Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Thursday, 4 July 2013
It just got warm out, its this shit I've been warned about.
I hope that it storm in the morning; I hope that it's pouring out.
I hate crowded beaches; I hate the sound of fireworks.
And I ponder what's worse between knowing it's over and dying first.
'Cause everybody dies in the summer.
Wanna say ya goodbyes, tell them while it's spring.
I heard everybody's dying in the summer, so pray to God for a lil' more spring.
I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared, too.
If you was there, then we just knew you'd care, too.
-- Chance The Rapper
I hope that it storm in the morning; I hope that it's pouring out.
I hate crowded beaches; I hate the sound of fireworks.
And I ponder what's worse between knowing it's over and dying first.
'Cause everybody dies in the summer.
Wanna say ya goodbyes, tell them while it's spring.
I heard everybody's dying in the summer, so pray to God for a lil' more spring.
I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared, too.
If you was there, then we just knew you'd care, too.
-- Chance The Rapper
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
It's normally assumed that atheists don't pray. When an atheist state representative in Arizona -- one of the few openly atheist lawmakers in the country -- was tasked with offering a prayer to start an afternoon session of the state legislature, though, he stepped up. Juan Mendez, a 28-year-old Democrat who identifies labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez as his political hero, asked the legislators not to bow their heads, and then offered up a god-free prayer.
The Phoenix New Times reports:
Mendez was elected to office in 2012. As a lawmaker, he has authored legislation that would bar credit card company marketers from college campuses, allow voters to register to vote the day of elections, reform the procedures for assessing affordable housing, require home owners associations to allow vegetable gardens, and start a micro enterprise development program. He hasn't sponsored or co-sponsored any legislation specifically related to religion or atheism.
Update (May 23): Mendez's secular humanist prayer did get some response, after all.
The Phoenix New Times reports:
'This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration,' Mendez said. 'But this is also a room where, as my secular humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences. We share the same spectrum of potential for care, for compassion, for fear, for joy, for love.'
Mendez continued, 'Carl Sagan once wrote, "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."'According to the Arizona Republic, the other lawmakers in the house had no response. In a comment Mendez left on the popular atheist blog The Friendly Atheist, he said "there are more non believers than you would think" in Arizona.
Mendez was elected to office in 2012. As a lawmaker, he has authored legislation that would bar credit card company marketers from college campuses, allow voters to register to vote the day of elections, reform the procedures for assessing affordable housing, require home owners associations to allow vegetable gardens, and start a micro enterprise development program. He hasn't sponsored or co-sponsored any legislation specifically related to religion or atheism.
Update (May 23): Mendez's secular humanist prayer did get some response, after all.
Friday, 3 May 2013
A remarkable graph showing mentions of "pray for Boston" on Twitter in the days after the Boston Marathon bombing:
At The Atlantic, Eleanor Barkhorn notes anecdotally that the calls for prayer came from unexpected quarters:
What I saw on Twitter and Facebook in the hours after the Boston bombings and the Texas explosion wasn't just faithful people reminding other faithful people to drop everything and pray. It was also the non-religious invoking prayer in a way that they wouldn't under normal circumstances.After a few days, though, those same friends found different vocabulary with which to relate to the tragedy:
My friends who wrote of praying on Monday night soon began thinking about Boston, or standing with Boston, or loving Boston. It's interesting to see what words besides prayer have emerged as the way to respond to and process the terrible things that happened, and continued to happen, in the cityElizabeth Drescher names the spike in mentions of prayer the "active memeing of prayer."
She writes:
The phrase #PrayForBoston was appended to tweets through the day, with the likes of Mary J. Blige, teen rapper TZire, Saint Louis Cardinals infielder David Freese, La Toya Jackson, the US Senate Republicans, and, of course, Justin Bieber joining millions across the world in calling for prayer [....]I don't find this entirely convincing. Religions feelings can be fleeting and yet still be religious. Drescher is thinking of these social media mentions of prayer as secular, but describes them in ways that are quite resonant with ancient faith practices.
