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[disembodiedbeard-blog]

How Much a Dollar Cost

24 October, 2015

By Logan

Kendrick Lamar:

He looked at me and said, "Your potential is bittersweet"

I looked at him and said, "Every nickel is mines to keep"

He looked at me and said, "Know the truth, it'll set you free

You're lookin' at the Messiah, the son of Jehovah, the higher power

The choir that spoke the word, the Holy Spirit

The nerve of Nazareth, and I'll tell you just how much a dollar cost

The price of having a spot in Heaven, embrace your loss, I am God"

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

Patreon: Check it Out

21 October, 2015

By Logan

Check it out. We launched a Patreon page. Whassat? It's a deal where we ask people who read Disembodied Beard to support us with cash money on the reals. It's like Kickstarter or Indiegogo or whatever where people beg for money, but on an ongoing basis.

This website and all the sweet stuff we do will always be free. The Internet is free. That's like the point of an Internet, yo. But money helps, you know?

In its current iteration Disembodied Beard has only been going since February of 2015 when Matt posted his first drank. That's less than a year! Before that Mark started posting in April 2013. We've been adding stuff all the time: comics, podcasts, drinks, weird things Logan does, etc. We wanna do more. And we will! But some support will help us make that happen. "Help us grow the Beard," as we say. That's why Patreon.

Three sweet people have already pledged enough to support the podcast.1 They're giving WAY more than I expected. Like 200 to 500 more percents than I expected people to give.

We're asking for a dollar. One dollar a month for all the sweet posts we post. $12/year. Install an adblocker on your phone and feed the Beard a dollar. Won't you help us grow this Beard?

Be a Patreon of the arts.

Seriously, THANK YOU. Like, what? Amazing. ↩︎

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

Kim Davis, Freedom of Conscience, and the American Tradition of Religious Pluralism

22 September, 2015

By Logan

Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis has been in the news for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on the grounds that her religious beliefs forbid it. She has been jailed, national politicians have jumped to her defense, she has been both demonized and trumpeted as a hero. The pluralism of belief in the United States means that the place of religion in public life will always have the potential to be one of the most divisive topics in American politics.

In the documents that form the United States and in their own private lives and discourse, our Founders intended to establish a society where freedom of conscience reigned and no one would be subject to coercion in their beliefs by an official of the government. Because the U.S. is an increasingly religiously diverse nation, an authentic, ongoing, sharp-edged pluralistic discussion is a necessity if the unity of the United States is to be maintained and a just society is to be cultivated. Otherwise, our rhetoric will devolve into the vitriol we have seen surrounding Kim Davis and the gay marriage question in the last few weeks.

A Christian Nation?

Kim Davis, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson would not exactly see eye-to-eye with the Founders who made concrete their Enlightenment principles in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. While the Founders certainly carved out a place for religion in America, they never gave credence to a specific religion.

A well-known document crafted by John Adams and the U.S. Senate puts this bluntly. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. Specifically Article 11:

the government of the United States... is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.1

President George Washington, for his part, was no Christian. According to Brooke Allen, on his deathbed Washington did not speak of heaven or ask for a minister to preside over his death. Rather, "his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism."2

Other Founders went to greater lengths to impose their rationalism on the world. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia with no religious affiliation, and "even banned the teaching of theology at the school."3 It is well-known that Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, which he called "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Jefferson carefully deleted (literally cut out of the Bible with a scalpel) any miraculous passage of the Gospels that did not conform to Jefferson's understanding of reason.

These three examples don't cover the entire body of men who shaped the beginnings of the United States,4 but they represent a sample of the kinds of sentiments that operated among men of their standing and generation. For the Founders, the main concern about religion was that the new nation be free from bondage to its rule. With this concern, the Founders established a possibility for pluralism and laid the groundwork for the great flourishing of religion we see today.

The Founders understood that the power afforded the banner of religion by its adherents could be a corrupting agent in government. They knew that governmental power and religious power combined could be catastrophic to the new nation. They sought to mitigate the threat to individual freedom posed by the confluence of religion and government.

In the person of Kim Davis, we can see the outcome when government power and religious doctrine meet. In her power as a clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, Kim Davis has unilaterally limited the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of her fellow citizens based on her religious beliefs alone.

