Entangled States

Peak Oil is back in the news. Ugh.

Well. This isn't good news at all. I'd been hoping that my inherent pessimistic attitude had wrongly convinced me that the world's oil supply was going to be getting significantly tighter. According to a report today, that's not the case.

The reason that the topic of Peak Oil hasn't been in the news of late isn't just the fact that the price of oil had dropped, or that gasoline wasn't as expensive as it was a couple of years ago. It's apparently because of a number of folks who decided that discretion was the better part of valor right now, because telling the truth would likely annoy the Americans.

And who knows what the Americans might do in response.

To whit, The Guardian, reporting on the decision of a group within the IEA to keep the news quiet:

"In particular [the secret keepers] question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.

[...]'Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,' he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was 'imperative not to anger the Americans' but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. 'We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad,' he added."

Read the full article here.

I'm not terribly surprised by this news, but I'd hoped that the economic downturn was going to lesson the conflicts I expect to be caused as we run out of this important resource. If it's true, we're going to have to reinvent most of our economy.

And it's going to change church life significantly…

(Hat tip to Slashdot)

Sermon for Proper 27B, 2009

The collect for this Sunday invites us to hold tight to our hope that we will be transformed into the full stature of Christ. I've been thinking about how important hope is all week as a result.

This sermon is about Hope. Specifically about the hope that the widow in the Temple courtyard must have had in God when she put gave the Temple treasury everything she had.

She reminds me of another widow that I once knew.


MP3 File

Angels appear at the Cathedral

Last Friday, while a group of friends and Cathedral members were gathered inside Olney Hall attending the regular monthly opening of a art show, some people came in from courtyard talking excitedly about an angel image on the wall of the Nave. I didn't go out right away but a few people did follow. There was really something there.

The image you see at the right is what they were talking about. Sorry it's so fuzzy but it's the only picture we have. It's from someone who was present that evening. She took a picture with her cell phone and emailed it to us over the weekend.

We're not sure exactly what is causing the image. It's probably the reflection of some city lights off of some windows in the auditorium on the opposite side of the labyrinth from the nave. But we're not completely sure, and I'm not convinced we want to be. I sort of like have a just a little mystery about the mechanism.

And according to a few people I've talked to, the image regularly appears in the evening or least has been for a while now, so it's not something terribly new. But it's new to a bunch of us. I was out on the labyrinth a month ago and I didn't notice anything like it at that time. So apparently it doesn't appear every evening.

Which is sort of nice. Now I just need to see about getting a better image.

Elevator version of the Gospel

When people are seeking funding for a new idea from venture capitalists, they're told that if they can't put their message into a short version suitable for an elevator interaction with another person, they won't find funding.

Seems to me that we Christians ought to be thinking along the same sorts of lines. If someone came up to you today and asked you to tell you the Gospel in a short statement, what would you respond? Would you need to add so much jargon that while what you said is correct, it's going to take a year to unpack?

Here's what I'm thinking mine might be:

"God definitively entered the world in the person of Jesus, was murdered with our complicity by the religious and secular authorities and died. God burst forth from death and is now radically transforming us and the whole world into something brand new, just and loving."

It comes from a discussion on the previous post.

What's yours? Care to share?

More on Apocalyptic Gospel

I posted some thoughts inspired by Fleming Rutledge's article calling for the recognition of a school of theological thought that she named "Apocalyptic". The key characteristic of which, in my thinking, is that the event of the Triduum, both historic and ongoing, is the fundamental revelation of God to the world.

Ben Myers, using Rutlege's term but in a slightly different way, gave a paper recently on Louis Martyn's commentary on Paul's Letter to the Galatians. In Myer's paper he describes Martyn's view of the Gospel (the Triddum in my place-holder term):

"The gospel is betrayed if one speaks about it ‘solely in terms of the once-upon-a-time’. Instead, Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’."

Read the full article here.

I'm very drawn to this idea of a dual historical and ahistorical quality (ala Bultman) to the nature of God's saving action in Jesus. It's a fundamental part of what we do in Church whenever we celebrate the Holy Eucharist. We reconnect (re-present ala Dix I guess) to the fundamental action of Jesus in Jerusalem.

