When the will of the gods is used as a screen for criminal activities, one is overtaken by fear that in punishing human wrongdoings we may be violating some divine law fused into them. (39.16)

I immediately thought of this scene from Kingdom of Heaven:

“There must be war; God wills it.” If God wills it, then whatever human wrongdoing may be involved is of no concern – we are doing the will of the divine, after all, human laws and human ‘morals’ be damned.

A cry of the same tenor rings from many corners of our country these days. The cry may not be for a literal war (though, sadly, it often is). It may not be for the killing of enemies (though, again, sadly, it often is). Instead, the cries are for the rightness of one’s cause, the righteousness of one’s cause, over against that of every one else.

What Livy understood was that the fear of divine punishment is a strong motivating factor and when the divine is brought in to the conversation human wrongdoings often go unchecked because we are busy doing the will of the divine – or so we think. Far too often the will of one’s god is a screen for human wrongdoing, for discrimination, for hate crimes, for blowing up abortion clinics, for disregarding the lives of innocent civilians who happen to be Muslims living in another part of the world, for thinking only of ourselves while countless others suffer.

As Leigh Teabing tells Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code, “As long as there has been one true God, there has been killing in his name.”

Livy, through the speech of the consul, has touched on a particularly stinging critique of religion in all its forms. Too many, I am afraid, are too worried about “violating some divine law,” as Livy put it, to care about their fellow human beings. It is this attitude, this understanding of God that allows one to call his God just when he orders and sanctions genocide (see the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua). It is this way of thinking about God that causes one to not associate with certain people for fear of what others will think, what God will think. This is the same fear that Jesus pushes against when he time and again heals on the Sabbath – he is more concerned with helping others, with human welldoing than he is afraid that he may go against God’s laws regarding the Sabbath.

Then, with no amount of irony, the consul giving the speech in Livy’s History of Rome just a paragraph later is able to say with full confidence,

All that we shall do will have the sanction and endorsement of the gods.

Like most of us, the consul is able to recognize the worst in others and to critique their understanding of the divine while entertaining not a shred of doubt in his own.

It is no secret that the SBC has long believed that homosexuality is in violation of God’s intentions for human sexuality and that it is a deplorable sin and affront to God. And as many expected, the SBC messengers voted to express their disapproval of the BSA’s decision, their approval of its member churches that feel the need to “prayerfully . . .  assess their continued relationship with the BSA,” and their “support for those churches and families that as a matter of conscience can no longer be part of the Scouting family.”

The recent decision of the BSA has, overnight apparently, turned Scouting into a new mission field, as if it weren’t already an overtly Christian institution.

we encourage churches and families that remain in the Boy Scouts to seek to impact as many boys as possible with the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ, to work toward the reversal of this new membership policy, and to advocate against any future change in leadership and membership policy that normalizes sexual conduct opposed to the biblical standard

None of this surprises me, though it does still bother me in many ways and for many reasons. The kicker for me, though, was the final declaration of the resolution.

we declare our love in Christ for all young people regardless of their perceived sexual orientation, praying that God will bring all youth into a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sure they think you’re going to hell if you believe you were born gay and that it’s just who you are. Sure they think your very existence is an affront to God and a grave example of the power of sin in this world. Sure they will tell you that you can never act on the “urges” you have, but have to remain celibate because the person you happen to love has the same genitalia as you. Sure they think their ‘sexual orientation’ is true and real and pure while yours is merely ‘perceived’ and is the result of a choice you made.

But it’s really all okay, because they ‘love’ you.

It seems to me that they sure do have a funny way of showing it.

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NB: Having spent the majority of my life thus far in baptist (and mostly Southern Baptist) churches, I recognize that the SBC does not speak for all members of Southern Baptist churches, nor does it speak for all who identify as baptist or as Christian. This is, though, the governing body, and they do hope (intend) that all member churches follow their stances on issues like this. Churches don’t have to adopt every position approved at the annual meetings, but hot-button topics like this (and women as pastors) often lead to churches being kicked out of the SBC, usually at the local (association) level.

The religious basis for opposition to homosexuality is seen clearly in the reasons people give for saying it should be discouraged by society. By far the most frequently cited factors –mentioned by roughly half (52%) of those who say homosexuality should be discouraged – are moral objections to homosexuality, that it conflicts with religious beliefs, or that it goes against the Bible. No more than about one-in-ten cite any other reasons as to why homosexuality should be discouraged by society.