There is an overwhelming feeling in the United States that the country will tear itself apart over issues of religious diversity, including secularism. However, according to John Meacham “history suggests… that there is hope, for we have been fighting these battles from our earliest days and yet the American experiment endures.”5 The question is why, even with all of the challenges presented by a society like the United States, the Union still stands.

The Founders knew this would be a divisive issue for their new nation. Their solution was to separate the state from the power of religion and religion from the power of the state. These separations were grounded in freedom of conscience.

Freedom of Conscience

What does freedom of conscience mean? Basically what we’re talking about here is freedom from external coercion directed by the government. However, it cannot mean that individualism and total self-sovereignty reign. That is the way being tested by Kim Davis and her supporters.

If freedom of conscience is to flourish, it must be based first on respect—perhaps even love—between individuals, and it must be guarded by the government. Freedom of conscience, guaranteed by America’s framing documents, promises something deeper than freedom to act, speak, and assemble; it promises that the right to think freely will be defended by the government, as long as citizens respect each other.

The Founders did not seek to separate “faith and politics” or “religion and public life.” No. They sought to separate the institutions of religion and government. Separating the public spheres of religion and government was not about secularizing society, it was about “protecting conscience by insisting on clear institutional boundaries.”6 Personal faith could inform politics, private religion could be manifest in public life, and how an individual chose to exercise her religion was her own business. But faith itself “should not be singled out for special help or particular harm” among private citizens.7

In a nation as diverse as the United States, the government and its officers have a responsibility to the free thought of every individual under the government’s power. Importantly, the Constitution’s religion clauses exist not only to protect doctrinaire believers, but to “protect the right of religious dissenters.”8 For the Founders, the greatest sin was to impinge upon another human being’s freedom of thought and ability to choose. Here the reader may herself connect the issue of “religious dissenters'” rights being impinged upon to the actions taken by Kim Davis’.

For Americans, the way forward is paved by freedom of conscience grounded in the Constitution and in respect for one another. For Christians, the way forward is paved by love of neighbor grounded in Christ and in freedom of conscience grounded in the Constitution.

Pluralism

”Freedom of conscience is, in a sense, the reason for pluralism and also the appropriate and just response to pluralism.”9

Pluralism is forever an attempt. The point of pluralism is not to achieve perfect agreement on all matters and tastes. Pluralism is not the savior of society; it will not fix all ills or erase sin from the world. What pluralism does do is aim at achieving relationship. Only if we openly, respectfully disagree can we come to understand our disagreements and begin to find common ground. The Founders knew this and so built freedom of conscience into the Constitution through separation of church and state, providing the foundation of plurality itself.

This is all well and good, but if the discussion of who we are devolves from respectful dialogue to angry muttering, idealistic positivism (as in the Kim Davis case), or outright violence, then we should begin to worry.

A generation of pluralism is not enough. A commitment to religious literacy, respect, understanding, and the responsibility of citizens to teach their children the way of pluralism is required. For Christians, pluralism means dedication to Jesus' command, “You shall love your neighbor.” American Christians should be the champions of pluralism. It is time that we worry less about politics and more about love. Building a perfect society is an unattainable goal. We will not save ourselves from sin. But pluralism grounded in freedom of conscience and love of neighbor grounded in Christ are steps toward a society that cherishes justice for all.

Treaty of Tripoli ↩︎

Brooke Allen, Our Godless Constitution ↩︎

Ibid. ↩︎

Thomas Paine was a self-professed deist and skeptic. John Adams was a liberal Unitarian Universalist in public and a deist in private correspondence. ↩︎

John Meacham, God and the Founders ↩︎

Richard W. Garnett, Modest Expectations?: Civic Unity, Religious Pluralism, And Conscience (Warning: PDF) ↩︎

John Meacham, God and the Founders ↩︎

Richard W. Garnett, Modest Expectations?: Civic Unity, Religious Pluralism, And Conscience (Warning: PDF) ↩︎

Ibid. ↩︎

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

Similarity and Difference

Check out the rest of Logan’s series on friendship.

2 September, 2015

By Logan

I left off exploring the concept of friendship last time with Buber’s observation, “All real living in a meeting.” We investigated friendship as a concept that has no measurable object but itself, a continuous process of becoming, and as a relationship which contains freedom, joy, and affection within mutual responsibility and solidarity.

Similarity

Normally, we think of friendship as a matrix of shared experience and interests. Throw in a chance meeting and you’ve got a friendship. A quote from one of my favorite movies, High Fidelity, captures this:

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films, these things matter. Call me shallow, it’s the fuckin’ truth.”