I should probably say that I'm searching for a better term to describe what I mean when I use the term Triduum. I choose that term because it broadens the idea of the Cross (which Paul tends to use) to the full events of Cross, Death and Resurrection. It's important to me to include all three, especially the middle one. I guess that's because I'm so influenced by Von Balthasar's thinking on the meaning of Jesus' death. And I think we can't put either the cross or the death into proper perspective if we don't include the bursting forth of the resurrection.

Any suggestions on a better term than Triduum?

Religion and Science were seen as allies not too long ago

I remember when I was a graduate student in Physics. Somebody gave me a copy of the old Time-Life series on Science, and one day while I was babysitting an experiment, I started to read the volume on Physics. It was pretty standard stuff with lots of pictures of accelerators, lots of pictures of impressive looking equations and bearded, bespectacled men looking knowledgeable. After looking at all the pictures and quickly scanning the text, I remember being intrigued by the section on the History of Physics and had my attention drawn to the statement: "Physics was always regarded as the Queen of the Academy".

"Well, that's nice" I thought. "So if Physics is the Queen, who's the King?"

My mind works that way.

A little digging around in the card catalog at the library (these were the days before Teh Googles knew all) and I found the answer. The King of Science, the King of the Academy was... theology!

Apparently, in the days of a classic education, having studied rhetoric, music, geometry, physics, etc, you were finally thought to be ready to study Theology.

Just that bit of knowledge that once upon a time, at least as recently as the 18th century, Science and Religion were still seen as allies, as different tools for describing the world around us, changed the way I started thinking about my own scientific and theological ideas. Granted, by the 18th century the bonds of affection were starting to fray, but things were nothing like were they are today. Today we have some scientists dismissing any religious thought as mere superstition and mocking the faith by talking about the "Flying Spaghetti Monster", and we have religious leaders seeing conspiracy and deliberate falsehoods being spread by scientists as they argue for a Universe that's 10's of billions years old and human beings slowly destroying the environment.

But it turns out that even a hundred years ago, just as we were reaching the pinnacle of rational modernity, some folks were still seeing Science and Religion as allies.

Mark Pinsky, writing in USA Today about the controversy and suspicion that Francis Collins, the new head of the NIH is being viewed with by some in the biology community, reports:

"Collins' supporters can look to an unlikely, artistic source for inspiration: American stained-glass master Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 1889-90, Tiffany executed a large window for Yale University's library addition that had as its central motif the interdependence of science and religion. It was commissioned by Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, a rough-hewn, self-made Brooklyn businessman who spent some of his teenage years in New Haven, and went on to become a minor railroad magnate and U.S. congressman.

Titled Education, the window is spread over five panels but clustered around four elements: science, religion, art and music. Both ethereal and allegorical, the human figures are religious, winged and haloed, although they could as easily be muses as angels. What is most significant is that science and religion occupy the center of the work, facing each other and flanking a standing, female angel holding the 'Book of Life.' This panel appears as a thumbnail image on the BioLogos website. 'Religion and science are not only central to the image, but also in dialogue with one another,' says the Rev. Guy Pujol, adjunct professor of pastoral liturgy at Atlanta's Interdenominational Theological Center.

In Tiffany's mind — and/or Chittenden's — science and religion were inextricably linked, in what Yale curators call a 'visual sermon.' At the time the window was installed, the tableau reflected academic attitudes on campus. For obvious reasons, the Chittenden window resonates among supporters of Collins' views. 'This personal integration of science and religion — and a belief that this well-balanced perspective may appease both sides of the stem-cell research debate — was a decisive factor for President Obama in appointing Collins,' says Pujol.

Unfortunately, the relationship idealized in the Chittenden window was called into question within decades of its dedication. Darwinian evolution first became a flashpoint with fundamentalists in the rural South and Midwest heartland in the 1920s, immortalized in the play and film Inherit the Wind."

Read the full article here.

I wonder sometimes if the conflict between Science and Religion is really about the conflict of the systems. As Pinsky points out, the situation devolved soon after the culture clash in the southern US during the 1930s. That clash wasn't really about science or religion. It seems to me to be more about economics, debates over what defines "common good", and rural vs industrial based society. I think the situation is similar today though the drivers behind the conflict now are probably different than they were then.

Either way, I wonder if lots of us aren't inadvertently being played as useful idiots. There's a lot of that going around these days don't you think?

Intersexing the papaya plants

You know, just when you were thinking you were starting to get the swing of things, the Universe throws another curveball.

