Be ye therefore perfect...

Does cross-posting something on my blog that I wrote for a TexAgs count as cheating? I hope not.

Anyhow, this grew out of the "Christians, why don't you believe in... thread, this will be a reference point for Orthodox Christian soteriology. This is an important topic for discussion, even among Apostolic traditions, since the definition of salvation and why we need it differs even between the East and West. Orthodox soteriology will also sound foreign to protestants who hold to sola fide. I encourage readers to engage all linked articles and post thoughtful questions and dialogue. If you want to start a thread about your faith tradition's theory of salvation, please be my guest. =)

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect

(Matt. 5:48)

...till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ

(Eph. 4:13)

...as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

(2 Pet. 1:3-4)

The Orthodox understanding of salvation is often called deification or theosis. St. Athanasius notes in his treatise On the Incarnation that “God became man that man might become god.” St. Gregory Palamas tells us that we are able to become by grace what God is by nature The Orthodox notion of salvation is not juridical; that is, it is not simply justification for guilt. Valeria A. Karras, points this out in her paper Beyond Justification: An Orthodox Perspective:

Robert Eno has pointed out the second generation of Christians, the Apostolic Fathers, “have been seen as presenting an almost total disappearance of the Pauline point of view.” A search of Greek patristic literature on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae shows that, over a period of a couple of centuries that includes the theologically-rich fourth century, most Greek Fathers don’t talk much about dikaiosuvnh (“justification” or “righteousness”) except when exegeting a passage using that term. The striking exception is Gregory of Nyssa, the late fourth-century bishop who was younger brother to Basil of Caesarea, but, interestingly, when Gregory uses the term, it is almost always in the context of the true, Christian way of life, in other words, works of righteousness; neither Nyssa nor any other Eastern Father ever writes in terms of what Lutheranism calls “forensic justification” (some would claim that the mid-fourth century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius did, but we will return to this issue later).

The absence in Eastern Christianity of a soteriology in terms of forensic justification is serious because Orthodoxy believes not only in ecumenism across geographical space, but especially “ecumenism in time”, i.e., the need to be consistent with the theological tradition of the Church from the earliest centuries. Thus, the traditional Orthodox mind is immediately suspicious of biblical interpretations that have little or no root in the early life and theology of the Church; this is true in spades of particularly the forensic notion of justification, and of its consequent bifurcation of faith and works. Sola scriptura means little to the Orthodox, who as opposed to placing Scripture over the Church, have a full sense of Scripture’s crucial but interrelated place within the Church’s continuing life: the apostolic church communities which produced many of the books of the New Testament, the communities of the catholic Church which over a period of centuries determined which books circulating through various communities truly encapsulated the elements of the apostolic faith; the dogmas and Creed declared by the whole Church in response to the frequent controversies over the nature of the Trinity and of the theanthropos Jesus Christ, controversies which frequently arose precisely from dueling perspectives of which biblical texts were normative and of how those texts should be interpreted.

This of course does not mean that the Orthodox do not believe that each generation of Christians may receive new insights into Scripture, especially insights relevant in a given cultural context. However, it does mean that the new insights must remain consistent with earlier ones, and that one or two Pauline passages (and one specific interpretation of those passages) are not considered theologically normative – particularly as a foundation for a soteriological dogma – unless the early and continuing tradition of the Church show them consistently to have been viewed as such.

History is important in a second way. Because of its less juridical exegesis of Pauline soteriological statements, Eastern Christianity has never had anything approaching the kind of faith v. works controversies that have enveloped and (for both good and ill) theologically shaped the Christian West, whether one considers the late fourth-/early fifth-century Pelagian controversy or the 16th-century Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther. Rather, the East has maintained a somewhat distant and even puzzled attitude toward the theological polemics which have raged over justification in terms of faith or works.

The Orthodox notion of theosis is relational in that we become like God by communing with God, as was man’s created purpose. Mankind’s fall from grace was that Adam & Eve broke communion with God by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, rather than repenting and returning to --God, they persisted in sin—Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. God removed them from Paradise as a mercy since if they were to further disobey and eat of the Tree of Life they would become eternally sinful. It is instructive that the original sin was a distortion or perversion of created intent: mankind was created for communion with God, but rather than following God’s plan for theosis they partook of the tree to become “like God.”

The consequence of the broken communion and persistence in sin is that man became subject to Death. Christ effects our salvation by restoring communion in His person—fully man and fully God, and by destroying Death. He calls us to “be perfect” because He has made that perfection possible…not easy…but possible, through imitation of Him.

When the Son of God assumed our humanity in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, the process of our being renewed in God’s image and likeness was begun. Thus, those who are joined to Christ, through faith, in Holy Baptism begin a process of re-creation, being renewed in God’s image and likeness. We become, as St. Peter writes, “partakers of the divine nature” (1:4)

Because of the Incarnation of the Son of God, because the fullness of God has inhabited human flesh, being joined to Christ means that it is again possible to experience deification, the fulfillment of our human destiny. That is, through union with Christ, we become by grace what God is by nature—we “become children of God” (Jn 1:12).

“Deification” p. 1692, The Orthodox Study Bible, 2008, Thomas Nelson Publishers

With the Incarnation, God has assumed and glorified our flesh and has consecrated and sanctified our humanity. He has also given us the Holy Spirit. As we acquire more of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives, we become more like Christ, and we have the opportunity of being granted, in this life, illumination or glorification. When we speak of acquiring more of the Holy Spirit, it is in the sense of appropriating to a greater degree what has actually been given to us already by God. We acquire more of what we are more able to receive. God the Holy Spirit remains ever constant.

Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature by Mark Shuttleworth.

All of this is intended to be worked out in “fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), and while we are corporately saved (2 Pet. 3:9), I’m called to worry about my own shortcomings and simply love everyone else. Fr. Matthew puts a nice twist on the mote:log injunction (Matt 7:5) by telling me to keep my eyes on my own plate. And while he is speaking specifically about fasting, the concept maps nicely onto thinking of myself as “chief among sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15).

Comparative Religion

I wrote this in response to a thread at TexAgs.com asking whether or not the resident Christians had studied other faith traditions. Please forgive any inaccuracies I may have written below, as my study has been self-initiated and is, in all likelihood, incomplete.

In-between my formative years when my family attended first an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church (Worth Baptist, Ft. Worth), then Southern Baptist churches (Matthew Road, Grand Prairie; First Baptist, Euless) and my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, I did study Buddhism and Taoism. Growing up, I went to my best friend's synagogue (Congregation Beth Shalom, Arlington). In college I had gone from my Baptist roots (First Baptist, Bryan) to non-denominational (Grace Baptist, College Station). When my then fiance and I started talking about churches we visited churches based on her background as well (St. Thomas Episcopal, College Station). We ended up halfway between our faith backgrounds (A&M United Methodist, College Station).