It would be easy to cast this sentiment aside as unserious, except I think it sketches around the edge of a fundamental truth: it is impossible to encounter the fullness of another person. Books, records, films, these things can suggest who another person “really” is—and it's how we "really" meet each other.

Remember our short look at Martin Buber’s concept of ‘Thou’ in the previous post? With this language he’s suggesting another person is totally other. Buber wants to say there is a transcendent quality to a human being that is impossible to approach.1 Even to make the attempt to meet “what you are like” is folly when we do not first recognize the constraints of language and limited human understanding. Perhaps the best we can do is to approach the Thou of another person through manifestations of our similarities. Encountering and acknowledging this unbridgeable gulf is the basis of relationship based on freedom, mutual responsibility, and a process of becoming.

But this only partially meets our definition of friendship. If we’re content to define friendship through mutual interest, we miss a deeper understanding of friendship based not on similarity, but difference. It is difference which drives friendship as a site of action where need and desire are joined.2

Difference

Shelley Jackson writes of the power of difference in friendship through the metaphor of a book: “A book, like a friendship, has two sides.” Jackson says that these two sides are “you and me” or “author and reader.” The power of the relationship between the two sides comes directly out of their difference. The desire for that which is out of reach of both the reader’s understanding and the author’s ability to express holds the two sides together in a mutual process of difference and togetherness.3 The same is true of friendship. We seek to express who we really are (what we are like) through our friendships. We seek to know another person, and ourselves. Through this process we come to know a bit of God—the divine sustaining center which makes friendship possible in the first place, the first thing we all share. We fall short, but the infinite qualitative distinction4 between ourselves, the other, and God stokes our desire and compels us to continue searching.

Meeting difference in another person is what drives our desire to continue the process of friendship’s becoming. Difference is also what makes solidarity possible. It fills out our definition of friendship. Most importantly, moments of reconciliation within difference are where we experience joy.5

In an upcoming post, I will more deeply investigate mutual responsibility and solidarity as basic requirements for the fullness of friendship generating freedom and joy in those who constitute the relationship.

I and Thou ↩︎

Svetlana Boym ↩︎

Project for the Separation of Friends ↩︎

This is Kierkegaard. ↩︎

Is this true? I'm just shooting from the hip here. ↩︎

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

All Real Living is a Meeting

Check out the rest of Logan's series on friendship.

17 August, 2015

By Logan

Through conversation over the past week, I've been led to continue reflecting on the concept of encounter that I touched on in my previous post, Encountering Poverty. Specifically, I will look into the concept of friendship and how it functions practically, philosophically, and theologically as a relationship. This will be a multi-post exploration, and I thank you for humoring me.

The word friendship shares etymologies with the word "freedom" in English, "freude" (joy) in German, and "philia" (affectionate love) in Romance languages and Greek.

For the sake of illumination, let's take a longer look at "philia." Philia is defined by Aristotle as, "wanting for someone what one thinks good, for his sake and not for one's own, and being inclined, so far as one can, to do such things for him."1 Discussing the same, John M. Cooper writes, “the central idea of philia is that of doing well by someone for his own sake, out of concern for him (and not, or not merely, out of concern for oneself).”2 It is important to note, in both of these examples philia is directed toward and concerned with the other over the self.

With this etymological understanding in mind, friendship is not merely affection, but a relationship which contains freedom, joy, and affection within mutual responsibility and solidarity.

Becoming

The edges of friendship are fuzzy and imprecise. Friendship is fundamentally a relationship of becoming. Svetlana Boym writes that friendship is not an object of analysis but a process. It is a process of coming to know the self, another person, and the boundaries of a relationship. Roland Barthes calls it a “miraculous crystallization of presence." Friendship is a site of action where need an desire are joined.

The process of friendship is always imprecise and non-prescriptive. It opens into the universal and cannot be wedged into preconceived models or easily understood tactics of marketing, mission, or outreach. Rather than a relationship of increasing closeness and a fusion of individuals, friendship defies symbols of fulfillment. Instead, friendship has no measureable object but friendship itself—the continuous development of two people into a life where friendship is more and more possible. The only goal of friendship is its own continuous becoming and the becoming of its constituents as selves.

