"Where gestures lack style, ethics itself becomes debased."
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección,
p. 240
07/06/2010
06/30/2010
The recluse is humanity’s delegate to what is important.
Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 226
06/28/2010
A New Orthodox College? St Katherine College in San Diego
From all I can tell a recently released website and a few bloggers ( AOI and Fr Gregory)are spreading info on a brand new Orthodox Liberal Arts college.
This is also interesting in light of this recent call from SVS (here).
from Fr Gregory's blog
"One of the greatest needs for the Church in America is an Orthodox school system. With few exceptions, Orthodox Christian children attend public schools. Yes, some attend private religiously affiliated or secular schools. But there are very few Orthodox parochial school. A noticeable exception to this, is Three Hierarchs Eastern Orthodox School (THEOS), “a private, non-public, non-profit religious school” that services children in the metropolitan Pittsburgh area.
Turning from elementary school children to older students, the lack of Orthodox educational options is even more striking. With the exception of Hellenic College, in Brookline, MA there are simply no Orthodox institutions dedicated to undergraduate education. While there are no doubt a number of reasons for this, it is hard for me to avoid thinking that all of this represents a significant failure of the Church in America. For all practical purposes, with the exception of seminaries, the Orthodox children are educated by State, by the faithful of non-Orthodox Christian communities and by the faculties of private educational institutions.
God willing, at least as far as undergraduate education is
concerned, all of this will change in the Fall of 2011 when St
Katherine College begins offering classes in San Diego, CA.
For the last several months, I have been in conversation with the founder and president of SKC, Frank Papatheofanis, MD, PhD. Reflecting on his reasons for founding St Katherine College, an Orthodox Christian, a physician-scientist and educator with over 30 years of experience in academic medicine and science, Dr Papatheofanis turns first to Scripture. “St Paul writes in 2 Peter 1:5-10,” says, that “we increase in our faithfulness to the Lord.” He points out that the Apostle
…first mentions goodness as an important quality for us to seek before identifying knowledge as another desirable quality. St Paul tells us we should increase in knowledge about the Lord. Some come to know, increasing their knowledge of, Christ from a spiritual direction whereas some come to understand Him more from knowledge of His Creation or other routes. As a physician-scientist I have been supported in my faith through glimpses of the Divine in the created world. The notion of “inquiry seeking wisdom” emerged from these experiences. Rigorous inquiry is the bulwark of scholarship and research. But why? Why does inquiry matter? I think it matters because Wisdom, Jesus Christ, is revealed to us as we learn more about what He has created. I think such an approach to scholarship probably reigned when the world’s great centers of learning were organized. I also think that an institution founded around such a principle is again needed in the world today.
St Katherine’s will “emphasizes teaching and research—with relevance to the practical world and Christian witness as guiding principles.” The College will offer “degree programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees in Art, Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Economics, English Language and Literature, History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Music, Philosophy, Public Policy, and Theology.”
Besides the natural challenge of starting a new college, one of the things that I find most interesting–and exciting–about SKC is that the academic program will not only “encompass several academic disciplines and degree-granting programs … leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees in Art, Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Economics, English Language and Literature, History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Music, Philosophy, Public Policy, and Theology” but do so within the context of “interdisciplinary collaborations, laboratories, and programs whose work cuts across traditional departmental boundaries.” Where typically an undergraduate education leads to a fragmentation of knowledge the goal at SKC is to create “a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere” that educates “students to become creative members of society.” Finally, and I think most importantly, all of this is within the context of the tradition of the Orthodox Church.
Thinking about my undergraduate education as a Roman Catholic at the University of Dallas (itself a Roman Catholic institution) I remember how important it was for me, and for the majority of the students, to see our professors not only in the classroom but to stand with them at Mass and receive Holy Communion together. I also remember how formative it was to have priests as professors. These men not only taught in the classroom, they celebrated Mass in the chapel, heard our confessions, and celebrated our marriages. Especially through their example, many of us became priests or, in the case of the women, entered became religious sisters and nuns.
Speaking as a psychologist for a moment, the four years that are typically spent at college are incredibly important to a person’s religious faith. If the empirical evidence tells me anything it is the local parish and the campus Orthodox Christian Fellowship simply can’t be expected to meet the spiritual and developmental needs of 18-21 year old Orthodox Christians. And, to be fair, institution like St Katherine College isn’t going to meet the needs of anything but a small fraction of Orthodox Christian undergraduates. But this shouldn’t stop us from wholeheartedly supporting SKC.