Our pastor there, Buddy Walker, a Baptist convert himself, helped me start to understand issues such as infant baptism. When I brought my thoughts about Buddhism to him, he also made the point that the same Christ that said to love our enemies probably wouldn't have much problem with most of what Buddha said.

I have in the last two years done fairly extensive reading on Baha'i and Islam. What I have found in all of my reading and participation is that there seems to be something innate in most people that draws them to be part of something bigger than themselves. I concur with prof. gradoo that I'm likely to have approached all of my study through the lens of some basic "Christian" assumptions, but I've also shattered some of those assumptions along the way (e.g. OSAS, Sola Scriptura).

The assumptions that I have left are that we are intentionally created (though I don't take a dogmatic position on how or when); that Christ is God; and that our calling is to love one another. Besides Christianity, Buddhism & Taosim come the closest to providing a framework for understanding my experience. The difference for me between these two and Christ is that instead of the person being subsumed in an everythingness of Being, in Christianity, the person becomes an integral part of unity in God, but retains his personhood. For a great meditation on Lao Tzu as a pre-Christian prophet (ala Aristotle) see Christ the Eternal Tao by Fr. Damascene Christensen.

Coming to Orthodox Christianity, I struggled with some concepts (e.g. veneration of icons, the role of the Theotokos, confession) more than others that were more familiar in my upbringing (e.g. the Trinity). What I discovered is that while there is a wealth of texts and traditions in Christianity, so too there are a wealth in other faith traditions as well. This is, finally, what I think faith is. I decided that I would trust Christ's word that he had established a temporal church and that it would persist (Matt. 16:18) and be led by God into all Truth (John 16:13). Along with trusting that Christ’s church existed and persisted to our times and had preserved Christ’s teachings intact and unaltered, I had to trust that those things which I didn’t cognitively understand would be made clear.

With respect to the comparative religion, I don’t disbelieve Judaism but think that Orthodox Christianity is a fulfillment of the Law and Prophets in Christ (and Judaism post-Javneh has a flavor of damage control for the “Christian problem”). Islam is a radical monotheistic reaction to Christianity. Baha’i is a universalist reformation of Islam. Buddhism/Taoism, like many pre-Christian religions (including Native American religion and Zoroastrianism) reveal mystical truths which are fully revealed in Christ. I’ve not studied Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, or Sikhism in any depth past casual reading. Confucianism is more of an system of ethics than a faith, and as such isn’t necessarily at odds with Christianity. In the case of Hinduism and Jainism, I think that multiple gods and/or ancestor worship can be influenced by evil spirits and/or point to later, more fully revealed truths in Christianity. Sikhism also points to a “Universal God,” which is beyond human ken…also has the ability to be interpreted as fulfilled through the Trinitarian understanding we have of God as uncreated and outside of time.

The bottom line to comparative religion for me is a truth that I discovered in Orthodoxy (it certainly wasn’t an aspect of the Evangelism Explosion training I received in the Baptist Church) is that I am called to focus on my own salvation, to work that out in “fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) and not worry about what someone else is or isn’t doing, but to love them as icons of Christ.

Orthodox Perspective on Ordaining Women Priests

With a nod to the folks over at Vox Nova, who made me think hard enough to write something down.

The Anglican Church has voted to approve the ordination of female bishops, further intensifying rifts caused by the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The teaching I’ve received from my spiritual father, Fr. Matthew, on the matter of a female priesthood goes like this:

On either side of the beautiful gates there is an icon of Christ (right) and the Theotokos (left).

As icons, they represent the spiritual and physical reality of actual persons, and as such reflect the glory of God. They are also icons of perfect manhood and womanhood; that is, the highest calling that any man can aspire to is that of priest, and the highest calling any woman can aspire to is that of mother. Not all men will be priests and not all women will be mothers, but certainly no man will ever be a woman (plastic surgery and hormone supplements notwithstanding) and no woman will ever be a priest because these we are specifically created for different functions.

Fr. Alister Anderson has written a response to the Anglican decision to ordain women in the priesthood and his comments echo the teaching I related above:

We Christians who advocate only a male priesthood as being the only valid apostolic ministry of the Church do not in any way deny that women have equal rights and opportunities to work. We believe that women should be paid commensurately with men for their labor and skill. But certain leaders deprecate the male priesthood as being a bastion of male chauvinism and a violation of civil and equal rights for women. Nonsense! The Church is not a secular institution governed by democratic processes. The Church is a spiritual organism and not just a secular organization. She is a spiritual and supernatural monarchy with God as Her king and supreme judge. We Orthodox Christians declare that while men and women are equal in the eyes of God and under the secular law, they are very different in their human nature because God has created them for different functions. A bishop, priest and deacon have a specific function within the family of the Church. To ordain women to the sacred ministry would only confuse and destroy that function. In terms of human function a woman can no more be a priest than a man can be a mother.

The full article

At long last...an update

It seems people (my dad) check this site and notice when I don't post. Since last I posted, the world has continued to move. Marking such progress, its of special note that the Northwest Passage, long sought at great cost, is open for the first time in recorded history.

I've discovered that there are more Kotineks out there! Hi Lauren, if you're reading.

While I voted for Ron Paul in the primary, it doesn't mean that I've permanently crossed the aisle. I held out hope that if there were a Republican candidate with good plans for foreign policy, trade, and health care it would force the remaining Democratic candidate field into more substantial positions.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy reading the updates and I hope I get a chance to write again soon!

Night Falls on Lake Somerville, July 4, 2008

To Be, or Not To Be

I'm having an epistemological, ontological, existential crisis with regard to my doctoral program. In a recent course geared toward helping students prepare our dissertation proposals, I discovered a huge gap in my education.

The opening essay to Conceptions of Giftedness, by James Borland, makes a compelling case for dismissing with the notion of defining giftedness. My very first reaction was a feeling of validation since I found correspondence between Borland's points and some ideas I had been developing independently since my introduction to the field. One such issue is the need for an umbrella term to describe giftedness and retardation (my suggestion is lamentably uninspired: "differently abled"). I suggested the need for such a term since there seems to be some emotional baggage attached to the term "gifted" that leads some administrators and teachers to believe that gifted students will fend for themselves in an average educational setting. The other point of correspondence that I found was with my idea that early entrance programs are an imperfect solution to the need for accelerated learning opportunities for gifted students. I suggested that instead we should have an educational system that provides access to suitable learning opportunities for students from birth through college, regardless of age.

