The Episcopal Church Goes to Disneyland!

The Episcopal Church is having its General Convention in Anaheim, CA, right across the street, so I'm told, from Disneyland.

Here is a passage from the Presiding Bishop's welcoming address that really speaks to my inner socialist:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy –that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that
salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being.

Indeed, we're all in this together.  No one pulls themselves up into Heaven by their own bootstraps.  No gets to say "ha ha suckers!" as the doorman lifts the velvet rope for us and lets us into the club ahead of the line.

And to all who demand the absolute clarity of a world of black and white text in screaming high contrast, there is this:

Have a good and productive Convention everyone! Tell the bishops not to ride the Mad Hatter's Tea Party ride so soon after eating.

Attack Bibles

From Wilfried.

Which is the scarier looking Bible?

I vote for the Pulpit Bible with the beveled edges. The kids will certainly remember that one when it comes crashing across their faces.
Curious how "weaponized" they all look. I wonder how much overlap there is between Bible collectors and gun collectors?

ESV Pulpit Bible

ESV Journaling Bible

Satanic Bible

UPDATE:

To see fire breathing extremist Calvinist liturgical regulations go to this link which Wilfried has so graciously provided us.

According to Wilfried, they ask if Catholics are really Christian here.  The answer is no.

A Little Treacle

The pre-computerized animation in this remains breathtaking after 65 years.

Holy Officiousness

I have 2 friends of quite different ethnicity and background from myself who are fascinated with Christian fundamentalism. One is Jewish, my friend David Kaplan, born and raised on the Upper West Side, the son of NYC school teachers ("He's grandmother Jewish," a former room-mate once remarked). The other goes by the blog name of Wilfried. He is American, ethnic Chinese, whose parents are scientists (physicists I think). Both of his parents are true-believing atheists and devout Communists. They spent time in the People's Republic of China as very honored guests. Wilfried still knows all the old Young Pioneer songs in English and in Mandarin.
David Kaplan belongs to a Conservative synagogue in Manhattan. Wilfried is a fellow parishoner with me, and after 5 years is still new to Christianity (though he certainly knows more about it than I do). Wilfried and I are both gay, and marched in this year's Pride March, though not together. He marched, as he does every year, with the Gaysians.
Both David and Wilfried are very different in background from each other and from me. Both of them are fascinated with Christian fundamentalism in its many forms. Christian fundamentalism for me is a surplus of very bad memories, coming as I did from Texas in the 1960s and 70s. For the both of them, Christian fundamentalism is as exotic as the Parsee's Towers of Silence. They both take an anthropological interest in the sheer freakishness of it.

They are both struck by the joylessness of it all beneath the smiles and the happy-clappy. David Kaplan finds the contrast with Jewish fundamentalists to be striking. The ueber-Orthodox Jewish Biblical literalists find some measure of inner peace in knowing that they are doing all they can to fulfill the requirements of the Halaka. He sees no such inner peace in fundamentalist Christians. Indeed, they seem to him to be always very anxious and deeply self-conscious, prickly and quick to take offense. There is something defensive in the aggressive cheeriness of their worship, and coercive in the insistent good fellowship in David's experience.
Wilfried sees something similar in what he's encountered. He likes to lurk through the most hard shell Calvinist fundamentalist websites and read the chatter among the "Fighting Fundamentalists." These are the folks who consider the Southern Baptist Convention to be nothing but godless liberal apostates and heretics and will have nothing to do with them. The Calvinist groups are all very small and very exclusive. One has a 2 page questionaire that must be filled out in detail before one can join their discussion group. The applicant must describe in detail their current church membership, who is their pastor, their "salvation history," etc. These small extreme fundamentalist Calvinist groups are all at war with each other, usually over points of doctrine that strike most outsiders as very arcane. They are all hard-shell Gomarists. Someone like me who is grateful to have been born into the humane Arminian theology of the Methodist Church would not be at all welcome with any of them. They are constantly arguing and splitting. The "Fighting Fundamentalists" are the most viscious fighters between themselves and with the outside world. They are always angry and always at war.