Please let me encourage you to look at their website and, if it looks like something that might be of interest to a young person you know, place along the link.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory"
It seems Fr Hopko, Scott Cairns, and others will be joining them! Very interesting!
06/24/2010
millinerd.com: The Other Internet
Around midnight in the moon-lit cobblestone courtyard of the Prodromos Monastery at Mount Menoikeion, a student and I were sitting outside taking advantage of the wifi signal that we've managed, somewhat ambivalently, to install. A solitary nun walked by with her prayer beads, and gently asked what we were doing. After explaining what we were up to, she smiled and said in a light Greek accent, while gesturing to the sky, "I'm trying to access the other internet."
I nominate this to be placed top ten nun quips of the twenty-first century.
[crossposted at the Mount Menoikeion blog]
"You'll Never Be Alone" by Christopher Clausen, City Journal Spring 2010
As anyone knows who spends time in the sunshine latitudes of contemporary America, gated “55-plus communities” have been spreading faster than kudzu ever since the oldest cohort of baby boomers felt the first twinges of arthritis. The oddly age-specific phrase signifies that the developments in question are designed for the needs of the (relatively affluent) retired. Typically, at least one resident of each unit must be at least 55 years old, and no permanent resident can be a minor. Why 55 became the canonical age rather than 50 or 60 is hard to say, but the figure is now so deeply ingrained that the vast Del Webb chain uses the variation “55 or better” in all its advertising.
Now that I’m a whole decade better than 55, my wife and I recently drove more than 2,000 miles touring such properties in the Southeast. Our original goal was simply to visit friends from Indiana who had decided to spend the rest of their days in The Villages, a retirement empire that stretches halfway across the flatlands of north central Florida. That particular realm of gold, feelingly described by Andrew Blechman in Leisureville, seemed too unreal to appeal to us—an endless sprawl of “town centers,” complete with ethnic themes and fake histories, around which you can observe hundreds of senior citizens tooling along on golf carts, day and night.
Florida sunshine, however, promised such a sublime change from the gray Northeast that it inspired an inspection tour of other, less grandiose, communities. Over the course of a few months, we visited half a dozen such places on the outskirts of Florida cities, beside Georgia lakes, or in verdant mountains. One hugged the bank of a South Carolina river and had just built an enormous shed for its residents’ boats. All had lavish recreational facilities and activities directors who offered daily classes in how to use them. As these places repeatedly emphasize, they are for “active adults” and carefully avoid any resemblance to nursing homes. The whole experience boiled down to one basic appeal, summarized by the horrifying promise we encountered again and again: “You’ll never be alone.” Or, as one resident enthused, “It’s like being back in high school!”
A succession of charismatic women in their twenties named Cyndi, Brandy, Misty, and Tara—I am not making the names up—led us through the neighborhoods, stopping every few minutes to talk animatedly with some resident who had succumbed to the same treatment six months or a year ago. Each a native of her territory, they were all the sort of fiddle-dee-dee sex bombs who transition effortlessly from high school cheerleading to selling middle managers from Milwaukee on top-of-the-line retirement homes while still keeping the wives charmed. Following them around was such a mindless pleasure that it was surprising to discover now and then that their grasp of figures was everything a sales manager could wish.
My wife, with the inbred politeness of a native Virginian, drove herself crazy trying to keep up with Brandy or Misty’s relentless extroversion and invariably conveyed the misleading impression that she loved everything she saw, whether it was a three-room condo or a replica of Mount Vernon in modern materials. Meanwhile, the job of asking about construction, bylaws, monthly fees, and whether two people who never played golf would still be paying for the upkeep on a championship course fell to me. Only once did I come up with a question that had apparently never been asked. Most of the residences, no matter how small, had rooms with glass doors referred to as libraries. When I asked Cyndi or Tara whether built-in bookshelves were available as an option, she seemed utterly baffled. “Why,” she wondered aloud, “would you want bookshelves in the library?”
With or without shelves, the outcome was always the same. Once we were back in the privacy of our accommodations, my wife fumed that she would rather die of rabies than live in something made out of Hardy Board, and it would be my duty to tell Misty or Cyndi that if it were up to me, we’d move here tomorrow, but unfortunately these houses reminded my wife of orange crates, or slightly more tactful words to that effect.
