both get a great feeling from the rector, staff, and parish and this rector seems amazing and is interested in all sorts of interesting things. Best yet, M and the Rector seem to have a great rapport already and both are very excited to see what happens. She starts on Sunday.

Deo gratias!

What’s Relevant to the Church and Vice-Versa

There’s a post at the Cafe today about the growing irrelevance of the Church.

We’ve talked about this before and will no doubt talk about it again.

The church will always and everywhere be irrelevant if it is not successfully bring the gathered Body of Christ into an ever deeper contact with the Living God. 

It’s not about lobbying or being a better social service agency. It’s not about getting people through the doors and in the pews, either. 

It’s about changing lives. It’s about remaking our perceptions of the world, reorienting ourselves towards that which is really real–the God who loves us enough to die for us and who demonstrates that love is more powerful than death, hell, and sin–then behaving in a manner consonant with those insights.

If we are not doing this, then we are truly irrelevant.

Anglican Customaries

As any liturgist worth their salt will tell you, having the text of a liturgy is only a part of understanding a past liturgical experience or a liturgical tradition. As one who works with thousand year old liturgies, I have to continually hold in mind that a liturgy is not a text—it’s an experience, and that what I see on a page before me is not necessarily determinative for what may have occured in an actual embodied space. Thus, historical liturgists are always on the look out for customaries, documents that flesh out how a set of liturgies were actually performed in a certain time and place. 

Even when we have a customary, though, that’s rarely the end of the discussion. A customary may help us visualize the liturguy better but, again, it’s still a document and not an event. And customaries have their purposes too, describing not only what does happen but—quite often—what the author wants to happen or wishes to happen. Indeed, some customaries can be polemical treatises that attempt to implant in the reader’s mind one particular model that is to supplant all others. (For instance, whenever I need a chuckle, I read through the section entitled “Of Practices Not Recommended” in Galley’s Ceremonies of the Eucharist… I should also mentioned that it’s been argued that the seminal treatise of Hippolytus upon which so much of the modern Liturgical Renewal movement is based is far more polemical and prescriptive than descriptive of early Roman worship.)

As an American interested in the history of Anglican worship, I have no lived experience of worship with the 1662 BCP. Certainly I can pick it up and read through it; the text and rubrics are clear enough for most anyone to follow. There are, however, ambiguities and options explicit in the text, and anyone who knows the wide vaariety of Anglican theologies, practices, and churchmanship realizes that there must have been differences in how various groups worked with or resolved these ambiguities. Without lived experience, we fall back on customaries.

Principle customaries for the 1662 with which I am familiar are three (Please note, these are intended as introductions, not as authoritative commentary; feel free to add notes or other items in the comments!):

The Directorium Anglicanum: First published in 1858 by John Purchas, a leading Ritualist, this is a guide to the 1662 that seems well suited to larger churches with a traditional architectural format. It argues that the rubrics of the early prayer books expect a certain amount of liturgical knowledge lacking in the priests of its day and thus seeks to “put the Priest of the nineteenth century on a par with the Priest of the sixteenth century as to ritual knowledge. An html copy of the First Edition can be found here at Project Canterbury’s liturgical archive. New to me (and what prompted this post) is my discovery of a PDF version of the Second Revised Edition of 1865. (A read of the preface to the second edition gives you a sense of the battles in the midst of the Tractarian (Oxford Movement’s) growing momentum. A catholic work that harkens back to Sarum uses as well as mentioning (then) contemporary Roman uses, I consider it moderately high. The first edition makes none of the references to the saints or the Blessed Virgin found in Roman or Later Anglican works.

Ritual Notes: This is probably the best known of the catholic customaries. Originally published in 1894, it has gone on to 11 editions. There is no better way to stimulate a discussion that will consume many hours and much gin than to ask a group of Anglo-Catholics which edition is the best. Current answers to “the best” tend to bounce between the 11th, 9th, and 8th reflecting how one feels about recent (20th-21st century) changes to the Roman liturgy and the degree to which current Roman practice should either be followed or rejected. (Brief sample here…). Currently some Continuing Churches sell the 11th, the Western Rite Antiochene Orthodox sells the 9th, and the first edition in html format can be found here.  (An 11th edition sits on my shelf though I’d put a 9th edition next to it if I had one…)

The Parson’s Handbook [English Use]: Probably the least known in America, this is the work of “Blessed” Pearcy Dearmer, the classic example of an Anglo-Catholic Socialist. (Wikipedia entry on the Handbook is here.) While the first two references have—as far as I can determine—some links to living traditions, this work attempts to go back to as exclusively Sarum Use as possible. As such it is particularly susceptible to accusations of antiquarianism and “museum” liturgy. Nevertheless, this work did establish a following and while it might have been a novelty when it was first published it is now a living movement of some weight in England.  The handbook went into no less than 13 editions in rather rapid succession. (I don’t know if there are arguments over preferred editions here…) Dearmer first penned the work just seven years after ordination; he made revisions as he worked out the implications of his program by implementing it in his own parish. The First Edition in html format is at Project Canterbury; the Forth Edition as a PDF may be found here.

Finding Patterns

Life adjustment is proceeding here… There’s still chaos in the form of unpacked boxes, unorganized living spaces, and incomplete funding streams. Nevertheless, some good patterns are taking shape.

M and I are in a good fitness routine now; we’re hitting the YMCA six days a week with weights and cardio. She’s taking yoga, I’m doing tai chi. (I used to do quite a bit of martial arts before wife and kids–I’m just now getting back into it…)

We’re all sitting at the table to eat breakfast and dinner together. Lil’ G has recently insisted that we start doing abbreviated morning prayer at breakfast and we’re happy to oblidge her. 

This weekend I put in new screens on the back door and in the girls’ room, replaced incandescents with compact flourescents, and did a bunch of lawnwork which included some good additions to the compost pile. The mint and lavendar are in the front bed now, and are looking much better for it. 

M’s maternal grandfather is ailing and probably won’t be with us much longer. We had a scare last week with his heart and one of the true blessings of our new location materialized: SIL swung by after she finished classes and she and M went to visit their grandparents spending a lengthy–and potentially final–visit with her grandfather. Neither of those things could have happened at the old place…

So things aren’t perfect, but they’re going quite well. Already our rhythms here are much better than they were before.

Important Episcopal News for Today

Today is Friday, the 19th. That makes it the first Friday after September 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross and the traditional start of the Winter side of the monastic year. Thus, today is one of the Autumnal Ember Days (along with this past Wednesday and tomorrow). These days are now remembered as the date postulants send letters to their bishops but these were originally dates for ordinations and such. As a result, they became days of fasting and prayer for the Church and its well-being.

Today’s collect:

O God, who didst lead thy holy apostles to ordain ministers in every place: Grant that thy Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, may choose suitable persons for the ministry of Word and Sacrament, and may uphold them in their work for the extension of thy kingdom; through him who is the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

As a Friday and an especially penitential one at that, the Great Litany is entirely appropriate at the conclusion of today’s Morning Prayer (along with a commemoration of Theodore of Tarsus, the Syrian Archbishop of Canterbury who founded a flourishing school of learning in Anglo-Saxon England). Fasting and/or refraining from meat today would be in keeping with the spirit of the day.

That is all.