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On Being: Bessel van der Kolk on Treating Trauma

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http://pastorkensnotes.com/2014/11/04/qa-on-why-are-there-so-many-homophobic-people-in-the-church/

The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called “bride-price”: a suitor’s family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman’s family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It’s easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a women, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused something of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice as a form of slavery. Anthropologists objected. Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, say, an ox— let alone a pair of sandals. After all, if you buy an ox, you don’t have any responsibilities to the ox. What you are really buying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases you. Marriage is entirely different, since a husband will normally have just as many responsibilities toward his wife as his wife will have toward him. It’s a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of all, if you were really buying a wife, you’d be able to sell her. Finally, the real significance of the payment concerns the status of the woman’s children: if he’s buying anything, it’s the right to call her offspring his own. 10

The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and “bride-price” was dutifully redubbed “bridewealth.” But they never really answered the question: What is actually happening here? When a Fijian suitor’s family presents a whale tooth to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, is this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future husband’s gardens ? Or is he purchasing the future fertility of her womb? Or is this a pure formality, the equivalent of the dollar that has to change hands in order to seal a contract? According to Rospabé, it’s none of these. The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible. The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

Graeber, David (2011-07-12). Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Kindle Locations 2604-2611). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

• Buzzfeed
• Dreher
• Salon
• The Dish: When does exploration become abuse?

• Andy Crouch on James Davison Hunters “How Not To Save the World”

Rather, we should embody a sacrificial love for our neighbors, of all faiths and none, expressed in acts of culture-making and institution-building that serve their good and leave the ultimate fate of our culture to the judgment and providence of God. And by this third essay, the strategic concern for élite presence has faded into the background—Hunter envisions Christians practicing that presence at the “periphery,” in the “center,” and everywhere in between.

A more practical question is what evangelicals might have done in the last century instead of retreating to the margins. A subcultural strategy can sometimes be wise—if nothing else, it preserves an identity distinct from the dominant culture. I spent some of my formative years among mainline Protestants for whom “faithful presence” was the very watchword, but in practice that meant nearly complete cultural accommodation. This is perhaps the greatest practical obstacle to enacting Hunter’s vision. Creating a strong alternative community to counter the dominant culture, while still boldly commissioning that community’s members for presence even in places of great cultural power, has proven quite the sticky wicket for two millennia now.

But how to love? Is not the church the place where this love becomes a tangible reality?  Continue reading →

Books and Culture

The Atlantic

But, as Armstrong points out in the book, “there is no universal way to define ‘religion,'” particularly when it comes to comparing mono- and polytheistic faiths. “In the West we see ‘religion’ as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals … whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities,” she writes. “But words in other languages that we translate as ‘religion’ almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing.” This is an important premise of one of Armstrong’s main arguments: It’s impossible make a coherent case about the role of religion in warfare and violence throughout history and across the world, simply because religion plays very different roles in different cultures.

For example, religious belief and practice in, say, ancient Mesopotamia were very different than what they have become in modernity—a period that Armstrong and many academics say began in the West in 1648, when peace treaties ending several major wars in Europe were signed in Westphalia, a region in present-day Germany. She describes the spread of more secular governments in the West and the decline of religion as a primary organizing force in many people’s lives during this period. Although “religious” violence has always had a political element, she argues, the political nature of warfare—even in wars with putatively religious justifications—has become even more pronounced in contemporary history.