When this process ends, we say people have "fallen out" of friendship.3

Thou

Martin Buber traced the full weight of friendship in his formation of the relationship between I (one, as an individual person) and Thou (another person). For Buber, to relate to another person is to become a person, a self, an "I." And as a person becomes more and more a self, she likewise increasingly understands that another person is himself an "I." But Buber goes beyond the impoverished, individualistic understanding of "I" we commonly hold.

Buber reveals that to relate to another person is to relate to the divinity of that person—her total otherness and transcendent quality as a human being. Another person is not "you," or "they." She is "Thou."4 Only this formulation of friendship can contain the fullness of freedom, joy, and affection within the bounds of mutuality, responsibility, and solidarity.

Truly and freely encountering another as a friend rules out coercion, violence, utility, and possession.

It is with this understanding that we will continue our investigation of friendship. And throughout the series, we shall keep in mind Buber's poetic wisdom: "All real living is a meeting."5

Nicomachean Ethics, 1380b36–1381a2 ↩︎

"Friendship and the Good." The Philosophical Review ↩︎

Svetlana Boym's reflections on friendship play heavily into the previous two paragraphs. I found out today that she died on the 5th of this month after a year of living with cancer. I am thankful for her and her work: “Scenography of Friendship,” Cabinet Magazine ↩︎

The Christian theological tradition formulates this as the Image of God (or Imago Dei) in every person. ↩︎

I and Thou ↩︎

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

Encountering Poverty

Check out the rest of Logan's series on friendship.

11 August, 2015

By Logan

Working at Network Coffeehouse, the goal is to be friendly. Christians being friendly; that’s what Network is. That’s what we do.

Sounds pretty simple, but oddly this makes answering questions about what you do a little challenging. The never-ending question that follows after I’ve explained this is, “Do you have success getting people off the street?” or “What do you do to help people get off the street?” or “How many people get off the street there?”

People want to hear about goals and a narrative of meeting those goals. Numbers tell a surface-level story that is easily accessed, digested, and understood.1 Goals and mission statements are a narrative about what an organization will do. It’s a pitch. We then act within that story to conform to the pre-constructed narrative.

But Network is about encounter. Narrative—our attempt to construct meaning—only occurs after encounter has already taken place.2 John Hicks, the guy who founded Network, says, “We are friends with real-life poor people.” Friendship takes encountering another person and opening yourself up enough to be encountered by someone else.

The second part, opening your heart to another, is the really hard part. Ryan Taylor,3 the co-director of Network, has been saying for a few months that a major part of coming to Network as staff or a volunteer is encountering the beggar within you. When you serve the poor, especially at a place like Network where the distracting varnish of goals and pre-set narrative is nonexistent, you will encounter parts of yourself you otherwise try to ignore: racism, prejudice, anger, sadness, loss, loneliness. Every shift I run at Network I meet myself at my very best and my most callous, passionless worst—sometimes in the exact same interaction.

In a nutshell, I found myself saying this at a professional networking event last night. Let me tell you, people looked at me like I was a crazy person. This, too, reveals our poverty. Our unwillingness or inability to encounter a person beyond a narrow narrative constrained by success and failure is a kind of societal violence we participate in without even thinking about it. We minimize each other and ourselves when we fail to encounter each other fully.

Pay attention. It’s the only currency that matters.

Kierkegaard calls this “glittering externality.” ↩︎

Narrative often (always?) functions as a way to gain power over our experiences or the experiences and actions of others. ↩︎

Check out Ryan on Twitter, and give his blog a read. ↩︎

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

When We are All Armed, We Will Finally Have Full Security from Each Other.

23 July, 2015

By Logan

There’s been another theater shooting. This time in Louisiana. This is not crazy. There’s nothing abnormal about this situation. When we are gathered in public spaces, we should now expect to be shot. It would be crazy to think otherwise.

Black people in America have been telling us forever, basically, that they expect violence at all times. They are wary of it. They look for it. They carry themselves in a certain way to fend it off. They are not crazy. The rest of us have been crazy. But no more.

Now we can join them and experience violent force established by government, codified in law, and supported by a vocal, extremist fringe of this country at all times and in all places.

Those who support the violent status quo would have us arm ourselves. When we are all armed, we will finally have full security from each other. No longer will we need to relate to each other as anything other than a possible threat. We will all be rogue actors within the indistinguishable morass of violence we have created together.