Apparently there are three naturally occurring genders of papaya trees: male, female and hermaphrodite. While that's not abnormal, per se, since human gender shows the same diversity, what I didn't know was that most of the papaya fruit that we consume comes from the more highly prized hermaphrodite papaya trees. It seems the fruit from the "intersexed" trees is much sweeter than the male or female trees fruit.

So agricultural biologists are going to do a little tweaking to make the sweeter variety which is already relatively common, much more common.

"'We're going to change the sex of the papaya to help the farmers,' said University of Illinois plant biology professor Ray Ming, who will lead the effort with researchers from the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, Texas A&M University and Miami University. A USDA scientist will also collaborate on the initiative.

'This is a perfect case to demonstrate how basic science can help the farmers directly,' Ming said. 'In our case we can apply it immediately as a byproduct of the research program.'
Papayas already come in three sexual varieties: male, female and hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite produces the flavorful fruit that is sold commercially. From the grower's perspective, however, hermaphrodite plants come with a severe handicap: their seeds produce some female plants (which are useless commercially) and some hermaphrodites.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that it is impossible to tell the sex of a seed until it has grown up and flowered. This means that papaya farmers must plant five or more seeds together to maximize the likelihood of obtaining at least one hermaphrodite plant. Once they identify a desired plant, they cut the others down."

The plan is to carefully examine the Y chromosome in the plant, identify the gene which controls the gender switch from female to hermaphrodite plants and through standard manipulation techniques make a hermaphrodite plant that only produces hermaphrodite offspring.

Read the full article here.

What an interesting action the free market and economic pressure is driving. Or I guess we could call this evolution in action - given that the cultivated papaya tree is in a sort of symbiotic relationship with human beings.

Why can't we unstir our coffee?

Newtonian Physics (and pretty much all of Classical Physics) represents an elegant, minimalist set of ideas that allow us to very accurately predict the movement of pretty much everything you and I are likely to encounter on the human scale. The model is so successful that the English poet Alexander Pope wrote

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

But the equations, as wonderful as they are, have one odd feature that remains to be understood. According the theory, there is no preferred direction to the flow of time. I can do a mechanical experiment and let run forward in time, and I can run the same experiment backwards in time (imagine a movie projector running in reverse) and Newtonian physics gives the same, equally valid results.

Which is mostly what we see. Until we come to things like a coffee cup. If I put a spoonful of instant coffee into a cup of hot water (I know... ugh) and stir it, I get a cup of "coffee". But if I reverse the direction of my stirring, attempting to unstir the cup, I can't manage to separate the coffee crystals from the water.

Why is that? Newton's Laws can't explain this. Thermodynamics (the study of heat flow and energy) can, but to do it, one has to postulate a law (albeit based on experience) that disorder is always maximized. (Disorder within a system is the physical basis of what physicists call "Entropy") But that's really an observed law, not a law that we understand from basic physical reasoning. Because, if one goes to a small enough scale, it should be possible to reverse the process - just flip the switch on the project (effectively reversing the flow (or arrow) of time.)

Entropy, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is presently the best explanation for what we observe as the unidirectional restriction of the "arrow of time" - the observed inability to go backwards in time. But why is it this way? How did the Universe pick which direction it decided to prefer? (Such a question is similar to asking why is there so much more matter than anti-matter in the Universe. Why did it choose one over the other?)

A small team of physicists think that perhaps we can understand the origin of this preference as being a result of small perturbations in the fabric of space-time in the early Universe. As is reported on the ArXiv Physics blog:

" Kiefer's conjecture is that the direction of time arises when quantum mechanics is applied to the universe as a whole, a branch of science known as quantum cosmology.

Central to this idea is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation that describes the quantum state of the universe as a whole, including both its gravitational and non-gravitational states.

This equation does not contain any parameter that is equivalent to our classical notion of time. In the Wheeler-DeWitt formulation, spacetime does not exist in any classical sense and particles do not have traditional trajectories in spacetime, just as particles do not have traditional trajectories in ordinary quantum mechanics. Instead all the information about the universe is encoded in its wavefunction

So how might an arrow of time arise? While the universe is considered homogeneous to the first degree, there is no preferred direction of time, says Kiefer. But he shows that when small inhomogeneities are taken into account, an asymmetry arises in this wavefunction.

He even says that with slight elaborations, this idea could be applied to an arrow of time in the multiverse."

Read the full article here. It's a pretty straightforward explanation.