Borland's solution is simple and elegant. If the end goal of programs to serve gifted students is ability-appropriate educational opportunities, the amount of time and energy we are spending on identification is a ridiculous waste of time, not to mention a process fraught with uncertainty and inequity. Instead, we should spend our resources ensuring that all students have an ability-appropriate education. In so doing, the gifted constituency, however one wants to define it, has their needs met, as do all other students, including those that might have been otherwise marginalized.

Which leads me to my crisis/es. Most of my chosen field has taken up the banner of one or another definitions of giftedness, and usually, some method of concluding that a person meets those criteria. I don't think that we can accurately say what giftedness is, figure out how to determine who is actually gifted, or continue to have a viable field while recognizing the ethical, political, and professional implications of being so unsure.

Ive come to the conclusion that I'm not satisfied with the rigor of my doctoral program so far. I don't have a good command of the literature (as evidenced by my startling discovery), I'm not confident in the soundness of some of the major theories in my field, and I'm not convinced of the viability of my degree. I need to immerse myself in the literature and find my way back out.

Classics of the Form

My sumbission to the VH1 Classic Rock Playlist contest

Playlist generated with Project Playlist

Do Redheads Have More Brains?

The following is an article that I read for the first time as an adolescent. I had just started high school and this article helped me find a sense of pride in an appearance otherwise ripe for ridicule. At a time when home computers were still very new and the internet as a public sphere was unheard of, I remember carefully typing the article word for word; I even tried very hard to match the fonts used in the magazine. I still have the original article, pages ripped from the magazine, stuffed in a case with other mementos of childhood.

I contacted the author, Dan Rottenberg, to see if the article is available online since I am fond of referring others to this article in hopes that it would provide a similar sense of pride in their red hair. Mr. Rottenberg responded that it is not available digitally elsewhere, and granted me permission to reproduce it here. I am honored and proud to do so.

Do Redheads Have More Brains?
By Dan Rottenberg
Town & Country, August 1991

On a recent trip to London, I engaged in a little mental game. Everywhere I went, I asked my English friends and acquaintances to pick out the five most important people in the past thousand years of British history. Without any prompting from me, they invariably produced a list that was comprised of William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill. Occasionally, in the hope of tripping me up, someone would toss in a more obscure fellow like James I (who united England and Scotland) or a nonpolitical figure like Shakespeare. No matter: when they were finished, I would ask, “Now, what do all these people have in common?” After allowing a minute or so for sufficient head-scratching and brow-furrowing, I would point dramatically to the answer: my own bright red hair.

It may not mean anything, but it is a mystery worth pondering. Redheads make up only about 2 percent of the world’s population, and some 4 percent of Americans. Yet, they’ve produced 15 percent of U.S. Presidents, not to mention some of the world’s greatest overachievers [see list below], attaining a significance far out of proportion to their numbers. Can anyone imagine American history without Christopher Columbus, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Literature without Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw or Sinclair Lewis? Music without Vivaldi, Paderewski or Beverly Sills? Sports without Red Grange, Don Budge or Red Shoedinst? Crime without Jesse James or Lizzie Borden? In his 1943 book The Hero in History, Sidney Hook suggested that only a handful of people can be said to have altered the course of world history, and of the half-dozen examples he cited, three---Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin---were redheads.

We carrot-tops take great comfort in such recitations because, frankly, the world has given us pretty rough time. Throughout the Middle Ages, male redheads were considered “sons of the devil” and, as a result, experiences great difficulty finding wives. And at the height of Europe’s witch hunts, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many women were stripped, shaved, pricked and otherwise tortured, then put to death simply because they were redheads. Painters since the Renaissance have generally depicted prostitutes with red hair. In nineteenth century Germany, barbers did a thriving business in concoctions aimed at altering their red-headed customers’ hair color. An American newspaper once explained to its readers that twenty-one Cincinnati men who had married red-headed women were color-blind and had mistaken their sweethearts’ tresses for black. And who could be more revolting than Dickens’ Fagin, in Oliver Twist, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured my a quantity of matted red hair?

“Everyone stands in horror” of red hair, said the seventeenth-century French scholar Jean-Baptist Thiers, “because Judas, it is said, was red-haired.” But Christians hold no monopoly on such superstitions. At one time, the Brahmins of India were forbidden to marry red-haired women. And in ancient Egypt, redheads were worshipped---and occasionally sacrificed ---as fertility symbols.

Even in our own, more secular age, redheads are still widely regarded as passionate, hot-tempered and adventurous. Alice Crimmins, the Queens barmaid convicted in the mid Seventies of murdering her two children, suffered in the jury’s estimation at least partly because she had flaming red hair, opines Kenneth Gross, author of The Alice Crimmins Case. Conversely, red-headed men are perceive as goofy characters: take, for instance, Bozo, Howdy Doody and Ronald McDonald.

“In the movies, there are no red-headed leading men,” says Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, himself a redhead. Adds California beauty-pageant promoter Steve Douglas, the 36-year-old founder of Redheads International, “You can watch TV all night and never see and attractive male redhead. There are no top TV stars or other people to help a little red-headed kid who’s growing up form an attractive image of himself.” That isn’t entirely true: who on television is more influential than Ted Koppel? But perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule.

My own entry into the world in 1942, is also instructive. Upon seeing my bright red hair, my relatives quickly split into two philosophical camps. The pessimists said, “What a shame!” The optimists said, “It’ll probably change.” My parents were actually pleased with my hair color, but mystified at to whence it had come, since both of them were brunettes. But a few months later, while showing me off to her grandmother, my mother noticed that the aging woman’s gray hair had a pinkish tinge. When my mother asked about it, my 78-year-old great-grandmother reluctantly admitted that, as a girl in czarist Russia, she had indeed been a redhead. But in that time and place, red hair had been the mark of a “fallen woman”—so once her red tresses had faded, she had never mentioned it again.

To be sure, we redheads have had our moments of glory. Red hair was fashionable in Elizabethan England, for the simple reason that Elizabeth I herself was a redhead and proud of it. The reddish-gold-haired Venetian women portrayed in paintings of Titian—himself a redhead inspired women in sixteenth-century Italy and Greece to tint their hair in imitation. Hair dye, in fact, is said to have originated with the Gauls—the men , not the women—who colored their hair red. And many red-heads like to be conspicuous: the late comedienne Lucille Ball imported fifty pounds of henna from Egypt early in her career and later imported and additional 100 pounds—enough to maintain her distinctive brilliant red tint for a lifetime.

The real trouble with being a redhead, you see, lies not so much with whether red hair is in favor or out, but in the fact that redheads are the objects of extreme reactions: if we’re not being put on a pedestal, we’re being sacrificed on an altar. Either way, to be a redhead is to stand out in a crowd. As movie actress Myrna Loy once observed, “Red hair isolates you.”