With the seemingly unprecedented major shift in public opinion on the topic, it is time that we take an informed and detailed look at the evidence. The majority of those who oppose homosexuality and gay marriage cite religious reasons and most of the other reasons cited, even by the small minorities that cite them can likely also be traced back to religious teachings. That our country’s law on this matter is only supported by religious opposition should be more than enough to tell us that these laws are no longer viable, if we truly wish to be a land of authentic religious freedom.

I just continue to be struck by such a strong relationship between one’s religious beliefs and their support or opposition to gay marriage.

Similarly, those who say religion is very important in their lives are only half as likely to support gay marriage as those who place less importance on religion (36% favor vs. 72% favor).

There are loads of us for whom religion is very important who also support gay marriage and we have made great strides in not allowing white Evangelical Protestants speak for all of ‘religion’ or all of ‘Christianity’ in this country, but this study makes clear that we still have work to do. For even the language of the study shows the degree to which religious opponents to equality have been winning the conversation: the question was asked, for instance, whether it is a ‘sin’ to engage in homosexual behavior. The fact that those who attend services weekly or more are more than twice as likely to say ‘yes’ to this (67% to 24%) says a lot about the teachings in our religious institutions and our understanding of ‘sin’ from a theological, sociological, and anthropological view.

For me and for many of you that I know, the story is the opposite of the one that this study seems to tell; that is, it is precisely because of our religious convictions that we support equality and gay marriage. So keep supporting organizations like the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Americans United and soon we can make equality a reality for all, while in the process helping to change the conversation about the “religion’s” view on gay marriage.

The paper is a version of some of my research on the connection between disease and sexual slander in early Christianity. The title is “Ancient Antidotes: Pollution, Sexual Slander, and The Body in Epiphanius’ Panarion.” The abstract is below.

The practice of slandering the sexual behavior of one’s opponent was far from uncommon in the ancient world. Charges of this sort were widespread and were designed to defame an opponent. This rhetorical device was employed in political discourse when ancient authors were engaged in identity and power struggles. Where Epiphanius’ work differs from that of other ancient heresiologists, though, is how he employs this rhetorical device in the service of his larger heresiological project; namely, as part of his conception of the social body’s vulnerability to pollution, which in this case takes the form of heretical teachings.

Epiphanius described the heresies he was combatting as poisons and toxic substances which could invade the social body. He then offered his work, a veritable “Medicine Chest,” as the cure. This rhetoric becomes particularly explicit when he describes those groups which he believes engage in illicit sexual activity. Thus, his heresiology creatively uses a rhetoric of disease to connect pollution, illicit sexual behavior, and the social body.

This paper will examine Epiphanius’ conception of the relationship between disease and the social body and will then analyze the charges of sexual misbehavior in two sections of the Panarion, “Against Simonians” and “Against Gnostics.” For Epiphanius’ use of sexual slander against his (real or perceived) opponents serves as an especially informative exempli gratia for determining the connection that he discerned between his conception of the Church as a unified, social body that is susceptible to pollution and his understanding of the various heresies as diseases. Thus Epiphanius is participating in a larger discourse, wherein he is fully engaged in promoting a particular understanding of heresy and disease along with advocating for the production and maintenance of a certain Christian identity.

One line of messaging has stood out to me recently in the arguments over whether same-sex marriage should be legal in this country or not, but it wasn’t until I read Tom Junod’s wonderfully vulnerable and eloquent piece that I realized just why it was rubbing me the wrong way. The line of argument says that same-sex marriage is “unnatural” because 2 men or 2 women are incapable of physically producing offspring. I pushed back against this argument with the usual points: what about opposite-sex couples where one member is infertile? What about elderly people who are no longer able to have children but desire the companionship that the rest of us desire? Should these people also not be allowed to marry because they cannot procreate?

What Tom Junod laid out so clearly, though, is that the anti-same-sex marriage arguments of this stripe are not just arguments against elderly people and infertile adults, but this is also an argument against adoption, something the right has espoused support for as an alternative to abortion.