Which is a pretty neat idea. This gives a basic phenomenological explanation to the observed behavior of time in the Universe. (This is similar to the way that Cosmological Inflation is used to explain the asymmetry in matter-antimatter.)

The problem apparently is, as is often the case in Cosmology, there's no obvious way to test the hypothesis. Someone more clever is going to have open that can for us. But, in the meantime, it's a plausible explanation, even if it requires a bit more complexity and hand tuning than we'd like.

It's the lack of that complexity and hand tuning of equations that makes Newton's Laws so beautiful in the eyes of Physicists. Of course they're not exactly correct, but they're very pretty.

Perhaps the Universe though isn't as simple as we want it to be.

Are email newsletters dead?

Some of you know that I've been very active in church communications for the last decade or so. I've been involved in parish, diocesan and national work as part of that. The one thing I've learned over the past ten years is that communications is rapidly changing, and that we're ALL struggling to keep up with the crest of the wave.

Ten years or more ago the idea of using email to regularly communicate with members of a parish or a diocese was a radically innovative idea. I did a lot of fast talking getting various parts of the church to get involved in using that technology.

But things are changing. Good email is being inundated and drowned in unwanted spam. Users haven't all learned how to deal with too many emails. ISP's and mail servers are starting to just reject mail if they're too busy to be able to receive it. And the sender has no idea if the message is read or not.

The nice folks over at Media Salt ask the question about whether or not it's time to move beyond emailed communications:

"Do you regularly read the email newsletters that end up in your inbox? I know I don’t. Even if I sign myself up intentionally, I’ll skim the first message I receive (maybe) and will then ignore all of the rest. They even begin to annoy me over time, requiring me to unsubscribe or just block the message as spam. Just like ads online, my eyes are  in the habit of ignoring the newsletters in my inbox.

Am I saying that email communication all together is a bad idea? Not at all. I understand the importance of occasional email blasts for special events and promotions. I just feel that the weekly newsletter format is an outdated way to push out your information online."

Read the full article here.

Email is a push medium - the message is pushed out the recepient. As such there's "friction" in its transmission. You have to format the note correctly. The servers all have to be working. The receivers computer must be working. The receiver must be ready to read your message.

There are other techniques. Facebook, RSS (real-simple-syndication), twitter for example are all pull media. The user tells the computer to go get interesting things when they're ready or interested in reading them. As such there's less friction to getting your message out there.

Is it time to pull the plug on email newsletters? Probably not. The one thing I have learned is that absolute answers don't work during a time of rapid transition. (There's a theological side to that too, I should blog about that.) So we're going to be best served with a both/and solution for a while. Email newsletters and RSS feeds.

Sort of what I'm doing here. (See the upper right hand corner under the mast head.) Not that I have lots of readers (about 400-500 a day) but the ones I have use direct page loading, facebook, email and RSS feeds about equally.

And I'm glad you do. Thanks. Now go and see if you can convince the folks in your church or diocese to do something similar. Grin.

Overuse of natural resources 'caused Nazca collapse'

Back when I was in High School and the works of Eric Von Daniken were still new and popular, I was fascinated by the mysterious works of the Nazca people in Peru. Von Daniken claimed that the giant figures that the Nazca people carved into the plateaus of Peru were meant to be seen by alien spaceships. (A bit of a reach perhaps, but if you know Von Daniken's work, exactly what you'd expect.)

But what made the lines so much more mysterious was the fact that the people who had made them apparently disappeared without a trace soon after. If Von Daniken was to be believed, something I was willing to do as a sophomore in High School, perhaps the alien arks had been in fact summoned and the people of the Plains of Nazca returned to the stars.

Turns out the explanation is much less poetic. But ultimately more important to us today. According to a new study, a team of archeologists have found that the civilization that created the enormous figures on the plains died off because they over consumed the limited natural resources they depended on.

A report on the BBC site explains:

"Analysing plant remains [the archeological team] reveal how the destruction of forests containing the huarango tree crossed a tipping point, causing ecological collapse.

The team have published their findings in the journal of Latin American Antiquity.

'These were very special forests,' says Dr David Beresford-Jones from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK who led the team.

The huarango tree (Prosopis pallida) is a unique tree with many qualities and played a vital role in the habitat, protecting the fragile desert ecosystem, the scientists say."

Read the full article here.