To grapple with those feelings of isolation, redheads periodically band together in support groups. In 1977 a group of Brown University students launched an organization called Redheads Are Special People—at a party whose menu featured red punch, strawberry ice cream and red candy—and the organization subsequently expanded to thirty other college campuses (although he Brown chapter disbanded in 1986). In it’s heyday, the Brown chapter of RASP sponsored and annual thirty-hour dance marathon to raise funds for the American Cancer Society (since redheads are especially susceptible to skin cancer), but most of its energies were devoted to defending the honor of redheads whenever it was maligned in the mass media.

That was also what drove Steve Douglas, a former musician who in 1982 left his job in a band, to launch Redheads International, which produced a newsletter, cosmetics and T-shirts bearing slogans like, “Don’t mess with red’ and “Redheads do it in color.” The Redhead Book, self-published in 1982 by Al Sacharov of Takoma Park, Maryland, sold several thousand copies, prompting New America Library to come out in 1985 with the Redhead’s Handbook, a sort of “everything you’ve always wanted to know about redheads but were afraid to ask” treatise.

This is not to suggest that red-heads are about to emerge as a new political force. Even in Scotland and Ireland, redheads are believed to comprise only some 10 percent of the population. Sacharov says redheads make up nearly 5 percent of the populations of Russia, Denmark, England, and Sweden, but only 2 percent of Americans. RASP claims that there are 9 million red-headed Americans, which is more than 4 percent. (DO not ask how these statistics are compiled: red-headology is perhaps the least scientific of the sciences.) On the other hand, redheads do turn up just about everywhere: among Hungarians, Egyptians, Australians, Israelis, and even among certain Nigerian tribes.

Obviously, most of the myths about redheads can be traced to the fact that they are such a tiny and conspicuous minority. But do any of the superstitions have any basis in fact? In the words of Tom Robbins, red-headed author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, “Could they be right about redheads? Are we really moonstruck mutants whose weaknesses are betrayed by the sun?”

The study of redheads as a science has long been neglected, partly because geneticists and dermatologists have had more pressing matters on their minds, and partly because of the lack of animal models suitable for experimentation (the yellow mouse is the closest approximation). British dermatologist H.C. Sorby, who discovered the “pink constituent” of human hair in 1878, believed that the substance influenced nothing beyond one’s hair color. As recently as 1952, the existence of this “pink constituent’ was challenged; conventional dermatological wisdom held that red hair was caused solely by the absence of the factors that make hair dark.

But a smattering of studies conducted over the past twenty years suggests that while most of the ancient folklore is ridiculous, there may be a germ of truth to the notion that redheads are physiologically different from others in significant ways—and these differences can sometimes affect redheads’ behavior.

The color of hair depends on the amount and type of melanin (dark pigment) granules present in the cortex (central core) of the hairs, and this in turn is dictated by the hair-color genes we inherit from our parents. All mammals, including redheads, have melanin, but redheads have much less of it than others do. Just as dark colors tend to obscure light ones, so a very active gene will obscure a red gene—which explains why it usually takes two red-haired parents to produce a red-haired child. (Not always, though, as my case demonstrates: because it’s produced by a recessive gene, red hair often skips a generation or two.)

What wasn’t known until the mid Eighties was just what substance (if any), in the absence of melanin, made redheads’ hair red—rather than, say, green or blue. But in 1969, after conducting a series of experiments on humans and animals, Dr. Peter Flesch of the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the substance that causes red-headedness is iron-based. Thus a redhead’s pigmentary system operates somewhat differently from those of brunettes and blonds, whose pigment is predominantly melanistic: a redhead’s hair and skin are more vulnerable to the effects of sun, wind, cold heat or careless handling. Flesch concluded that red coloring has a great deal to do with redheads’ unique genetic and historical development. Unfortunately, Flesch died before his study was published, and he was unable to pursue its mind-boggling implications any further.

More recently, two dermatologists at the Harvard medical school, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Madhu Pathak, classified the people of the world according to the reaction of their skin to the sun. There are six categories. The first group—people whose skin burns most easily, always peels, never tans—consists entirely of blue-eyed, freckled redheads, mostly of Celtic lineage. A few redheads with splotchy pigmentation turned up in the second group—people who burn easily but minimally and can tan to some extent—but this group consists mostly of blonds. There are very few redheads in the remaining four groups, which consist of people who have darker more sun-resistant types of skin.

This study reinforced the view that redheads are set apart from the rest of humanity in important physical ways. As Pathak puts it, “Redheads are three-time losers.” For one thing, he says, red pigment is an inadequate filter of sunlight, so redheads’ skin is more likely to burn when it is exposed to the sun, and wrinkle as it ages. For another, redheads are more susceptible to skin cancer than anyone else. When ultraviolet rays damage DNA—the “genetic blueprints” of life—darker skin types can repair the damage, but redheads’ skin can’t.

Some scientists speculate that the physical gulf separating the reds from the non-reds traces back to the dawn of human evolution. In 1952, the dermatologist F.J.G. Ebling wrote a monograph for the World Health Organization, which noted, among other things, that redheads are generally more numerous in northern latitudes. Dr. Flesch seized on this point in 1969 and theorized that the first specimens of Homo sapiens lived in colder climates—usually in the north—a conclusion he deduced from his belief that they had a hairy coat covering their entire body. According to him, the eventual disappearance of this hair enabled mankind to thrive in warmer climates as well.

The disappearance of body hair also made human skin vulnerable to the sun, however. At that point, Flesch theorized, when exposed to warmer climates, red-headed humans with darker hair and skin thrived. But others, who were red-headed and fair-skinned, were so vulnerable to the sun that they only thrived in the colder northern latitudes, which is where most redheads are found this day.

This theory holds forth the intriguing possibility that the first humans may all have been redheads—that the development of darker hair and skin were later stages in human evolution. To be sure, Flesch’s thesis represents a minority opinion: most scientist think the first human-like creatures appeared not in the cold north, but in eastern and southern Africa and Java. But Flesch bolstered his thesis with this tantalizing evidence: red hair shafts are the thickest. A redhead needs only 90,000 hairs to give the appearance of a full head of hair; by contrast, a black-haired person requires 108,000, a brunette 110,000 and a blond 140,000. That being the case, argued Flesch, it’s not unreasonable to presume that redheads’ thicker hair is a survival from the dawn of human evolution, when thick hair provided necessary protection from the cold.