Both David Kaplan and Wilfried find the bitterness of all this utterly exotic and deeply puzzling. As Wilfried points out, there is no real joy in any of this arcane doctrinal internecine warfare. The only pleasure seems to come from the thrill of victory and the satisfaction of knowing that one is right and among the Elect. The hard Calvinists in particular are not shy about expressing a Taliban-like contempt for any and all aesthetic experience, including music. Wilfried notes that they all seem to be bibliophiles. All that repressed aestheticism comes out in their cherished very expensive leather bound Bibles (Geneva or King James; and they fight over which one God really wrote). Wilfried calls them "attack Bibles" bound in floppy black leather with gold stamped lettering and onion-skin pages edged in gold leaf. They do look like weapons of war, like Samurai swords. Perhaps Wilfried will show up in the comments section and give us some links to their sites.

Both David and Wilfried find the selectiveness in their literalism to be very striking. Wilfried points out that a truly literalist understanding of Genesis requires us to believe in a flat earth with a domed sky surrounded by the waters of chaos.

This is just the sort of officious Christianity that I find deeply alienating, and which seems to be the dominant image of Christianity for the general public (the Church as Cop as I discussed in an earlier post). It is that legalistic Christianity that values tidiness and exactitude above all else. It is the kind that makes a cult of purity. I've seen purity. I've been to the desert, purged of all variation, all color, all dirt, clean of all life. It's not for nothing that the Bedouin call the desert the "Garden of Allah." These are the sorts of Christians that drive me ever further into the antinomian camp and toward the likes of William Blake.

I remain an anti-systematic thinker, and proud of it.

The War In the Anglican Communion

As the Episcopal Church convention starts in Anaheim, CA, all I will say about the current mess is that it's a bishop's coup by those determined to save the letter of the Gospel by killing off its spirit.

And for those who have declared war on Western liberalism, how many liberal humanist suicide bombers are there in the world?

Robert MacNamara is Dead

The most depressing stroll in the United States is that short distance from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam Memorial. We walk from a monument to the preservation of the Union and its founding principles, to a monument to 58,000 who died for abstract strategic policy objectives, so that someone else could look resolute, for the sake of someone's career, so that some comfortable patriot could feel a little jingoistic pride. They were 58,000 people who died for nothing, along with millions of Vietnamese, inhabitants of a country that few of these young Americans had ever heard of until they were in the middle of it. They were the hard luck disposable surplus young people who didn't have college deferments or powerful connections to keep them out of the draft. They and the Vietnamese they fought with and against were ground up in the mill of history driven by ideologues and ambitious men.

And what have we learned from this experience? Nothing. A whole new generation of disposable surplus young people is busy cleaning up our mess in Iraq and in Afghanistan, just as we expect them to clean up our mess at home, to mow our lawns, fix our cars, build our buildings, process our food, and save us all money by being content to accept what little pay we give them.

Robert McNamara played a large role in creating the Vietnam War. When he knew the war was a lost cause, he remained silent for the sake of his career. He will now have to answer for that.

Ugly New Buildings In New York

The new Bank of America tower (right) on 42nd street.
FL Wright once said that architects could always grow ivy over their mistakes. There ain't enough kudzu in Georgia to cover this one. It's taller than the Chrysler Building.


The Conde Nast Building,
like a giant vacuum tube out of the old Magnavox TV belonging to the Jolly Green Giant.


A better view of that blue glass and steel tumor looming above Delancey street near my studio


The Great Abomination on Astor Place.
It makes no rhyme or reason to me, a box sitting on top of a Playdough extrusion, with half a Coke can on the top. I suppose there's some fashionista wanker out there who thinks this jerry-built eyesore of future Section 8 housing is clever. The worst part is that it dominates the vista of 4th Avenue where Lafayette and the Bowery come together. You can't not look at it.
Eeewww!