So in the end, little came of our 55-or-better tour, apart from the memory of following Quebec license plates up and down Interstate 95. Part of the reason was that these communities are designed for exceptionally outgoing people who love group activities, set a low value on privacy, and don’t mind living in a mass-produced structure that is rarely built to outlast its owners by much. Another source of our paralysis is still more difficult to overcome because it seems to involve an abiding law of human nature, which is that as many men grow older, they become less tolerant of cold weather, while many women become less tolerant of heat. No retirement community I know of, from Maine to Miami, has found a way to deal with that dirty trick evolution can play on even the most gregarious couples.
Christopher Clausen is the author of Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America.
06/17/2010
Ayn Rand and the Orcs
06/16/2010
THE LAST HOURS OF CASSIODORUS
The ceiling of my death is near complete,
The Vivarium now must live up to its name.
Fish in my stewponds circle silently,
Their free captivity is like the soul,
An endless round, then thrashing in a net.
Our state days pinioned in official letters,
The Variae of sound administration,
But Boethian birds still shun my volary.
Home to the South, to sad Scolacium,
From Civilisation and a Library,
The sea spray drying on acacia leaves.
After me what further barbarisms?
My pose is prayer, but yet my head is filled
With the terrifying dissonance of God.
I have lived well past my statutory days,
The mapping pen has fallen from my hand,
A hundred years or more of beating wings.
- Peter Porter
Lethal Loyalties: Dulce et Decorum Est | William Cavanaugh's New Book
A review of William T Cavanaugh's new book "The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict"
by John Medaille.
It is, alas, a story we hear almost everyday. A “terrorist” straps explosives to his body and walks into the crowded market to cause mayhem. Or “Holy Warriors” fight endless battles to prevent the spread of democracy in their homelands. When we see these things, we shake our heads and lament that in the name of God, these people not only commit terrible crimes, but resist the very things—democracy and liberalism—which will bring them the same peace and prosperity that we enjoy. We have no doubts about how these events are to be interpreted, for we know that misdirected and irrational violence is part of our own history, a history from which we were rescued by the liberal state, and the separation of religious and temporal affairs.
But what if our understanding is wrong? What if the nation-state was not the cure but the cause of the wars that we term “religious”? In other words, what if all that we “know” isn’t so, is in fact a myth used to justify the nation-state and marginalize certain kinds of discourse, most particularly “religious” discourse? This is the theme of William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence.
We know the story very well: after the Reformation, Europe fell into a murderous cycle of sectarian violence, from which we were rescued by the nation-state, which cordoned off “religious” concerns from the temporal order, imposing a political tolerance on the contending faiths while concentrating on building prosperous kingdoms (at first) and then liberal democracies, in which the religious realm was kept separate from the secular. It is this story which provides us—all of us, whether “left” or “right—with the framework by which we view both domestic and international events, and most particularly the Muslim world.
But is this story a history or a myth? Prof. Cavanaugh contends that it is a myth, one that simply does not conform to the facts of history. In support of this thesis, he makes a number of remarkable claims:
- Religion in not a severable category from cultural political, and economic life. In fact, “religion,” as we understand the term, is a creation of the modern West, and would have been unintelligible to previous ages and cultures.
- The modern state precedes the so-called wars of religion, Indeed, the “wars of religion” weren’t about religion at all.
- There has been a transfer of the sacral from the religious order to the political. Far from separating religion from the state, the modern state creates its own sacred space, with its own rituals, hymns, and theology, and its own universal mission.
The universal mission of this new Church is mainly tied up with practical solutions to particular problems that are elevated to the status of transcendent truths. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it:
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.
If Cavanaugh is correct, then his thesis should profoundly effect the way we view the world, or rather, the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. Humans always tell themselves stories about how things are; it is the only way to organize information into a coherent whole. But it does help if the story bears some relationship to the way the world is, or was; if its details can in general be correlated with some actual history. In this case, the story does not correspond with reality. Even if we allow that religion is not something severable from the rest of life and culture, can we go along with Cavanaugh’s claim that religion itself is a modern invention?
The moderns would hold that “religion” is a trans-cultural, trans-historical reality, a universal genus of which “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” and “Islam” are particular species. The problem is, any attempt to define this genus in such a way as to include what the moderns want to include and to exclude what they wish to exclude turns out to be contradictory. Nationalism is no less a cult than Catholicism. Including a belief in God would exclude many major “religions.” One might attempt to limit religion to the “transcendent,” but ideas such as “the nation” or “liberty” are transcendent ideas, as are all values. Hence, there is no coherent way to distinguish “religious” from “secular” violence. What counts as “religious” or “secular” in any given society always depends on the configuration of power within that society. Indeed, the demarcation of the “religious” sphere is itself an expression of secular power, a political act.