Do these physical differences influence redheads’ behavior? That question hasn’t been studied. But one researchers findings seem to suggest that, for whatever reasons, redheads do behave differently from other people. In 1977, Israeli psychiatrist Michael Bar reported that red-headed children are three or four times more likely to develop “hyperactive syndrome”—whose symptoms include overexciteability, a short attention span, easily sparked feelings of frustration and, usually, excessive aggressiveness.

Bar arrived at these conclusions after comparing the behavior of forty-five red-headed boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 12 with that of a control group of non-red-headed children. The evidence from such a sampling, of course, is far from conclusive. Still, Bar contends, the study points to a generic link between red hair and hyperactive behavior. “It is possible,” he adds, “that the characteristics attributed to certain ethnic groups, like the Vikings’ adventurousness or the Irish temperament, are connected to the high incidence of redheads among them.”

Since both my head and my daughter’s are as red as they come, and since neither of us has exhibited any of the symptoms described by Bar, I naturally give his claim short shrift. Besides, even if you could prove that the Irish are innately hot-tempered, that wouldn’t prove a link with their hair color: as stated before, redheads comprise only about 10 percent of the population of Ireland.

If many redheads seem aggressive, overexcitable or easily frustrated, the most likely reason is that they’re responding to the way people treat them. Being a redhead can be exhilarating or traumatic, but it’s rarely dull.

“I’ve been watched my whole life,” says Sandy Rubin of Philadelphia, who has flaming red tresses. “I walk into a room and I’m noticed instantly.” Another red-haired friend of mine notes that, in the presence of red-haired women, even older men become adolescent, frisky and familiar: “They feel they already know your name, which is ‘Red.’”

Movie star Arlene Dahl, who claims direct descent from the tenth-century Norwegian explorer Erik the Red, argues that, contrary to the stereotype, the typical red-headed personality is characterized by confidence, inner security and a sense of humor. “I think men are fond of red-headed women because generally we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” she says. “Since childhood, many of us have been teased about our red hair and freckles, and we’re used to it.”

Are redheads really different from everyone else, or do they just act differently because they’re perceived as different? It’s a chicken-and-egg question, so you can answer it however you wish. Personally, I subscribe to Flesch’s theory that redheads are endowed with more iron than other mortals. It doesn’t change anything, but it’s comforting to think about on a summer’s day, as I sit alone beneath an umbrella, swathed in towels, watching my blond or brunette friends frolic on a sunny beach.


A Red-Headed Hall of Fame


WOODY ALLEN (born 1935), film director
ANN-MARGRET (born 1941), actress
ARNOLD (“RED”) AUERBACH (born 1917), basketball coach
LUCILLE BALL (1911-1989) , actress
WALTER (“RED”) BARBER (born 1908), sports announcer
BORIS BECKER (born 1967), German tennis champion
SARAH BERNHARDT (1844-1923), actress
LIZZIE BORDEN (1860-1927), acquitted of murder
DON BUDGE (born 1915), tennis champion
JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986), actor
MICHAEL CAINE (born 1933), actor
JIMMY CARTER (born 1924), U.S. President
WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874-1965), British Prime Minister
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451-1506), Italian explorer
CALVIN COOLIDGE (1872-1933), U.S. President
ALICE CRIMMINS (born 1938), convicted murderer
OLIVER CROMWELL (1599-1658), British Lord Protector
GEORGE A. CUSTER (1839-1876), U.S. Cavalry officer
ARLENE DAHL (born 1924), actress
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886), poet
ELIZABETH I (1533-1603), Queen of England
ERIK THE RED (tenth century A.D.), Norwegian navigator
MIA FARROW (born 1945), actress
SARAH FERGUSON (born 1959), Duchess of York
LYNETTE (‘SQUEAKY”) FROMME (born 1948), Presidential assailant
GREER GARSON (born 1908), actress
JOHN GLENN (born 1921), astronaut and U.S. Senator
ARTHUR GODFREY (1903-1983), radio and TV personality
HAROLD (“RED”) GRANGE (1904-1989), football player
RED GROOMS (born 1937), artist
NELL GWYN (1650-1687), actress
RITA HAYWORTH (1918-1987), actress
HENRY VIII (1491-1547), King of England
KATHERINE HEPBURN (born 1909), actress
WILLIAM (“RED”) HOLTZMAN (born 1920), basketball coach
RON HOWARD (born 1954), actor/director
ISABELLA I (1451-1547), Queen of Spain
JAMES I (1566-1625), King of England
JESSE JAMES (1847-1882), outlaw
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), U.S. President
VAN JOHNSON (born 1916), actor
JOHN PAUL JONES (1747-1792), U.S. Naval Commander
SONNY JURGENSEN (born 1934), football player
DANNY KAYE (1913-1987), actor
JOHN F. KENNEDY (1917-1963), U.S. President
TED KOPPEL (born 1940), television journalist
ROD LAVER (born 1938), tennis champion
VLADIMIR LENIN (1870-1924), Russian revolutionary
SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951), novelist
MYRNA LOY (born 1905), actress
MAN O’ WAR (“BIG RED”), champion Thoroughbred
SHIRLEY MACLAINE (born 1934), actress
BETTE MIDLER (born 1945), actress/singer
NAPOLEON I (1769-1821), French emperor
NERO (37-68), Roman emperor
MAUREEN O’HARA (born 1921), actress
IGNACE JAN PADEREWSKI (1860-1941), Polish pianist and statesman
BONNIE RAITT (born 1949), singer
VANESSA REDGRAVE (born 1937), actress
WALTER REUTHER (1907-1970), labor leader
MOLLY RINGWALD (born 1968), actress
TIM ROBBINS (born 1936), novelist
CHARLES (“RED”) RUFFING (born 1904), baseball player
JILL ST. JOHN (born 1940), actress
SALOME (14-62 A.D.?), Biblical dancer
MARGARET SANGER (1883-1966), birth-control pioneer
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616), English playwright
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950), Irish playwright
MOIRA SHEARER (born 1926), actress/dancer
BEVERLY SILLS (born 1929), opera singer
RED SKELTON (born 1913), comedian
MAGGIE SMITH (born 1934), actress
WALTER (“RED”) SMITH (1905-1982), sportswriter
BLAZE STARR (born 1932), stripper
DANIEL (“RUSTY”) STAUB (born 1944), baseball player
TITIAN (1487-1576), Italian painter
SPENCER TRACY (1900-1967), actor
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910), author
MARTIN VAN BUREN (1782-1862), U.S. President
VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890), artist
GWEN VERDON (born 1925), singer/dancer
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1675-1743), Italian composer
MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN (1892-1918), German aviator
ROBERT PENN WARREN (1905-19889), U.S. Poet Laureate
GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732-1799), U.S. President
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR (1028-1087), King of England
TOM WOLFE (born 1931), writer

This article originally appeared in Town & Country, August 1991. Copyright 1991 by Dan Rottenberg. Reprinted with the author's permission.
Readers may learn more about Dan Rottenberg and read more of his work at http://www.danrottenberg.com

My Journey to Orthodoxy

Yesterday after I posted a little "gem" of political insight written some time ago, I realized that my blog is very heavily weighted toward political commentary. Though the situation in our world requires some action on that front, I didn't ever have the intention of making this my political pulpit. I also realized that, unlike several of the orthodox blogs I read occasionally, I didn't have the story of my journey to Orthodoxy posted. So, in the spirit of digging things out of the hard drive, here is the story of my journey as I wrote it just over two years ago.

