Go study, go study, go study….
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I gotta study and I don’t wanna! Please don’t make me read any more about Medieval English Christianity! Please cancel the paper on Julian of Norwich! Please don’t make us right a book review, picking 12 topics to write on from Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England! Actually, the discussion on Trinity (what the heck?) during Systematics was quite good. I tend to dominate. I need to quit doing that, but I process out loud, and repeating all that Patristics stuff helps me remember it.
Of course, then there is Liturgics. Do an analysis of “Space” at St. Thomas, 5th Ave., and St. Peters Lutheran, somewhere in Mid-town, and write a long paper on it. What does the “space” say about the church’s theology of community, nation, individual, movement, eucharist, involvement, yadda, yadda, yadda. Ugghhhhh……. Actually, it is interesting. I’m just complaining, which I know I need to stop doing because I am bugging people. What, then, Pastoral Theology and Homiletics.
I’m also not studying!
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Listening to a piece on the Texas Legislature’s redistricting problems on NPR, I heard it said that the legislature used to be known for its bipartisanism – even going so far as to declare itself the best functioning legislature in the world. It is Texas, after all. Anyway, the thought struck me as they were describing all the rancor between Democrats and Republicans, and now that the runaway democratic legislators have returned to the state, between the Republicans themselves, that the breakdown in the ability of our legislators, whether state or national, to govern is analogous to American Christianity’s inability to work through the theological and cultural wars going on now. Which came first, rancorous and intransient legislators refusing to work together to solve state and national problems, or the rancorous and intransient religious leaders refusing to work together to present to the world a faith that doesn稚 go about destroying itself? Who influenced whom? Has the Religious Right, in demanding that the world recognize their particular brand of theological understanding and praxis as they only legitimate expression of Christianity, so influenced politics that politicians now define their party’s political theory and praxis as the only expression of good ol’ American patriotism, or the other way around. Or something like that.
I do not know enough about the history of it all, but do understand that religious and political wars have been with us from the beginning. It seems to me that as the fundamentalist liberal Christians infused liberal politics in the ’70’s and as the fundamentalist conservative Christians infused conservative politics in the ’80’s, politics has come out on the lesser side of success.
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