How the War on Gay Marriage Turned into a War on Adoption | Esquire: What has changed our understanding of the way some people see our marriage is, of course, the general debate unleashed by the last two days of argument before the Supreme Court on the subject of same-sex marriage. No, my wife and I are not of the same sex; I am a man and she is a woman. But we are infertile. We did not procreate. For the past nine years, we have been the adoptive parents of our daughter; we are legally her mother and father, but not biologically, and since Tuesday have been surprised and saddened to be reminded that for a sizable minority of the American public our lack of biological capacity makes all the difference — and dooms our marriage and our family to second-class status.

And there it was. The very nature of the arguments against same-sex marriage because same-sex couples are unable to produce children is just as strongly an argument against my own family, with a mother who was infertile and chose to adopt both me and my (biological) sister. Our family’s very existence is, apparently, a threat to the good, straight, biological family units in this country, and thereby a threat to the very foundation of this country.

Junod rightly points out the elementary nature of these sorts of arguments:

For all its philosophical window dressing — for all its invocation of natural law, teleological destiny, and the “complementary” nature of man and woman — this argument ultimately rested on a schoolyard-level obsession with private parts, and with what did, or did not, “fit.” There was “natural marriage” and “unnatural” marriage, and it was easy to tell the difference between them by how many children they produced. A natural marriage not only produced children; it existed for the purpose of producing children. An unnatural marriage not only failed to produce children; it resorted to procuring children through unnatural means, from artificial insemination to surrogacy to, yes, adoption. The argument against same-sex marriage now boiled down to a kind of biological determinism, and so became almost indistinguishable from an argument against adoption itself.

The idea that the purpose of marriage in this country is procreation serves to label all marriages that chose not to or were unable to produce children as “less than.” They are not real marriages. And as a result, those families are “less than.” They too are not real families. To many – some much closer to home than one should have to admit – my sister and I are not our parents’ “real children.” And we are a threat to families everywhere. Never mind the fact that we have a better relationship with our parents than most everyone else I know. We have a relationship based on openness, honesty, communication, and above all love.

No one – gay, straight, or whatever – should have to share those negative experiences with my family. And as much as anything else, this is why I support marriage equality.

There is so much more that needs to be said like how cruel it is to actively keep children in a broken social services system and away from a loving family that desperately wants to love and raise children of their own. Or how, once again, the Right has offered nothing but lip service when it says it cares about children when it is really only concerned with its own “moral disapproval” of the love of others. Or how the only “threats” to anyone’s marriage – gay or straight – come from within and not from without. Or how our country’s very understanding of “family” needs to take step out of 1950. Or how ludicrous it is to expect that others who do not share your particular religious views to live their lives according to your specific interpretation of a few verses from your holy book.

But for now, urging you to read Junod’s article is all I really have. For just as Junod did, I have realized that these arguments are not just arguments against same-sex marriage, but are arguments against me and my family too. Thank you, Tom, for the reminder that we are all in this together.

While I was an associate pastor, I was asked to give the invocation at the National Football League Players Gala in Washington, DC. During the gala, which was also a fundraiser for the Special Olympics, I was introduced to a variety of National Football League players, politicians, philanthropists, dignitaries, and celebrities. One of the players was gracious enough to allow me to take a picture with him. After I introduced myself as an associate pastor in a local congregation, the professional football player asked, “What does an associate pastor do anyway?”

What follows are multiple answers to that question and guidance for helping churches determine just what they want/need out of an associate pastor. Rudnick includes numerous case studies and discussion questions for churches and for associate pastors that deal with issues ranging from the role of an associate pastor in worship leadership to conflict management. But the appendix is what I think will prove most useful to associate pastors and churches alike. The five appendices are 1) how to plan for an associate pastor, which offers a timeline of what should be done beginning two years before hire down to one month before hire; 2) sample job descriptions, which includes both a full-time and part-time job description; 3) a case study on transitioning from volunteers to paid staff; 4) a short questionnaire helping an associate determine when to stay and when to leave; and 5) a compensation guideline.

As most things are in the book, the appendices are suggestions and rough guidelines, but I can speak from experience that churches often do not know what they really want or what they should be paying someone in a particular position. Likewise, job seekers rarely know how much they should expect to receive and are often left to essentially write their own job descriptions.

