Flourishing : mackenzian

August 9, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Read: Mindsets of Respect

My chapter commentary on Miroslav Volf’s book, Flourishing, is out!

It begins, as the chapter does, with hard facts and sobering memories:

Friday, August 5 marked the 4th anniversary of the day Michael Page gunned down six Sikhs at the Oak Creek gurdwara in Wisconsin. Until Dylan Roof murdered 9 worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Oak Creek was the largest mass killing at a place of worship in the US since the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Nothing highlights our need to establish mindsets and cultures of respect than these and so many other instances of Othering, religious exclusivism, and terrorism in the US and around the globe. People literally die when we fail to respect each other.

Chapter 3 of Miroslav Volf’s book Flourishing tackles the mutual respect that religious traditions need to give and also be given in a plural society. Volf explores two themes: (1) the ‘global security risk’ of religious intolerance, and (2) relationships within religions, between religions, and between religions and host societies that mutually honor religious freedom.”

Read the rest on Spectrum’s website. And pick up your own copy of the book and read along.

July 31, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Panic

Nothing brakes the train of progress and learning more effectively than apocalyptic panic.

After a week at this month’s conference near Baltimore, I’m returning to Miroslav Volf’s latest book, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world. (I wrote about Flourishing briefly earlier this month, and you can still join the group that’s reading it this summer.)

Chapter 1 includes extensive quotes from Marx’ and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto. These authors, both younger than me when they wrote, imagined that burgeoning global capitalist industrialism would so spin the world into crisis that a communist social structure could not only emerge but also be welcomed.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in Volf, p. 30

A bit dramatic, no?

Whether the world is dissipating before our eyes and whether everything is terrible seems to depend on who we ask, which scales of time or scope we have in mind, and whether we’ll accept the facts.

Because there are still facts.

Scientist and writer Steven Pinker has reviewed international and inter-personal violence trends and announced that, headlines notwithstanding, violence is in decline around the world. Other authors concur. Of the US, Marian Tupy writes, “the homicide rate is now at a 51-year low.” Trends for terrorism are similar. Seismologists record more kinds of earthquake more often, but according to the British Geological Survey and California’s Department of Conservation, large earthquakes aren’t happening more frequently than in the past, and deadly earthquakes are becoming rarer due to a combination of better building construction and stronger disaster response and mitigation planning.

That’s not the impression anyone would get from the conventional bad-news industry or from most Christian televangelism. In the news industries’ case, a steady stream of bad news means a steady stream of nervous viewers and support from advertisers who use consumer anxiety to prime us for sales. In the televangelism industry’s case, angst about natural and human disasters makes us receptive to teachings about a better world to come and faith that can protect us during a deeply uncertain and discomforting era.

Over the last decade, I’ve done a fairly good job of not supporting media outlets that trade in social or moral panic, and I can largely avoid religious rhetoric that does the same. But because of the branch of Christianity I work with, I still sometimes catch accounts of “worse and worse.” It’s hard to know how to respond.

That anyone suffers in street, state violence, earthquake, or famine speaks to me of an urgent need to repair this world. It doesn’t inspire me to pine for an end to this world. I grant that every transformation is a sort of ending, but a transforming apocalypse is rarely the kind of apocalypse promoted around me. Instead, many of the evangelists in my tradition promote their vision of a judging, destructive apocalypse, one that morally “cleanses” the planet with mass death.

When all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, our attention naturally nosedives in the sickest and most grotesque we can find.” —Mark Manson, July 28

Direct surveillance via cellphone videos or indirect surveillance through embedded network news teams brings us all the current affairs we can stand. And in this time of attention saturation, we still get to choose the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening.

Are we spinning stories to reinforce fear, escapism, and futility? Are we using the facts to inspire constructive action for ourselves and others today?

July 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Read with Spectrum: Volf’s Flourishing

Adventist Forum’s Spectrum Magazine is hosting a summer reading group again this year. Last year, we read Richard Beck’s reflections on morality, purity, and disgust in the book Unclean.

Read my article on the body and the private sphere.

This year, we turn to Miroslav Volf’s latest work, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world.

The book is Volf’s ambitious attempt to integrate reflections on the relationships between globalization and religion and ways world religions can undermine or support human development. Based on his classes at Yale Divinity School, including a course he co-taught with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Flourishing also depends on several international and multi-faith review groups that Volf invited to assess the manuscript. He gives extensive credit to his research assistants and graduate students, a move that I appreciated.

At least in the preface and introduction, whereas Volf defines and delimits religion, he does not define globalization. When he writes “globalization,” does he mean something more substantial than “international and trans-national trade”? I assume so, but in the absence of definition, the term is a cipher that readers can fill more or less as they please, whether with Blair’s modern Western liberalism, with the UN’s sustainable development tenets, or with other signifiers like “freedom, democracy, human rights, market economics, and prosperity” (p. 5). In notes, Volf does mention Joerg Rieger, who wrote the brief Globalization and Theology.

Volf tells us his colleague Linn Tonstad encouraged him to make his positioning explicit:

I could have tried to shed the particularities of my own faith and culture and to survey the landscapes of multiple religions and globalization processes impartially, as if I were a mechanical drone with no biases or interests of my own. But the ‘view from nowhere’ is impossible; drones always fly at somebody’s behest and for somebody’s interest.” —Miroslav Volf, Flourishing, p. 18

I’ll learn more as I read. I already wonder whether Volf takes too much about globalization for granted. And I don’t think he could possibly be right to exclude indigenous and non-conquering religions from his grand synthesis of the future of religions or flourishing humans: we already have enough practical theory based on the praise songs of war winners.

But we’ll see.

Update: My commentary came out the first week of August. Read with us.