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My journey to Orthodoxy started about a year before I had ever heard of such a creature. As part of our preparations for marriage, my wife and I had been meeting regularly with Rev. Buddy Walker at A&M United Methodist Church. I was raised in a series of progressively more liberal Baptist churches, and Ashley had been raised in the Episcopalian Church. We both deigned to visit the denomination of the other, and both found worship in the unfamiliar setting unfulfilling.
As we began wedding preparations, one of our chief concerns was finding a beautiful church to be wed in. A&M United Methodist, because of its prominence and classic architecture, was an early favorite. We contacted the church office and found that a prerequisite for marriage in the church for non-members was attendance at seven worship services. We began visiting A&M United Methodist for worship in the Spring of 1998.

Also at this time I was taking a course on “Nature in Literature” and found the nature communing spirit of Emerson, Muir, Matthiessen, and Dillard very appealing. Further, I found in these works mystic connection and affirmation of the connection of spiritual and material things. I was especially interested to read the Buddhist thought in Matthiessen and even attended a talk given by a visiting Buddhist monk that semester.

When I talked with Rev. Buddy, I brought up the attraction that these philosophies held for me and his response was the first time that I believe that I had really been shaken out of a spiritual slumber. He indicated that the Christ who had spoken the Beatitudes would have no problem with the tenets of peace and communion in many Eastern philosophies. Rev. Buddy and I spend many afternoons together talking, especially because, at that point, his journey mirrored my own: he was raised in the Baptist church and had become Methodist as a young adult. The biggest points of contention for me, coming from an evangelical protestant background, were the things that Rev. Buddy told me about infant baptism and salvation as a process instead of an intellectual decision.
As I read the articles that Rev. Buddy gave me and listened to the sermons given by Rev. Charles Anderson on Sundays, I generally became more aware of the truth in the position that I was balking at. By the beginning of 1999, Ashley and I had decided to become full members of the Methodist Church, effectively negating our obligation to prove our attendance to be married. Of course, our attendance promptly fell off.

For a number of reasons, about six months prior to our wedding, I fell into a spiritual and emotional funk which gradually grew to a crisis. As any man at a time of crisis will, I thrashed about, looking for any sort of life preserver I could find. As it happened, my salvation had been sitting on my bookshelf for a year or so. My mom and stepfather are fond of giving me books as gifts; and I am equally fond of receiving them. The book, given to me by my parent, was The God Who Is There, by Francis Schaeffer. In this book, Schaeffer takes American society to task for becoming so relativistic, and, in the process, making God an optional entity. I mentioned to my parents that this book had made an incredible impact on my life, and I would be interested in reading more by the same author. This life-affirming work helped me re-establish perspective, along with the loving patience of my then-fiancée, and I was feeling generally good again.

My parents, meanwhile, started looking for Schaeffer in the library and bookstores. Instead of the Protestant apologist Francis, they found his son Frank. Frank Schaeffer’s book Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion was their introduction to Orthodoxy. My parents had the opportunity after reading the book to visit Orthodox churches in California and near their home in St. Louis and were generally making their way toward the East. They sent me a copy of Dancing Alone for my birthday just before our wedding. In a phone conversation with my mom, I asked her what Orthodoxy was about. Her answer frustrated me and, admittedly, turned me away. She said, “you have to experience it.” I put the book away and went on with life. I know that my mother is an intelligent, articulate woman, and I just couldn't understand how she couldn't convey the sense of her experience.

Just after our wedding and honeymoon, my National Guard unit did a rotation at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, CA. I packed several books, among them Dancing Alone. My trip to the Mojave Desert was challenging for a number of reasons, among them my recent diagnosis with asthma and the harsh conditions, including wind, sand, and CS gas, which exacerbated it. Our presence at NTC was just a handful of support personnel attached to a company in our home battalion, guys who we knew vaguely, but not men we had trained with on a regular basis. Once at NTC, we were reassigned to the Quartermaster of the battalion that our tank company was sent to support. No one knew us personally, we were not faces—we were assets. Our experience at NTC was plagued by poor leadership, which at one point lost two vehicles in a night road march through the desert, and at another point left a remote fuel point unsupplied for two days. To make matters worse, the NCOIC of our detachment was a timid despot that refused to act as a filter for the abuse that came from above. Early in our stay at NTC, one of our small group of six, my co-driver, was called home because of the death of a grandparent. As a result, I was paired with the above NCOIC.

I was disappointed, but resigned. Of everyone in our group, my personality was best suited for rolling with the punches. Also, as a result I had lots of time to think and read. I read all of my other books before picking up Dancing Alone, but once I began reading, I found myself having an transcendent experience. Here was someone putting together pieces that I had been trying to sort out of all of the faith professions I had encountered over the years, and was making sense. Granted, Frank’s approach is acerbic, for which reason he has been subject to censure by some Orthodox bodies, but it worked well for me as a generally disillusioned seeker. My joy was so complete that I composed a song.
Upon returning home, I began my search in earnest. However, there were no Orthodox churches in Bryan/College Station; the nearest was in Houston, and I was not so committed yet to make the weekly pilgrimage. I did find out that the Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a student group at A&M, sponsored bi-monthly Liturgy at All Faiths Chapel. I started attending these sporadically, convincing Ashley to visit even less frequently. In early Spring of 2001, my journey had a jump start.

My parents had, as a result of reading and searching on their own, decided to become catechumens at a Greek Orthodox church near their home. We traveled to St. Louis to see my parents and two younger siblings be baptized at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church. We also had the privilege of seeing my parents’ marriage blessed. Over the course of the weekend, I had the opportunity to speak with their priest and sponsors, as well as experience my first Liturgy in a “real” church. The combination of sight, sound, smell, and touch made the experience almost overwhelming. Having come from a non-liturgical background, I felt completely out of place—but like I had finally made it home.