Over logging these trees destroyed the environmental balance that the people depended on to be able to live in the hostile environment.

One wonders how much longer we have until we reach a similar tipping point in regions of the earth that are carrying far more than the normal capacity because of our use of high-energy storage resources like oil and coal. Or until our over logging of forests too drastically reduces the environments ability to sequester sufficient carbon dioxide that might cause a runaway greenhouse effect.

More information on this story here on one of the Discovery Magazine's blogs.

But why is it so sad?

A few years ago, because of some local political controversy, we offered a safe place to worship to a group of Latinos who no longer felt safe traveling to part of Phoenix. That small group of ten or so souls has now grown to over 300 people with nearly 100 or more regularly gathering on Sunday mornings.

I've learned a great deal from this experience. One of the most important things I've learned is that when Americanos and Latinos work to make common cause, it's less important to be bilingual than it is to be bicultural. (Full credit given to Canon Carmen Guerro for leading me into this understanding.)

Why bicultural? Because sometimes we Americanos do something with the best intentions and find out that we've misstepped. Consider this year's Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) observance at Trinity Cathedral here in Phoenix. We've tried to do something to mark this important folk celebration of All Soul's Day in Mexico and other Latin American countries given that there is a very large number of Latinos living in the neighborhoods around the Cathedral. Generally though we (Americanos) constructed a beautiful altar in the Art Gallery part of the Cathedral, collected important artistic works and thought we were doing bicultural ministry. The displays were very lovely and lots of folks from the Anglo congregation brought their friends by to see the exhibit.

But now that we have a vital Latino congregation it was important to me that we move away from an observance of the day and toward an authentic worship experience. So we decided together that the proper place to put this year's altar of the dead was not in the gallery but in the Columbarium (which is where many of the beloved of the Cathedral congregation are interred). One of the priests on our staff, who has a real gift for design, was asked to put the altar together on Friday and Saturday in preparation.

He did a superb job. It was striking, senstive and theologically rich. It sent a message of our Christian hope, founded in baptism, that in Christ our lives do not end, but that death brings our transformation. He created a three part altar, covered with beautiful black cloth, a display of marigolds, focused on a cross and pascal candle; all of which were dramatically lit. It was elegant, understated and just what I had hoped it would be.

We were very pleased with ourselves.

Then on Saturday morning we had a group of parishioners and other friends come in to create decorated lamps that we were going to use in procession on Sunday night. Some of the women from the 12:30 (spanish language) congregation wandered in to see the altar. It was not what they expected. I was upstairs in a Commission on Ministry meeting. I was sent a note that told me I needed to come downstairs as soon as possible. "It's very important."

The ladies had gone to Canon Guerro very concerned about the altar. "It's so sad!" What I had seen as elegant and understated, they saw as effectively communicating a message of restrained grief; not the exubarent celebration of joyful transformed lives that Dia de los Muertos proclaims.

So, with my "permission" the ladies set to making it a proper altar. They went out and bought candied skulls, crepe paper and lots of colored votive candle holders. And they spent a couple of hours making paper flowers, bunting and streamers. You can see part of the result in the picture here. (I'll post more as soon as I have time to create a proper album.)

Where did we misstep biculturally? Well first, in my own sense that the beautiful altar was finished... Our staff priest actually designed the area to serve as liturgical "scaffolding" with the idea that it was going to be remade by the 12:30 congregation. But most of us, myself and the ladies of the 12:30 congregation included, didn't see that. It was so elegant that we didn't imagine that possibility. Where else did we misstep? It was in the idea that the ladies needed to get the permission of el Dean to make the altar their own. My understanding was that it was to be theirs from the beginning. But they could not imagine changing it without asking "The Man". Clearly we have some work to do to make them feel that they are full and vital members of the congregation, not people whom the rich Americanos tolerate out of some sort of noblesse oblige.

So, we have some work to do. But it's good work. I'm rather looking forward to it. Because, by pointing out my own misunderstanding of the basic nature of celebration rather than somber mourning surrounding Dia de los Muertos, I found myself rethinking my own relationship to my family members who have died. Particularly that to our youngest daughter.

The idea that she is attending an eternal fiesta in the presence of God held in the arms of her grandmothers and her namesake grandfather is a totally different way for me to envision her today, the 12th anniversary of her death. I like the idea of Fiesta much better. And so I'm grateful to the ladies of the 12:30 service for giving me a new set of lenses to see the world around me.