Our concept of “religion” was simply unknown to the ancients. There is no word in Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Aztec, Chinese, or the Indian languages that precisely corresponds to our term. The Latin religio, “re-binding” referred to the rites which bound the social order together, and would include anything from the Japanese tea ceremony to the Greek rites of hospitality, to the temple rites of the various gods. When Augustine wrote De Vera Religione, “Of True Religion,” his subject was not Christianity. Rather, it was about worship, which can be given either to the creator or to the creation. True religion is directed toward the creator alone, and religion is not something contrasted with a secular realm. In the City of God, Augustine uses the term religion to refer to the worship of God, but he finds the term ambiguous, because:
In Latin usage…”religion” is something displayed in human relationships, in the family (in the narrower and wider sense) and between friends; and so the use of the word does not avoid ambiguity when the worship of God is in question. We have no right to affirm with confidence that “religion” is confined to the worship of God, since it seems that this word has been detached from its normal meaning in which it refers to an attitude of respect in relations between a man and his neighbor.
When we turn to a work like Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, we would expect it to be concerned with what we call “religion,” but Thomas uses the term only once. Religion is one of the nine virtues that are a part of justice; it is that part which renders to God what is due to God and refers to the rites and practices that offer worship to God. It is not a term that designates a sphere of human activity that stands apart from some other sphere, called the “secular.” Indeed, the terms “religious” and “secular” in the middle ages normally referred to the two orders of clergy, those bound to monastic vows and those which were a part of the diocesan structure. The different “religions” were Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, etc.
If there is no analytical severable category of “religion,” then the idea of the “wars of religion” from which we were saved by the secular state can’t be correct either. The neat narrative of a struggle with Catholics on one side and Protestants on the other simply doesn’t work out. The framework of the 30-Year’s War was a struggle between three Catholic monarchies, the French and the two branches of the Hapsburgs. Prof. Cavanaugh gives of 10 pages of examples that run counter to the standard narrative: Catholics allied with Protestants against Catholics, Protestants allied with Catholics against Protestants, Protestants battling Protestants, etc. Obviously, the facts exceed the narrative.
Nor was the rise of the modern state the solution to the problem, it was the cause. Long before the Reformation, the state was expanding its power at the expense of the Church. The taxing of the clergy, the consolidation of ecclesial courts into civil ones, intrusion into the educational system, the replacement of the Church’s charities with the welfare state, and royal control of clerical appointments were some of the signs of the expanding power of the state. The Reformation itself was part of this process, since so many of the “reformers” were more than willing to replace the pope with the prince to enforce a confessional conformity. The Reformation depended on lay power, and gave a justification for that power. The biggest source of power is always property, and the wealth of the Church was a tempting target. In 1524, King Gustav Vasa of Seeden welcomed the Reformation because it allowed him to transfer the tithes from the Church to the crown, and three years later he appropriated all Church property, nine years before Henry VIII did the same. In France, “secularization” meant the transfer of Church property to the crown.
But this confessional conformity required that local privileges and independence to be overturned. The Catholic Monarchs desired absolutism as much as did their Protestant counterparts. Charles V made war against the Protestant princes, with the help of at least some Protestants, in an attempt to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a centralized, sovereign state. In France, the crown attempted to unite the country under un roi, une foi, une loi, which required a war against the nobility. The nationalized churches became part of a clientage system, so much so that Pope Julius III could write to the French King Henry II, “You are more than pope in your kingdoms.”
After the state caused the wars, its apologists proposed the state as a solution. Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau saw a strong state (or even a state religion) as a necessity. After all, membership in a religion was voluntary, but membership in the state was compulsory, and the state required a degree of conformity. It is not that the new state would be intolerant. On the contrary, it would enforce religious “tolerance,” but only for a “religion” shorn of any civil interests. Religion was to be a private passion—or fantasy—one which would not be allowed to serve as a source of resistance to the totalizing state. Hence, Catholics were excluded from this tolerance, not because of bigotry, but on the quite rational grounds that the Catholic Church could never confine itself to being a “religion” that could be conveniently domesticated and striped of its civil and economic concerns. This church could never fit into the truncated category of religion, and hence could not be compatible with the modern state. The actual trajectory is that first the state was “sacralized” by absorbing the powers of the Church, and then the state was “liberalized” by being tolerant of the “religions,” but only insofar as they present no genuine opposition to the power of the state.
