Miroslav Volf : mackenzian

September 11, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

How we remember

CN: 9/11 remembrances and suicide.

Photo of one of the National 9/11 Memorial voids lit for the evening. Victim names are visible. — Photo credit: PWP Landscape Architecture, via the ASLA 2012 Professional Awards

On September 11, 2001, I was at home at my grandparents’ house in Jamaica. I was dressed in scrubs an aunt had handed down, and had no plans to do much for the day but rest: I was out of school for medical recovery while classmates and others began their semester on campus. As I walked through the dinning room table that morning, I watched my 85-year old grandmother stand two feet away from her television. Smoke clouds wrapped around the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“Oh, Lord, help us!” she said. I didn’t see the second plane. I just heard her as she did.

I don’t know anyone who was around in 2001 who doesn’t have a story like that. And I don’t think anyone needs to tell us to “Never forget” because we can’t forget. Looping video all over domestic and international news broadcasts ensures we can’t forget, even when we wish to, even when we try to opt out.

And even if we missed it the first time round, broadcasters are perfectly happy to show it to us now.

I couldn’t get a phone call through to friends in New York for over a week after 9/11. For people on the ground, who lived there and lost relatives, friends, and coworkers, the experience was exponentially worse. Ordinary life has permanently shifted in some way for all of us.

Miroslav Volf published The End of Memory five years after 9/11. Reflecting on the discourse around what later became New York City’s National 9/11 Memorial, he writes:

We demand immediate memorials as outward symbols because the hold of memory on our inner lives is so tenuous. And then, because we have tangible, observable memorials, we feel absolved of the obligation to remember on our own; we feel free, in good conscience, to immerse ourselves in the blur of the present. Thus does the memory boom try to compensate for an actual memory bust.” —Miroslav Volf

Volf explains that we easily mis-remember, filling in details that are inaccurate, or obscuring details that could change or challenge easier interpretations of events. And he insists throughout the book that the way we remember constitutes us: our memories shape our individual and collective identities.

I may not be culpable if I misremembered unintentionally; but I am responsible to remember correctly. The obligation to remember truthfully is just one dimension of the general obligation to tell the truth.” —Miroslav Volf

This is the question that Tom Junod considers in a remarkable and troubling Esquire essay on photos of “the falling man,” one of perhaps 200 people who jumped from the towers on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. AP photographer Richard Drew was in New York for another assignment, went toward the disaster rather than away from it, and took a series of photos of the World Trade Center buildings from his post next to first responders.

That photo series, and the people it represents, are rarely seen now in remembrances of 9/11. Junod asks why that is.

What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.” —Tom Junod

Read the rest. The article includes photos from Drew’s series as well as direct discussion of suicide, and may be distressing.

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.