Of course, the feeling is relatively fleeting in the 'always now' of digital time. By the morning after the bombing, the #PrayForBoston meme had faded as a top trend, replaced by the leaner #Boston hashtag, which mostly tracks news and opinion, with calls for prayer appearing more sporadically. As the sun set on the same day, and the #OneBoston hashtag appeared, we were all apparently meant to be over whatever had prompted so many to call for prayer, focusing our energies on the practical what's next of the tragedy.
Obviously, we can reasonably conclude, prayer memes shared in times of crisis do something besides expressing traditional religiosity, calling us to God, to regular spiritual practice, or to worship.
She says "calling for prayer in times of tragedy seems to mark a kind of existential angst, sorrow, or confusion for which other words or gestures seem inadequate [.....] The impulse to pray holds a space that we may not even believe exists." But existential angst in not antithetical to prayer. Supplication mingled with doubt and disbelief is at least as old as Pslam 88, which says,
I have become like a man without strength,Perhaps Mary J. Blige and David Freese tweeting #PrayforBoston signals something new. But maybe, it's an old, old human urge, expressed with the medium at hand, as it has been expressed through other media in other ages.
Forsaken among the dead,
Like the slain who lie in the grave,
Whom You remember no more [....]
O Lord, why do You reject my soul?
Why do You hide Your face from me?
Whatever the interpretation, what we know we saw and what the graph shows is a huge increase in public talk of prayer and then, almost as fast as it happens, a sudden dissipation. It an odd and fascinating measure of a very fleeting moment of American religiosity.
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Charles Fox Parham's historical significance is due to one fact: he was the first to outline and define early Pentecostal theology of glossolali, the experience that Pentecostals call "speaking in tongues." He himself wasn’t the first to have the ecstatic experience of "spirit baptism," and utter unknown words in an unknown language, but rather, as the religious leader at the Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas in 1901 he was the one who theologized the experience of others. He said that the tongues were tongues. He said the experience was the spiritual gift of a new language, the evidence of sanctification, and the tool that God would use to spread the gospel at the end of time. In Ann Taves' terminology, he was the one who deemed the experience of tongues a religious experience. Parham referred to himself as the movement's "projector." In light of Taves' work, he might more precisely be called the "ascriber," as he is the one who set this particular experience apart as special, founding this specific religious tradition with his ascriptions.
Lesser known, but perhaps also significant, is another aspect of Parham's work as founder and leader of the nascent Pentecostal movement. He spent much of his time, from 1901 on, aggressively contesting the validity of Pentecostals’ ecstatic experiences.
After he started the movement, Parham was among its fiercest critics. According to historian Grant Wacker, he dismissed the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, one of the most successful moments of early Pentecostalism, as "holy-rolling-dancing-jumping, shaking, jabbering, chattering, wind-sucking and giving vent to meaningless sounds and noises." Many ecstatic experiences that others deemed the work of the Holy Ghost were, for Parham, "disorders." He dedicated himself, time and again, to brusque denunciations of experiences he considered to be lewd or racially inferior, manifestations of "the flesh" or "spook spirits" in "wild, weird prayer services."
These efforts to police the boundaries of Pentecostal experience have not gone unnoticed in Pentecostal historiography. Yet, they haven't been foregrounded, either. They have been considered as secondary or even tertiary in the beginnings of this movement, construed normally as curious but not critically important power struggles. Taves' work suggests it might be fruitful for historians to re-focus on these disputes.
Read Other Reasons to Unpack 'Religious Experience', my response to Ann Taves' interview with The Religious Studies Project.
Lesser known, but perhaps also significant, is another aspect of Parham's work as founder and leader of the nascent Pentecostal movement. He spent much of his time, from 1901 on, aggressively contesting the validity of Pentecostals’ ecstatic experiences.
After he started the movement, Parham was among its fiercest critics. According to historian Grant Wacker, he dismissed the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, one of the most successful moments of early Pentecostalism, as "holy-rolling-dancing-jumping, shaking, jabbering, chattering, wind-sucking and giving vent to meaningless sounds and noises." Many ecstatic experiences that others deemed the work of the Holy Ghost were, for Parham, "disorders." He dedicated himself, time and again, to brusque denunciations of experiences he considered to be lewd or racially inferior, manifestations of "the flesh" or "spook spirits" in "wild, weird prayer services."