I think our family just found a new folk custom that we shall keep all the days of our lives.

(Thanks to Eric Brimhall for these pictures from last night.)

Stanley Hauerwas on the Reformation

Stanley Hauerwas was asked to preach on Reformation Sunday (what some Lutherans and many other protestants call the Sunday of All Saints). Prof. Hauerwas, as you might expect knowing his thinking, not going to choose the obvious path of lauding the reformers who managed to split western Christendom:

"I realize that this perspective on Reformation Sunday is not the usual perspective. The usual perspective is to tell us what a wonderful thing happened at the Reformation. The Reformation struck a blow for freedom. No longer would we be held in medieval captivity to law and arbitrary authority. The Reformation was the beginning of enlightenment, of progressive civilizations, of democracy, that have come to fruition in this wonderful country called America. What a destructive story.

You can tell the destructive character of that narrative by what it has done to the Jews. The way we Protestants read history, and in particular our Bible, has been nothing but disastrous for the Jews. For we turned the Jews into Catholics by suggesting that the Jews had sunk into legalistic and sacramental religion after the prophets and had therefore become moribund and dead. In order to make Jesus explicable (in order to make Jesus look like Luther — at least the Luther of our democratic projections), we had to make Judaism look like our characterization of Catholicism. Yet Jesus did not free us from Israel; rather, he engrafted us into the promise of Israel so that we might be a people called to the same holiness of the law.

I realize that the suggestion that salvation is to be part of a holy people constituted by the law seems to deny the Reformation principle of justification by faith through grace. I do not believe that to be the case, particularly as Calvin understood that Reformation theme. After all, Calvin (and Luther) assumed that justification by faith through grace is a claim about God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth. So justification by faith through grace is not some general truth about our need for acceptance; but rather justification by faith through grace is a claim about the salvation wrought by God through Jesus to make us a holy people capable of remembering that God’s salvation comes through the Jews. When the church loses that memory, we lose the source of our unity. For unity is finally a matter of memory, of how we tell the story of the Reformation. How can we tell this story of the church truthfully as Protestants and Catholics so that we might look forward to being in union with one another and thus share a common story of our mutual failure?"

Read the full sermon here. I think it would qualify as a sort of mitzvah.

Apocalyptic theology

Fleming Rutledge, always worth a read, posted an essay on a school of Theology she's calling "The Union School of Apocalyptic Theology". Chief among the members of this school is Karl Barth (who's one of my own primary theological influences). She lists a number of other as well including Paul Minear and Brevard Childs who were both Yale faculty (where I attended seminary). I had the honor of taking a couple of classes on Old Testament theology with Professor Childs and heard some Prof Minear's lectures as well. Perhaps that is why I have such a preference for Barthian thought.

Rutledge explains Apocalyptic Theology thusly:

"'Most simply stated, 'apocalypse' is shorthand for Jesus Christ. In the New Testament… all apocalyptic reflection and hope comes to this, that God has acted critically, decisively, and finally for Israel, all the peoples of the earth, and the entire cosmos, in the life, death, resurrection, and coming again of Jesus, in such a way that God’s purpose for Israel, all humanity, and all creation is critically, decisively, and finally disclosed and effected in he history of Jesus Christ.'[1]

Some central affirmations of apocalyptic theology (F. Rutledge)

• Divine agency is central— ‘God is up to something in the world’ (Paul Lehmann).
• Sin and Death are Powers who have invaded the world and established their dominion.
• The human condition is genuinely tragic because humanly speaking, there is no escape from bondage to the Powers.
• The earthly human world is subject to incursion from the divine world—‘cosmic breaking and entering’ (Martyn)—in Jesus Christ, the end of the ages has come upon us (I Corinthians 10:11).
• The divine apocalypse is less a disclosure than it is an invasion (‘O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down’—Isaiah).
• Justification (dikaiosune) is understood less as individual salvation, more as rectification constituting a new world.
• Jesus Christ waged apocalyptic warfare (see R. E. Brown on Gethsemane).
• The apocalypse of Jesus Christ means the end of conventional warfare, because the line between good and evil runs through each person (as attested by Vaclav Havel, A. Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi and many others).
• Apocalyptic metaphor is God’s poetry (Martyn), telling us the truth about our condition and our hope.
• The New Creation dawns even now, in the Church’s participation in the Cross and Resurrection.
• Cruciform Christian witness is anchored by secure confidence in God’s triumph at the ultimate End, the Last Day when God puts an end to Sin, Death, and the devil, establishing the Kingdom of God in its eternal, victorious completeness."

