Daily Archives: September 11, 2004

What is really going on…

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This appeared in a post from the House of Bishops/Deputies listserv:

ITæ‹… THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SURVIVAL
By Giles Fraser
Thereç—´ a biblical reason for obsession with sex
AFTER HIS engagement at Greenbelt, the US biblical theologian Ched Myers has spent a week with us in Putney. During his talks, the penny dropped for me.
After all this time thinking about homosexuality, I finally get why the Bible is apparently anti-gay.
The real obsession of the Hebrew scriptures isn稚 about what people do in bed; thatç—´ a more modern fixation. What the scriptures are really concerned with is children. Just as Yasser Arafat once said that his secret weapon was “the Palestinian womb” (i.e. that the Palestinians are going to triumph through demographics), so, too, the people of ancient Israel were obsessed with their own survival. It makes sense.
Itç—´ how it all begins in Genesis. Noah being told by God to “be fruitful and multiply”, and Abram complaining that “I continue childless”, only to be blessed with descendants as numerous as the stars. Itç—´ why the Bible remains obsessed with barren wombs, eunuchs, and so on. What is going on here is the psychology and politics of survival, with the unproductive misrepresented best as useless and at worst as traitors.

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Kicking and screaming

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This from Duke Magazine from 2002. The article presents questions asked by an audience to Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School.

[Another member of the audience asks:] What’s the point of defending a society that’s built on spending? We’ve been terrorized by Madison Avenue for how long, through the television and such?
Be careful with that kind of language. You’ve been manipulated by Madison Avenue–I’m not sure you’ve been terrorized. And it’s very important to get the description right. As a response to September 11, for academics to roll out all the things that they’ve thought have been wrong with America and American foreign policy is–the word I’m close to is “duplicitous.” It is morally inappropriate. Nothing that America has done in the world justifies, excuses, or explains September 11.
It is therefore all the more important for us–and this is the use of the word “us”–to try to understand why it is that many people in the world find it satisfying that this has happened to America. On September 11, America was dragged kicking and screaming into the world. We think of ourselves as global, but our globalization has remained safe within the boundaries of our ocean, and now the reality of the world has been brought home. We’re mad as hell because we didn’t really want to deal with this kind of world on an everyday basis. It’s a very important moment for national self-examination, and I would like to be as helpful to that as I can as a Christian. If you are a pacifist, you don’t want to withdraw–you want to be as helpful to your neighbor as you can.