These efforts to police the boundaries of Pentecostal experience have not gone unnoticed in Pentecostal historiography. Yet, they haven't been foregrounded, either. They have been considered as secondary or even tertiary in the beginnings of this movement, construed normally as curious but not critically important power struggles. Taves' work suggests it might be fruitful for historians to re-focus on these disputes.
Read Other Reasons to Unpack 'Religious Experience', my response to Ann Taves' interview with The Religious Studies Project.
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Meeting notes taken in the late 1930s -- that seems to be the very last remnant of the German language in the history of the German United Evangelical Synod of the North America.
Everything official was in English, at that point. There was just one last meeting where one old churchman kept notes in German.
There is no German United Evangelical Synod of North America today. The church joined with the Reformed Church -- itself formerly the German Reformed Church -- in 1934. Then that church, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, joined with the Congregational Churches in 1957 to become the United Church of Christ. Even before that series of ecumenical mergers, though, what was once an immigrant church with a strong ethnic, "Old World" identity had accommodated and assimilated, jettisoning its Germanness, according to History of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, over the course of about 90 years.
That story is the story of immigrant assimilation in America.
The church began in St. Louis in the 1840s, a collection of immigrant congregations that defined themselves in opposition to the area's "ultra-Lutherans." These congregations adhered to the Heidelberg Catechism. The new church called itself a verein -- a union or an association -- and had a strong ethnic identity. Thought it existed only in the American Midwest, it formed with a German name: Der Deutche Evangelische Kirchenverein des Westens. After about 30 years, the church officially translated its name into English, re-christening itself in the late 1870s as the German United Evangelical Synod of North America.
Not quite two decades after that, in the 1890s, the church took the next major step in assimilation, following a course that was, by then, fairly well defined by other religious groups transplanted from Europe to North America: Sunday School curricula was switched to English.
The catechism was put in English, then the church's hymnal, then, soon, the entire church was functioning in English, and the only remnant of the original language was those synod meeting notes, kept in German long after anyone needed them to be German.
Other groups were pressured to make the transition into English by war. Some Dutch Reformed churches faced serious social pressure to assimilate during World War I, for example. As James D. Bratt notes in Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, Christian Reformed Churches that continued preaching and praying in Dutch elicited outrage from "American neighbors unable to distinguish between 'Dutch' and 'Deutsch.'" Several Midwestern states actually passed laws prohibiting churches from holding services in any "foreign" language, unless full English translations had been given prior approval by the state legislature.
For the Kirschenverein, though, it wasn't nativists and nationalism behind the push to translate the church into English. It was religious competition. The big concern for the German United Evangelical Synod of the North America in the last decade of the 19th century: Lutherans.
The Lutherans had all their services in English at the time, and the Evangelical Synod leaders heard horror stories of youth across the Midwest abandoning the faith of their fathers and mothers for English-language Lutheranism.
It's a curious moment. A kind of tipping point for an immigrant community: there came a moment in the 1890s where, for a younger generation of German-Americans, churches they'd never attended more familiar, more inviting and less strange than the churches they'd grown up in, because of the issue of language.
The "religious marketplace" pushed the Evangelical Synod to adapt to America, in a sense, and so, about 50 years after it began, the immigrant church shed its immigrant language. For the sake of maintaining a connection to children and grandchildren. And 40 years after that, on the eve of the Second World War, the last remnant of the original language of the church was scribbled in synod meeting notes, and then was no more.
The Evangelical Synod was the last major German church to jettison its immigrant identity, one aspect of which was its language. By the time of the First World War, when Dutch pastors were finding their homes graffitied in "paint raids" with slogans such as "Be an American" and "Buy a Liberty Bond," the once-German churches in the American Midwest didn't really seem German anymore.
That wasn't the end of German-language worship in America, though. There are some small pockets of resistance to assimilation, and also ways in which assimilation has come to include, rather than exclude German-language prayer and worship. Assimilation, being what it is, doesn't seem to ever mean the total erasure of immigrant history. Instead there's a often kind of submersion, where "identity" becomes "heritage," which is another sort of identity.
It's accessible -- for what gets called, in cultural studies, "projects of the self" -- in part through the persistence of culture tourism and "heritage" consumer products.