Seen in this light, the so-called “separation of church and state” is a complete sham. As Robert Bellah put it, the state becomes “an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion” that “has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.” the real issue is where we place what Cavanaugh calls our “lethal loyalties,” which have been transferred to this new religion and its universal mission: the imposition of democracy and market economics on the whole world. None of us would think of killing for the faith, but killing for the state becomes “patriotism.” It was in the trenches and the gas attacks of World War I that Wilfred Owen discovered the price of this new religion in “the old lie, Dulce et Decorum est, pro patria mori.” And of course, what we die for, we also kill for.
The actual trajectory of history is that the state absorbed the powers of the church, and then “solved” the problems this creates by offering “tolerance” to any church which would become a “religion,” a domesticated, private fantasy that could pose no challenge to secular authority. As Christians, our best response is to accept the role that Hobbes and Locke assigned to us: permanent outsiders, to be viewed with suspicion at best and persecution at worst. This new state, actually just another cult, rationalizes some forms of violence and condemns others. We are horrified at the violence of those whose countries we invade, but “shock and awe” over Baghdad is a regrettable, but rational form of violence in a noble cause; in the end, it will bring free trade, democracy, and better phone service.
The obedience that the state requires is total, and dissent is worse than traitorous, it is unpatriotic. Every combat soldier instinctively recognizes the truth of Randall Jarrett’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, and tells his own version of the grim joke:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
06/10/2010
International Conference of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies
It seems that the Volos Conference has been underway and overviews of the specific papers have been provided via the website for the Volos Academy.
Here is a general outline:
Holy
Metropolis of Demetrias
INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE
Neo-Patristic Synthesis or
Post-Patristic
Theology: Can Orthodox Theology be Contextual?
June 3-6, 2010, THESSALIA
CONFERENCE CENTER,
(MELISSIATIKA), VOLOS
The
conference is organized
in collaboration with the Orthodox
Christian Studies Program of Fordham University, the Chair of
Orthodox Theology of Münster University, and the Romanian
Institute for Inter-Orthodox,
Inter–Confessional, and Inter-Religious Studies (INTER) Cluj-Napoca
PROGRAMME
THURSDAY, JUNE
3rd 2010
18.00-18.30 Registration
18.30-19.00
Opening – Greetings
Session
I
Moderator:
Dr. Pantelis Kalaitzidis
Director
of the
19.00-19.30 Rev.
Dr. Vladan
Pericic, Professor of Patrology, former Dean of the Theological Faculty,
Liturgical
Theology as Contextual Theology in the Patristic Era and Today
19.30-20.00 Dr.
George
Martzelos, Professor at the
The Role of Contextual
Theology in the Orthodox Tradition
20.00-30 Discussion
20.30 Dinner
FRIDAY
JUNE 4th 2010
Session
II
Moderator: Dr. George Demacopoulos
Associate
Professor
of Theology, Co-Founding Director,
Orthodox
Christian
Studies Program of
09.00-09.30 Dr.
Marcus
Plested, Director of Studies, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies,
The Emergence of
the Neo-Patristic Synthesis: Content, Challenges and Limits
Florovsky’s Christian Hellenism: A Critical Evaluation
10.00-10.30 Rev.
Dr. John
Behr, Dean, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological
Going Beyond Neo-Patristic Synthesis
10.30-11.30 Discussion
11.30-12.00 Coffee-break
Session III
Moderator:
Dr. Bruce Beck,
Director,
Pappas Patristic
Institute,
12.00-12.30 Archbishop
Dr. Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokolamsk, Chairman of the
Moscow Patriarchate Department for
Orthodox
Tradition and Contextual Theology
12.30-13.00 Dr.
Tamara
Grdzelidze, Programme Executive, Faith and Order, WCC
Contextualisation of the Church Fathers
in the Context of Ecumenism
13.00-13.30 Discussion
13.30-15.00 Lunch
Session IV
Moderator:
Dr. Tamara Grdzelidze
Programme
Executive, Faith
and Order, WCC
15.00-15.30 Dr.
Daniel Ayuch,
Associate Professor, St. John of Damascus Orthodox Theological Institute
of
University of Balamand, Lebanon
The Relationship
between Biblical and Theological Disciplines
15.30-16.00 Dr.