Once back in Bryan/College Station, I became even more ardent in my desire to learn more about the historical church. My interest coincided with the establishment of a mission community sponsored by an Antiochian parish in Houston. I attended Liturgies when I could, both on campus and at the mission. I was sincerely impressed by the talk given by Fr. Peter Gillquist about how his group of evangelical protestants had left the Campus Crusade group looking to find the authentic faith of the New Testament. What they discovered in the end was that the Church is alive and well.

The mission group started hosting Thursday-night discussion groups that acted as a catechism of sorts. I began to see in Orthodox theology the missing pieces, such as the ideas of the linking of spiritual and physical things that I had searched for in the Far Eastern philosophies. The overriding sense I had the more I studied Orthodoxy was that it was cohesive, not only internally, but externally as well. I read books such as Ladder of the Beatitudes by Jim Forrest, and Sacred Symbols that Speak, vol I & II that reaffirmed biblical Christianity on the firm ground of two millennia of consistent interpretation. I will readily admit that the appeal to historical evidence was one of the greatest factors in my decision to become Orthodox. I find it intellectually and spiritually fulfilling to affirm that God participates in, yet is not bound by the laws of, His creation.

On that note, the mysticism of the Church fulfilled the inveterate fantasy lover in me. Having had spiritual experiences in my life, and being presented with the overwhelming evidence of the supernatural across cultures and time, I found the complete disavowal of mysticism in the evangelical protestant tradition unfulfilling. In Orthodoxy I found some concrete answers, but more importantly, an allowance for the interaction of the spiritual and physical.

After having studied and spent a lot of time participating in worship, I contacted Fr. Matthew, the priest at St. Joseph Antiochian Orthodox Church in Houston—our sponsor parish, in the spring of 2002 to let him know that I felt that I had overstayed my welcome as a seeker and wanted to move forward toward formally committing myself to the Church as a catechumen. Fr. Matthew let me know that he already considered me a catechumen, though there was a service it make it “official.” Before we could get any farther, however, Fr. Matthew asked me how Ashley felt about becoming Orthodox. I had anticipated the question, but my answer “she’s got some hesitation, but she’s ok with it” didn’t cut the mustard. At this point, Fr. Matthew let me know that my marriage was an important component of my life spiritually—something I hadn’t thought much about—and that if my pursuit of Orthodoxy was going to become a point of contention in my marriage, that I should remain outside as a “friend of the Church.”

Having made such an arduous intellectual journey, I was floored. How could the “One, True Church” advise me to stay away? Gradually it dawned on me that the Church is the visible expression of the invisible God in this world and that by supporting and affirming my marriage—as it is intended to mirror the complete unity of the Trinity—the Church is affirming its own being. Thankfully, Ashley was interested in pursuing Orthodoxy as well, she just wanted to study and have some questions answered. To meet this need, we began meeting regularly with Fr. Matthew.

My wife is continuously a spiritual help to me because just as soon as I feel confident that I know something about God, she gives me a perspective or asks a question that is truly humbling. When we began our meetings with Fr. Matthew, I felt like I knew everything I needed to know. However, paradise keeps turning out like the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle; we keep going further up and further in. Fr. Matthew started at the beginning, all in all, quite a logical place to start.

In the Orthodox understanding of Creation is the root of the difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. The Orthodox understanding of the Fall is an incredible study and worthy of its own treatment; to sum up here: the direct consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin was the disruption of their communion with God. What is interesting is that studying the Biblical account shows that God didn’t just say, “that’s it, you’re outta here!” Instead, he gives them a chance to reestablish contact in asking them to confess, however, they persist in their sin and choose to blame anyone but themselves. By eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are imbued with knowledge that their experience was not mature enough to handle. Their actions also brought Death into the world and made them subject to his power. As an act of mercy, before Adam and Eve could disobey and eat of the other tree from which they had been warned, the Tree of Life, God removed Adam and Eve and all creation from Paradise. If He had not and they had eaten of the Tree of Life as well they would have become immortal and been forever subject to Death.

There is a wealth of theological implications here, one of which is that mankind is responsible for the removal of the Earth from a state of Paradise because we needed it to sustain us—therefore, our stewardship takes on a new level of responsibility. The best analogy for the Fall that I’ve heard is that Adam and Eve were like two people in a big warm house sitting next to the fire. They had been warned that if they were to go outside, they would not be able to get back in, yet they decide to go out of the warmth into the cold regardless. As a result, their children are born outside of the house unable to get back in, yet are innocent of making the decision to step outside in the first place. This is the Orthodox understanding of the Fall—our curse is not innate, it is the situation into which we are born. God made Adam and Eve a promise that He would send a deliverer that would reunite mankind to God; that is why Eve says after Cain’s birth “I have made a man with the LORD”—she believes that the promise is already being fulfilled.

The upshot of the Orthodox view of the Fall is that the image of God in man is not destroyed, it is marred, and damaged. Our salvation depends on the reestablishment of communion with God which was achieved in the person of Christ. This is why an Orthodox Christian will emphasize Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection as all equally important to our salvation, whereas the evangelical protestant sees the rest as incidental to the crucifixion. In His Incarnation, Christ, God the Creator enters his Creation (time and space) and becomes physical matter for the sake of communion with us. As a result, all matter is sanctified. Christ’s baptism, likewise sanctifies all water and makes participation in the act of baptism mystical participation in the transformative life of Christ. Christ’s death is important because as God, He is the only being that could enter Death’s realm and defeat him, releasing humanity from Death’s rule. As a result of living in a fallen world, our physical bodies will still die, but we will not be eternally subject to Death. The caveat to this is that holy men and women throughout history, as a result of their faithful participation in the transformative life of Christ are so physically changed that their bodies are not corrupted even after death. This is why the Church says that salvation cannot be outside of the Church—because the Church is the only designated repository for the sacraments, which are the ways in which we participate in a mystical way in the physical life of Christ. Yet, at the same time, the Church affirms that truth is found all throughout creation because the image of God remains in man, it is only in the Church that the fullness of Truth resides. Further, the Church would affirm that salvation is God’s work and He can effect it anyway He so chooses; we are only given one path, and we must do what we know.

A total of four years passed between my starting to research the Ancient Church and my baptism. I was made a catechumen just eight months before my baptism. While I felt ready for conversion long before that, I think that God granted my priest insight about what I needed to learn that I didn't have. When I first started searching, participating in Orthodox worship in our town meant the once-a-month Liturgy that Fr. Matthew would do, and a smattering of OCF on-campus Liturgies. I read, my wife and I attended services, and I began to attend catechism classes. After about two-and-a-half years I felt moved to approach Fr. Matthew and tell him I felt I had overstayed my welcome as a seeker, and that I would like to become a catechumen. At that point he made me realize that my wife and I weren't in the same place and that we needed to be...so I waited a bit longer. When we were made catechumens, it was a special event for our mission, and one that helped build a sense of community. We were received into the church, I through Baptism and Ashley through Chrismation, on Holy Saturday 2003.