Read the full article here.

It's certainly worth a read. I'll need to think through some of the ideas she derives from this list, but I very much agree with her point that the Cross is the Sign of that signifies the turn of the Ages.

The idea that the revelation of Jesus Christ is historical, discrete and ongoing seems obvious to me, but it is something I've had to argue in support of with other Christians.

The BCP as Anglican Covenant

People have always asked Episcopalians to describe what sort of Episcopalians they are. That's because there's a very diverse lot of us under the Episcopal Church's umbrella. Gosh, there's a very diverse group of us under my own Cathedral congregation's umbrella. There are High Church Anglicans, Ultramontane Anglicans, Calvinists, Low Church, Charismatic, Broad Church, Deists, Theists and cultural Anglicans. To name just a few.

Lately thanks to the writing of folks like Christopher Evans and Derek Olsen (see sidebar) I think I've come to understand my own place on the spectrum as being a "Common Prayer Anglican". Our genius within Anglicanism is our decision to find our unity in prayer, not in a binding Confession or in a Teaching Magisterium. And we find that unity by agreeing to pray the words of Book of Common Prayer with each other.

The wise folks over at Anglican Online have taken this idea a step further than I have in my own thinking, and I like where they're headed. They suggest that rather than the proposed Covenant for the Anglican Communion, we circle back and look at what we already do have, The Book of Common Prayer:

"At first glance, it's easy to dismiss this concept of BCP-as-covenant as a conceit: really, some will say exasperatedly, the 1662 BCP was book of liturgy, not a covenant. But within a empire that crossed continents and oceans, where postal mail took months and news could be delayed by years, it was theological framework of the 1662 BCP that shaped the understanding of English Christianity. The two great sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist — as well as the lesser sacraments — were defined within an Anglican understanding. Their definition was sufficient for most to read, mark, and inwardly digest. The catechism was the school book for millions of children — and what is the catechism other than a theological FAQ? The rubrics, if not quite canon law, were observed diligently for the most part and provided additional theological guidance. Lex orandi, lex credendi was perhaps truer during the hegemony of the 1662 BCP than it can ever be again.

We might now argue that the use of Elizabethan English in, say, the Sudan was absurd; part of a misguided, wrong-headed attempt to 'civilise' the world and produce Victorian gentlemen and ladies rather than promote the spread of Christianity. But English Christianity was spread by Victorian (or Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolinian, or Regency) gentlemen, by word and sometimes weapon. And the vector* was the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. All these little oases of English Christianity — Elizabethan thees and thous in the Mongolian desert, 'The Day Thou Gavest' heartily sung in Delhi, clergy dressing for dinner in Zanzibar — eventually joined together in strangely named dioceses such as Mashonaland and Ruwenzori and became the building blocks of the Anglican Communion. But the ties that bind were pages of the 1662 BCP bound in morocco, cloth, or paper. They held the communion together before any covenant was a glimmer in any disaffected bishop's eye."

Read the full article here.

Obviously such an idea isn't a panacea, and it glosses over the real differences between the prayer books in use in different Provinces. The Book of Common Prayer in Sudan is very very different than the one in use in New Zealand. But at least this idea takes us back to our foundational roots and the fundamental defining characteristic of our polity.

I like this idea very much. Good on 'em.

Help the Cathedral support Habitat for Humanity

Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix is one of a number of Episcopal congregations in the central part of Arizona who, together with Central Arizona Habitat for Humanity, build two houses a year in the Phoenix metro region and one house in the developing world.

For the Cathedral to be part of this, we need to pony up our share of the cost of the houses. Rather than use money that we spend on clean water projects, orphan education, free clinics for the homeless, etc, we are going to try to raise this money independently of our general budget. We are doing this with the help of Tim Sprague, a Cathedral member and one of the musicians in the local band "Crisis".

We're going to be putting on a big block party in central Phoenix, right next to the Roosevelt and Central Light Rail station on Nov 14. If you're in the city on that night, come and join us! Free food, music and dancing. Honor bar for those wish to fortify themselves against the cold. Good times for all.

You can buy your tickets in advance at Rocksupport.org. If you can't come, you can still donate!