John
Fotopoulos, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Saint
Mary's
College at Notre Dame, USA
Orthodox
Theology and the Historical-Critical Method
16.00-16.30
Discussion
16.30-17.00
Coffee-break
Session V
Moderator:
Serbian
Orthodox Church,
Professor
at the
17.00-17.30
Dr.
George
Demacopoulos, Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director,
Orthodox
Christian Studies Program of
History,
Post-Colonial Theory, and Some New Possibilities for Retrieving the
Theological
Past
17.30-18.00
Alexei V.
Nesteruk, Senior Lecturer, Department
of Mathematics, University of
Portsmouth, UK; Visiting Professor, St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological
Institute, Moscow, Russia
Orthodoxy in the
Scientific Age: From a Neo-Patristic Synthesis to Radical Theological
Commitment
18.00-18.30
Rev. Dr.
Demetrios Bathrellos, Visiting Lecturer, Institute for Orthodox
Christian
Studies, Cambridge, UK; Priest of the
Aghia Sophia Greek Orthodox Church, Drafi, Attica, Greece
Systematic
Theology as a New Form of Orthodox Theology
18.30-19.30
Discussion
SATURDAY JUNE 5th 2009
Session VI
Moderator: Dr Demetrios
Moschos
Lecturer
at the Scholl of Theology,
09.00-09.30 Dr.
Assaad Elias
Kattan, Director of the
Essentialism
Reconsidered: The Myth of a Non-Hermeneutical Approach to Orthodox
Tradition
09.30-10.00 Rev.
Dr. John
Panteleimon Manoussakis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, College of
Holy
Cross, Worcester, USA
God. Being and
Event: The Intersection between Theology and Ontology
10.00-10.30 Discussion
10.30-11.00 Coffee-break
Session VII
Moderator: Dr.
Aristotle Papanikolaou
Associate
Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director,
Orthodox
Christian Studies Program of
(Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou, Fr Andrew Louth)
11.00-11.30 Metropolitan
John
Zizioulas, Member of the
Actuality
and Temporality of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis
11.30-12.00
Fr. Andrew Louth, Professor of Patrology,
The Authority of
the Fathers in “post-patristic Orthodox theology”
12.00-12.30 Discussion
12.30-14.00 Lunch
Session VIII
Moderator: Dr Vassilios
Makrides
Professor
of Sociology of Orthodox Christianity at
14.00-14.30 Dr.
Michail
Neamtu, Senior Fellow of CADI/
Ethno-theology
as a Particular Case of Contextual Theology
14.30-15.00 Dr.
Radu Preda,
Associate Professor of Social Theology, Babes-Bolai-University,
Orthodox Social
Theology as Contextual Theology
15.00-15.30
Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou, Associate Professor
of
Theology, Co-Founding Director, Orthodox Christian Studies Program of
Orthodox
Liberalism: Political Theology after the Empires
15.30-16.30 Discussion
16.30-17.00 Coffee-break
Session IX
Moderator: Dr.
Radu Preda
Associate
Professor, Babes-Bolai-University,
Director
of the INTER (
17.00-17.30 Dr.
Peter
Bouteneff, Associate Professor, St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological
Seminary, New
York, USA
Liberation Theologies:
Challenges for Contemporary Orthodoxy from Contextual Theologies
17.30-18.00 Dr.
Eleni Kasselouri, Teaching at the Hellenic Open University,
Member of the
Academic Team of Volos Academy for Theological Studies, Greece
Feminist Theology and its Contextuality: A Challenge
or an
18.00-18.30 Discussion
SUNDAY JUNE 6th 2010
Divine Service at the Christ’s Ascension Church, Volos
Departure of the buses for
Session X
Moderator: Dr. Assaad Elias
Kattan
Director
of the Centre of Religious Studies
and
Chair of Orthodox Theology,
Gospel and Cultures: Toward a Theology of
Religions
12.00-12.30 Dr.
Athanasios
N. Papathanasiou, Editor in Chief of the Theological Journal
12.30-13.00 Dr.
Pantelis
Kalaitzidis, Director of the
Toward a Post-Patristic
Theology?
13.00-14.00 Discussion
14.00 End
of the
Conference-Lunch
There are press releases in English that provide over views of each day:
A blogger I have followed for some time. Fr. Gregory Edwards, has posted pictures and his impressions here
There is also a Greek website that covered the conference in great detail, here.