For German-Americans, this means "German villages" in California and Georgia, an annual "Wurstfest in Texas, and companies selling imported German food, German-style windows (made in America), and "authentic German garden gnomes."
In the back of one the last remaining German-language papers in the United States, Troy, Michigan's Nordamerikanische Wochen-Post, one can find four listing for German-language church services:
There's been a strong trend away from "denominational histories," in recent years. One doesn't have to dig too deep into the records of various denominations and religious traditions, though, to find all sorts of interesting, enlightening aspects of American history, and "the American experience." Church history becomes immigration history becomes war-time conflict or generational relationships, becomes the religious marketplace, becomes identity formation.
The end of German-language prayers in America becomes -- curiously -- German-language prayers offered again, every third Sunday or with a special deutschem Quartet
Everything official was in English, at that point. There was just one last meeting where one old churchman kept notes in German.
There is no German United Evangelical Synod of North America today. The church joined with the Reformed Church -- itself formerly the German Reformed Church -- in 1934. Then that church, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, joined with the Congregational Churches in 1957 to become the United Church of Christ. Even before that series of ecumenical mergers, though, what was once an immigrant church with a strong ethnic, "Old World" identity had accommodated and assimilated, jettisoning its Germanness, according to History of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, over the course of about 90 years.
That story is the story of immigrant assimilation in America.
The church began in St. Louis in the 1840s, a collection of immigrant congregations that defined themselves in opposition to the area's "ultra-Lutherans." These congregations adhered to the Heidelberg Catechism. The new church called itself a verein -- a union or an association -- and had a strong ethnic identity. Thought it existed only in the American Midwest, it formed with a German name: Der Deutche Evangelische Kirchenverein des Westens. After about 30 years, the church officially translated its name into English, re-christening itself in the late 1870s as the German United Evangelical Synod of North America.
Not quite two decades after that, in the 1890s, the church took the next major step in assimilation, following a course that was, by then, fairly well defined by other religious groups transplanted from Europe to North America: Sunday School curricula was switched to English.
The catechism was put in English, then the church's hymnal, then, soon, the entire church was functioning in English, and the only remnant of the original language was those synod meeting notes, kept in German long after anyone needed them to be German.
Other groups were pressured to make the transition into English by war. Some Dutch Reformed churches faced serious social pressure to assimilate during World War I, for example. As James D. Bratt notes in Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, Christian Reformed Churches that continued preaching and praying in Dutch elicited outrage from "American neighbors unable to distinguish between 'Dutch' and 'Deutsch.'" Several Midwestern states actually passed laws prohibiting churches from holding services in any "foreign" language, unless full English translations had been given prior approval by the state legislature.
For the Kirschenverein, though, it wasn't nativists and nationalism behind the push to translate the church into English. It was religious competition. The big concern for the German United Evangelical Synod of the North America in the last decade of the 19th century: Lutherans.
The Lutherans had all their services in English at the time, and the Evangelical Synod leaders heard horror stories of youth across the Midwest abandoning the faith of their fathers and mothers for English-language Lutheranism.
It's a curious moment. A kind of tipping point for an immigrant community: there came a moment in the 1890s where, for a younger generation of German-Americans, churches they'd never attended more familiar, more inviting and less strange than the churches they'd grown up in, because of the issue of language.
The "religious marketplace" pushed the Evangelical Synod to adapt to America, in a sense, and so, about 50 years after it began, the immigrant church shed its immigrant language. For the sake of maintaining a connection to children and grandchildren. And 40 years after that, on the eve of the Second World War, the last remnant of the original language of the church was scribbled in synod meeting notes, and then was no more.
The Evangelical Synod was the last major German church to jettison its immigrant identity, one aspect of which was its language. By the time of the First World War, when Dutch pastors were finding their homes graffitied in "paint raids" with slogans such as "Be an American" and "Buy a Liberty Bond," the once-German churches in the American Midwest didn't really seem German anymore.
That wasn't the end of German-language worship in America, though. There are some small pockets of resistance to assimilation, and also ways in which assimilation has come to include, rather than exclude German-language prayer and worship. Assimilation, being what it is, doesn't seem to ever mean the total erasure of immigrant history. Instead there's a often kind of submersion, where "identity" becomes "heritage," which is another sort of identity.