Violence is our purpose and our aim. It is our revelation. Our telos. Our eschaton. Our apocalypse. Violence gives meaning to our lives. We should expect it at every moment.

[disembodiedbeard-blog]

Complicating Forgiveness

21 June, 2015

By Logan

On June 19, family members of those killed in a hate crime at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, publicly forgave the man who murdered their loved ones only two days earlier. This has been rightfully trumpeted by large and small media sources alike as a startling expression of faith and virtue. In the face of devastating violence and in their grief, these men and women spoke words of forgiveness to and hope for the man who changed their lives forever.

Amidst the rush to proclaim and comment on such forgiveness, however, I have some questions. Please hear me clearly: I do not question the sincerity of forgiveness offered in court on Friday. No one can know the inner thoughts and feelings of another person. But in general, there are forces that operate on our individual and societal understanding of forgiveness that are worth exploring.

I wonder about the reaction from media and the public at large on social media to this act of forgiveness. I wonder about the psycho-social forces at work when forgiveness is offered up shortly after such violence is perpetrated. I wonder about the performative nature of public forgiveness. And I wonder about my own ability to forgive in such an instance.

The Public

To forgive is a virtue. Some say it is the height of divinity, of godliness. The positive reaction to the forgiveness on display in Charleston is evidence of our culture's high opinion of forgiveness. The Associated Press uses words like "marveling" to describe President Barack Obama's reaction to the forgiveness offered. Such a word could also be used to describe the reaction on social media. I admit, I marvel at it as well. Much of the praise, however, feels automatic, reactionary, and unthinking.

In the same way South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and others have automatically called for the death penalty in the case, others automatically assume forgiveness is the only appropriate Christian response and expect it to follow—as if it were natural. I can say from my own experience as a Mainline, progressive Christian, there is a kind of hegemony of forgiveness at work. Forgiveness is the assumed, knee-jerk response to any slight. While forgiveness may be the goal after experiencing harm, it should come from a studied and refined outgrowth of the spirit, and not because it is assumed to be a matter of course.

Conformity

Because of this background, I wonder about forgiveness so quickly given after a terrible episode of violence. When community standards are in play, coercion becomes a concern. Conformity studies in social psychology have shown that even in the simplest cases, subjects are known to give answers outside their own perception of what is correct. When claims about ultimate reality and eternity are in play, one can assume that conformity is even more difficult to resist even in the absence of an agent directly attempting to coerce those around him or her. Again, I don't mean to question the validity of forgiveness as a concept, nor of the particular forgiveness offered by any individual, only to add a layer of complexity to the way we view any particular event of forgiveness offered publicly.

Forgiveness Performed

This leads me to the question of performance. Is there a performative (liturgical?) aspect to public forgiveness. Yes. We act out and reify our values through performances of all kinds. By acting out a virtue we may not feel internally, we can spread a word about our values and seek to more fully embody these virtues in our community and ourselves. From a Christian perspective this may be raised to the order of liturgy, literally the "work of the people." It is the work of the people to embody Christ-like forgiveness in ourselves and our world.

But questions remain. Does performative (liturgical) forgiveness aid in the process of actual (inward) forgiveness? Does it hinder inward forgiveness? Does it harm the people who are expected to forgive publicly who are not in a forgiving mood? I don't know how to answer these questions. I do know about my own experience, however.

What I Might Know

Having recently gone through some scary, violent stalker-type stuff at work,1 I don't know how the Charleston survivors can so quickly forgive the man who sat for an hour in their church, and then cooly proceeded to attack and kill their loved ones. Maybe I simply lack the faith, the godliness to imagine such a movement of love.

What I know: I have felt tremendous psycho-social pressure to forgive. I have made the knee-jerk movement of forgiveness. Truthfully, this forgiveness was an empty defense mechanism. Sitting with unresolved pain is harder, in my experience, than just about anything else. And I wonder about repentance. Is forgiveness without repentance cheap grace? I have a inkling that moving too quickly to forgiveness is tantamount to moving too quickly past the cross to the resurrection.

Whatever questions that remain, forgiveness should be celebrated. In the face of death motivated by hate, by death in the justice of the state, little deaths experienced in grief and fear, forgiveness is a work of love, of hope, of courage.

Prayers for our sisters and brothers in Charleston.

I have also been assaulted at work, in homelessness ministry. Don't really want to see that guy around again, I gotta say. ↩︎