I definitely think that Rudnick’s book is a welcome resource for churches and associates in all kinds of denominations and am particularly glad to see such a useful, straightforward book that can serve as a guide and resource.

I am posting about Alan’s book as part of his “blog tour” highlighting the release of the book and I do genuinely think it is a good resource. Also, you can get in touch with Alan by going to his website or by following him on Twitter, like I do: @alanrud.

I am simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this Earth.

I quite like this sentiment.

Reminds me of Logion 42 in the Gospel of Thomas: Be passersby.

GOP Seen as Principled, But Out of Touch and Too Extreme | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: At a time when the Republican Party’s image is at a historic low, 62% of the public says the GOP is out of touch with the American people, 56% think it is not open to change and 52% say the party is too extreme.

Those are some pretty damning numbers. Here’s a fuller breakdown:

This may mean good news in the short term for the Democratic Party, but I think this is ultimately a bad thing for our country. In a two-party system, we need two legitimate options to work as a sort of balance. This is becoming less likely as both parties are becoming further and further apart from one another. The Tea Party and the Republican Party have succeeded in shifting the entire conversation to the right so that what is “liberal” now would have been a quite moderate (and in some cases conservative) position 20 years ago. This is not the direction I personally want the country to go and I think the woeful image of the Republican Party may help this in the short term. Nevertheless, I still think that a thriving two-party democracy actually needs two parties.

It should go without saying that the Republican Party has brought much of this on themselves over the past 4 years by being “the party of No,” refusing ideas that were originally theirs simply because they are being suggested by President Obama, and allowing vocal members of their party to express nostalgia for 19th century views on non-white, non-male citizens. Yet many fail to see this correlation.

Leonardo’s Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory | The Atlantic: The British Library has been digitizing some of its prize pieces and they announced a new round of six artifacts had been completed including Beowulf, a gold-ink penned Gospel, and one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.

I continue to be fascinated by how far technology has brought us with regard to manuscript access. The fact that I can access thousands of ancient manuscripts that are housed in hundreds of museums and libraries around the world while sitting in my apartment in Tallahassee, FL is amazing. The digitization of manuscripts has the ability to revolutionize many fields and areas of research, making intense manuscript study possible for more and more people.

There was, however, another note by the author of this story in The Atlantic that resonated with me:

But there is a fundamental inscrutability to these texts to the untrained eye. Not only is the language unfamiliar, and the script, in Leonardo’s case, a simple code, but without the context of the times, it’s hard to make heads or tails of them, aside from aesthetic appreciation.

Of course, I’m happy such objects exist in more accessible, digital formats, but what the primary documents remind me is how important the interpreters of these works are. The raw documents do not make sense without the added layer of analysis that comes from the scholars who study these works.

Perhaps we can read this as a kind of parable for opening up data and archives. The digitization of key historical artifacts does not replace historians so much as make their work more visible to different audiences. The necessity of what they do is made plain.

Every little bit of validation that I can get for the work I do is nice and it seems that the digitization of manuscripts has done just what this author suggested – made others aware of just how necessary historians and specialists are. For any member of the “generally educated public” can access Leonardo’s notebooks or any of the thousands of New Testament manuscripts, but most of them will only ever be able to appreciate the documents on aesthetic grounds. I’m grateful to the historians, scholars, and specialists that have opened up so much history to me and hope that one day I can help history come alive for others as well.

Thanks to Sam for the link.

What if we approached the study of world events not with the preconceived notion that religion was essentially pure and spiritual matter of disembodied belief but, instead, with the presumption that all classification systems (such as Church vs. State, belief vs. practice and embodied vs. disembodied) are the means whereby all too historical groups negotiate – sometimes violently, always aggressively – sets of interests that determine who they think they are and who they think they are not? A shift capable of answering this question would enable us to see that, regardless by whom they are used, rhetorics of origin, privacy, authenticity, spirit, tradition, essence, faith, along with the common distinction between belief and action (seen in the common-sense distinction between myth and ritual) or content and structure, are useful (and useful to whom is the question that needs to be posed) political techniques that can help to massage and manage an unruly social world that generally does not meet with any group’s expectations, interests, and needs.

The quote is from Russ’ book Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation. It is a short read (95 pages), but it packs a punch.