It's accessible -- for what gets called, in cultural studies, "projects of the self" -- in part through the persistence of culture tourism and "heritage" consumer products.
For German-Americans, this means "German villages" in California and Georgia, an annual "Wurstfest in Texas, and companies selling imported German food, German-style windows (made in America), and "authentic German garden gnomes."
In the back of one the last remaining German-language papers in the United States, Troy, Michigan's Nordamerikanische Wochen-Post, one can find four listing for German-language church services:
- A Catholic Church in Detroit, St. Joseph's, where one can find "Feierliches Deutsches Hochamt mit geistlichem Gesang von deutschem Quartet (Die Minnesänger) an jedem vierten Sonntag des Monats um 10:30 Uhr morgen," "A solemn German high mass with spiritual singing from the German quartet (The Minstrals) on every fourth Sunday of the month at 10:30 a.m.," as well as a weekly German-language novena.
- St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Warren, Michigan, which has a bilingual, German-English service every Sunday at 10 a.m., according to the Wochen-Post.
- Gemeinde Gottes -- of a very small, strict Holiness denomination -- in Swartz Creek, Michigan, which seems to have retained German not as a preservation of heritage but as one way of maintaining a distinction from the surrounding culture and the churches deemed "apostate." They have a weekly "Bibel- und Gebetstunde" "Bible and prayer hour" in German, and a German-language service three Sunday evenings a month.
- Benediction Lutheran Church, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they hold one German-language service a month, "normalerweise" on the third Sunday of the month at 2 p.m.
There's been a strong trend away from "denominational histories," in recent years. One doesn't have to dig too deep into the records of various denominations and religious traditions, though, to find all sorts of interesting, enlightening aspects of American history, and "the American experience." Church history becomes immigration history becomes war-time conflict or generational relationships, becomes the religious marketplace, becomes identity formation.
The end of German-language prayers in America becomes -- curiously -- German-language prayers offered again, every third Sunday or with a special deutschem Quartet
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
A fascinating thing about demonology and explanations of exorcisms is the way theology -- sometimes very abstract theology -- is re-cast in very different terms.
So, for example, an anonymous Catholic priest from the Midwest who participates in about three exorcisms a day talked to the Catholic News Agency about the incarnation, as thought about in the context of demon possession. CNA reports:
This isn't so different than traditional Catholic theology of incarnation. But when those doctrines are illustrated with the image of a 13-year-old boy who falls down and starts growling in response to a priest's prayer, the context for the meaning of these ideas changes, and some aspects are more notable that they would be otherwise.
The idea that suffering is related to redemption, specifically, looks a lot different in this context:
So, for example, an anonymous Catholic priest from the Midwest who participates in about three exorcisms a day talked to the Catholic News Agency about the incarnation, as thought about in the context of demon possession. CNA reports:
"The early Church Fathers, including St. Jerome and St. Augustine, speculated that these angels rebelled 'because of the revelation to them of God’s plan of incarnation' and their 'repulsion at the notion that God, who is pure spirit and infinite, should become a man.'
For this reason, the priest observed, they have a 'fascination with physicality' and 'making people suffer.'
'So once the rite begins, normally [the demon] starts to manifest himself in the suffering person different ways - violence, changing of the face, changing of the voice [so it] is different,' he said."This means, according to the priest, 1) the demon is, from the demon's perspective, slumming; 2) the suffering person is suffering because of the incarnation; 3) suffering is inextricably linked to redemption.
This isn't so different than traditional Catholic theology of incarnation. But when those doctrines are illustrated with the image of a 13-year-old boy who falls down and starts growling in response to a priest's prayer, the context for the meaning of these ideas changes, and some aspects are more notable that they would be otherwise.
The idea that suffering is related to redemption, specifically, looks a lot different in this context:
"'These suffering people are becoming saints (by) the offering of their sacrifices' which God then receives and 'blesses large parts of the Church around the world.'
'When you remind the Devil of that it makes him furious,' because he knows he is losing and hence 'he wants to get what he can, while he can. If he can't win these peoples' souls, he wants to at least make their lives miserable.'"
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
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