06/08/2010
"Radical Homemakers"
Thank you Daniel for finding this, wonderful insight into the shape of our domestic lives today, and the shape we want them to take!
Radical Homemakers
Over the weekend, while browsing the shelves of a bookstore, I picked up a book with a promising title:Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. Its author, Shannon Hayes, argues with passion and with telling and appealing examples that families should step out of our badly-oriented, self-destructive consumerist culture, and seek to achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency within the contexts of community by eschewing the consumptive ethic and the corresponding felt need of both spouses – or, indeed, either – to “succeed” in the corporate rat-race. She recommends a shared life of living and working mainly within one’s own household: growing and making one’s own food, repairing one’s modest possessions, living frugally, and creating one’s own entertainment. While framing her argument as one drawing from “progressive” impulses aimed at “social justice,” it might easily be categorized as a companion volume to Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, essentially a traditionalist rejection of a modern utilitarian, consumptive ethos.
In an article explaining the book’s thesis, the following is excerpted:
The Origins of Homemaking: A vocation for both sexes
Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land.
Upon further investigation, I learned that the household did not become the “woman’s sphere” until the Industrial Revolution. A search for the origin of the word housewife traces it back to the thirteenth century, as the feudal period was coming to an end in Europe and the first signs of a middle class were popping up. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains that housewives were wedded to husbands, whose name came from hus, an old spelling of house, and bonded. Husbands were bonded to houses, rather than to lords. Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land. While there was a division of labor among the sexes in these early households, there was also an equal distribution of domestic work. Once the Industrial Revolution happened, however, things changed. Men left the household to work for wages, which were then used to purchase goods and services that they were no longer home to provide. Indeed, the men were the first to lose their domestic skills as successive generations forgot how to butcher the family hog, how to sew leather, how to chop firewood.As the Industrial Revolution forged on and crossed the ocean to America, men and women eventually stopped working together to provide for their household sustenance. They developed their separate spheres—man in the factory, woman in the home. The more a man worked outside the home, the more the household would have to buy in order to have needs met. Soon the factories were able to fabricate products to supplant the housewives’ duties as well. The housewife’s primary function ultimately became chauffeur and consumer. The household was no longer a unit of production. It was a unit of consumption.
That is, what we today call “freedom” or autonomy is a kind of enslavement to outside powers, the replacement of old lords (aristocrats) with new corporate lords (“meritocrats”). Our cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that we confuse being “bonded” to the home as a kind of bondage, when in fact it is the true source of our freedom. Only by being productive and relatively self-sufficient within our households and communities are we truly liberated from those outside powers that see us only as fungible asset collections to be bled. The current rage of the Tea Partiers, and even that by some increasingly on the Left who begin to understand that Obama is a pawn and enabler of those corporate powers (e.g., Frank Rich), have not been able to adequately explicate the precise form of our bondage, because the language of freedom and autonomy to which they would appeal has been so degraded for the past half-millennium. The Tea Partiers, in particular, direct much of their rage against the government, which – while a proper object in many particular respects – misses the more fundamental target, which is the perverse and destructive wedding of big government and big business in their shared effort to make us new serfs. Their rightful rage needs a better articulated object.
The only major shortcoming of the book that I have so far detected is a confusion of categories – throughout the book, Hayes claims that her argument in defense of the home is essentially “progressive.” What she calls “progressive” is, in fact, profoundly conservative, reaching back to the arguments at the heart of Catholic distributist theory at least since the 19th-century. Unfortunately, it appears that she has read neither Chesterton nor Belloc, nor has had any exposure to Christopher Lasch, all of whom are absent in her bibliography, and could have offered her a healthy corrective to this confusion. I think it’s more than a verbal mistake to call her argument “progressive,” for at the heart of her excellent case against modern organization is a rejection of nearly every aspect of what is today called “progress.” Hayes rejects growth, autonomy, expansion of human dominion, and wealth as what are purported to be the central goals of modern humanity (though, to be fair, hers is also a strong argument against much of what today passes for “conservatism,” in its “progressive” embrace of a corporate society aimed at “equal opportunity,” social mobility, and wealth expansion based on maximal extraction from and degradation of the natural world). Instead, Hayes would put the family, the household, and the community at the heart of our activities, and asks not how those forms of human association can serve the economy, but how the economy best can serve our shared lives. But for some philosophical confusion, it’s an excellent book, and one that points to a promising coalition of new feminism and traditionalism.
Recent Comments