Female friends and depression
"Girls, grab a girlfriend and hold on to her for life," author Vicki Iovine advises.That's because a new study says most women turn to friends when they feel depressed, sad, anxious, or stressed.
There's been little written recently about friendship from a theological perspective--but friends are often replacing family as primary relationships in our culture. What are the pastoral implications of this shift? And how do we make sense of it?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, June 24, 2004
Salvation spam
It was bound to happen, wasn't it--someone touting salvation via spam?My first experience with it arrived tonight in a message I've [artfully?] rearranged as found poetry, complete with spelling and grammar errors:
Eternity is a really
long time.If you or someone close
to you has not
accepted GOd please
do so tody. The following
prayer can save
you or someone that you love.
Those three sentences say much about the normative culture's attitude toward God, salvation, and faith.
I laughed out loud to think a prayer [or anything else I could say or do] could complete/restore/make me whole. Only the Holy One, the great I AM, can do that, and s/he doesn't need my prayer to make it happen.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, June 22, 2004
If you're happy and you know it . . .
A little evil lurks in happiness, Jim Holt writes in yesterday's New York Times Magazine..: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, June 21, 2004
Sit, stay, heal?
Another provocative SPT tidbit [see the first below], this time from Andover Newton's Sharon Thornton, author of Broken But Beloved: A Pastoral Theology of the Cross.Pastoral theology has long understood guiding, healing, sustaining, and reconciling as the classic functions of pastoral care, specific activities through which caregivers engage the concrete situations encountered as a part of the living human web.
Through her research on suffering, however, Thornton began to revision these classic modes of care, viewing:
sustaining as solidarity
reconciling as the work of justice
guiding as empowerment
But what about healing, you ask?
"I began to conceive of healing as not a function of pastoral care at all," Thornton said in a workshop yesterday. "Healing is a gift that comes out of the other three functions."
That certainly fits my experience and my theology--and I imagine that for students of pastoral care, it could relieve some of the anxiety they experience in an introductory class when they begin to sense the awesome responsibility of serving as an agent of "healing."
How freeing to be in solidarity with those for whom we care, working for justice in relationships, empowering others to do the same--and leaving the gift of healing to a gracious God.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, June 18, 2004
African influence on ancient Judaism
Imbibing the nectar at the Society for Pastoral Theology in Atlanta this week, where the theme of the annual conference is "Conjuring Liberation: African American Resistance to Racism and Oppression."A provocative thought from the Rev. Dr. Mark Lomax of Georgia's First African Presbyterian Church (unleashed during yesterday's opening plenary panel):
God's chosen people Israel were enslaved in Egypt--upper Africa--for 400 years, and it's impossible to imagine that their encounter with African culture, African philosophy, and African life-ways did not shape their faith.
The implication, of course, is that to incorporate an Afrocentric worldview into contemporary theology is to "hear into speech" a long subjugated voice that nonetheless shapes the root tradition of the Christian faith.
As Psalm 68 says: "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God . . . ."
How did the African enculturation of Prime Minister Joseph shape Jewish thought and practice?
What ancient African spiritualities reverberate in today's synagogues and churches, a part of that cloud of witnesses that worshippers are hardly aware of?
What I'd really like is to listen in as Lomax and a rabbi chew on these ideas over Red Stripe beer with Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" playing in the background . . . .
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, June 18, 2004
The brain and near-death experiences
The brains of people who have a brush with death change significantly--especially in regard to the area that governs creativity.A new study identifies increased activity in the "God module" in the temporal lobe--that part of the brain that connects with the transcendent.
Interestingly, the increased activity occurs in the center of visual and spatial creativity rather than in both hemispheres of the brain.
The study lead one researcher to suggest that "our concepts of the role of the brain in mental life, and particularly in what appear to be transformative spiritual experiences, is far too limited."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, June 10, 2004
Creeds: subversive statements, acts of defiance
In a world that wants to reject creeds ("I'm spiritual, but not religious"), Luke Timothy Johnson sees Christian statements of belief as "subversive documents" rather than doctrinal straight-jackets.Martin Marty agrees, arguing further that contemporary anti-creedalism has become a creed in and of itself:
Tell me you are 'spiritual but not religious;' that you are reading gospels that say you are God, or God is in you, or you are in God; and that 'vibrations,' 'connections,' and 'energies' in the universe should be the focus of your ultimate concern; and I can an outline 'your' creed as clearly as you can grasp the Nicene Creed.As a proud proponent of creeds, I've come to think of reciting a statement of belief each Sunday as an act of defiance.
Our implicit cultural creed goes something like this:
We believe in the power of consumption; that purchasing power creates good living; that the purpose of humanity is to consume; that our individual wants should be met by the marketplace; and that the greatest number of product choices equals the highest good.Want an example? I recently heard someone complain about living in Turkey in the 1980's: "You could buy fresh tomatoes for 3 cents a pound, but you couldn't get tomato paste or tomato sauce anywhere. There were absolutely no value-added tomato products. What sort of choices do you have in a place like that?"
What sort of choices do you need in "value-added" tomato products when you can joing friends and family in making your own sauce or paste?
No doubt that the man who made the remark considers himself Christian. But he was looking at Turkey through consumerist eyes, not the eyes of the gospel.
So when a congregation stands in worship to say the Apostle's Creed, the Nicene Creed, or A Brief Statement of Faith (you can find all of these and more here), or when members of a synagogue recite the shema, it's a collective act of defiance against the creed of the culture.
Now: How do we get people to grasp the subversive and defiant nature of our creeds, rather than mumbling them mindlessly as over-familiar formulas of faith?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Power and the news
With 110,000 people still waiting for electrical service after tornadoes and high winds early in the week, it's been great fun to creatively misread local news reports.For example, on the morning after the first wave of storms, the front page headline on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram screamed, "Thousands powerless."
They're kidding, right? "Thousands powerless"? Isn't that the story of humanity?
Could someone really write that headline without a sense of the irony involved?
I don't want to discount the suffering and potential danger of the lack of power. But what if we gave equal media space to true issues of powerlessness in our culture?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Saturday, June 05, 2004