There is so much that I have found corresponds with Orthodox theology; I continually find that it is a very satisfactory and robust explanatory framework for every facet of life. This has, as I noted earlier, been the most significant realization that I have made in my Journey. The idea that each of us is an icon of Christ in that the image of God remains in each of us resounds with the best aspects of progressive social theory. In the lives of the saints the consistent teaching of the Church is reaffirmed throughout history in a manner that only the worst kind of revisionism can ignore.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Kurt Vonnegut's death this week has left me with a peculiar sadness that is hard to describe. Though I enjoyed (very much) the two books of his I have read (Galapagos, Timequake) and have fond memories of my stepdad telling stories about Tralfamador, from which planet a younger brother was purported to hail, I've never really thought of myself as a Vonnegut fan. Thinking about it now, I suppose that Mr. Vonnegut might have thought about the concept of fans as slightly ridiculous anyhow. I've not yet read Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle, though I have vague plans to do so in the way that I think all English majors have a list of great books they just haven't gotten around to reading yet. In spite of this all this good-natured disinterest, Vonnegut's death leaves a hole in my world that I don't think I could define better than Jon Stewart's comment, "the world got less interesting." Vonnegut was one of those rare authors who seemed to be able to work hope out of postmodernism. A comment made in a literary obituary in The Observer sums up Vonnegut's genius this way: "he told us the hardest of truths, but in the gentlest, funniest and most amiable way he knew how." I really think Vonnegut is what Mark Twain would have been like had he been an optimist.

Vonnegut's death made me think of another unexpected loss of an author whose distillation of hope from the absurd has helped me understand the human condition. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy and all its related stories, and Last Chance to See. Though Adams' death is several years past, his passing also permeates the sense of loss I feel for Vonnegut. I think that it is increasingly rare to see such selfless truth-giving from authors, and that we're worse off without them. I don't think that their perspectives necessarily need to be lost, though, as their readers--dare I say, fans--can take advantage of a cultural tipping-point in calling to account the absurd abuse of power in the world. I don't think their lessons are being lost, we just have to act rationally irrational. Both might agree, "Don't Panic."

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This time last year I was on a trip abroad with my Century Scholar Learning Community class visiting London. On March 17, Ashley and I took a day trip to Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. The trip itself was quite an adventure. We got up early to catch the first train to Bath where we spent the better part of the morning. Towards noon, we finally purchased bus tickets for the rest of the journey to Glastonbury. The bus ride was close to three hours...we had anticipated spending about half of that time traveling. We arrived at Glastonbury Abbey about two hours before they were to close and stayed until close to 6:00 PM.

Glastonbury Abbey is noted as the site of the earliest above-ground Christian church in Europe. Legend holds that Joseph of Arimathea (who purportedly dealt in tin...a good reason to travel to Britain) established a daub and wattle structure on the spot thirty years after Christ's Ascension (and his staff, once planted, also bloomed into a unique thorn tree). The oldest ruins extant, the Lady Chapel, are about 1100 years newer, but are dwarfed by the ruins of the later church. The disrepair dates from Henry VIII's schism and subsequent persecution of English monastics. In the small museum on the grounds, I was sorely disappointed to find a brass etching plate of Henry VIII among other icon rubbing plates, given his hand in destroying the vibrant community there. I was similarly disappointed by the lack of recognition of the historic church in England that, no doubt, stems from inherited distrust of anything Catholic. How ironic that one of Prince Charles' favorite retreats hearkens to that rich heritage.

Glastonbury Abbey is rich in legend. In addition to Joseph of Arimathea, other storied visitors (and sometime residents) are St. Patrick, Arthur and Guinevere, and perhaps even Christ Himself! I was particularly pleased to say a prayer at the old stone altar in the chapel dedicated to St. Patrick on the Abbey grounds which was spared in the Reformation. There are competing legends about where St. Patrick is buried, but one claim holds that he was buried on the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey with the honor of being its first abbot. This is the closest I've come to a pilgrimage, and was incredibly humbling to honor St. Patrick on his feast day.

Through the prayers of Sts. Patrick, Dunstan, Benedict, David, and Bridget, and of all of the British and Celtic saints, may God Bless and keep you all!

Peace for our time?

This post is ambitious. I hope to look at the nature of war, the threat of perpetual war, my take on the proper Christian response, and what we can do about it. I should make a note here that while I have faithfully tried to represent Orthodox Christian teaching as I understand it, there are a number of Orthodox Christians who would disagree with my take that all war (understood as combat between humans) is evil and avoidable for Christians. I earnestly entreat the forgiveness of any who might be scandalized by what I've written here.

Though I’ve been actively involved in peace-making since 2002, the particular stimulus for sitting down to write now is a pair of interviews on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Most recent was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s evaluation of how the last three presidential administrations have squandered opportunities to change our foreign policy to effect peace.



AND

Ted Koppel on “Our Children’s Children’s War”

After watching Brzezinski’s interview, my wife turned to me, holding our three and a half week old boy and said,” I don’t want us to still be at war in twenty years.” Her statement was fraught with meaning. What would perpetual war mean for an already de-stabilized economy? How much further might our socio-political relations crumble in the face of increased fundamentalism (on all sides)? What role might our son be forced to play in this future? I responded that we have to be proactive in pursuing peace.

During my military training (Army National Guard), I came to a realization that I would wrestle with for five years. The realization didn’t crystallize overnight, but was something I came to gradually. The first germ of the realization was in the cognitive dissonance I had trying to integrate the training I was receiving into my still-developing value system. My mother had instructed me never to start fights, but told me to finish one if someone else started a fight with me. My drill instructor told us that he believed he was damned to hell because he had participated in war. If the notion that a strong military is a deterrent to military aggression, thereby securing peace, was true, then it seemed as though civilization was being held together by training men and women to do the most uncivilized of things. To Kill. Basic training has a number of facets. New soldiers learn chain of command, equipment recognition, disaster response, first aid, teamwork, and self-respect (and probably not enough military history and ethics). But, if all that had to be trimmed out of the training process, what would remain would be combat training: rifles, grenades, bayonets, and hand-to-hand combat. I recognized that the change in me was that I now knew how to kill someone. I don’t expect that 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds regularly engage in this kind of metacognitive evaluation (neither, I suspect, does the military establishment).

War has become a very useful metaphor in the English language. We can wage war against drugs, cancer, obesity, poverty, and a number of other social and physical ills. We are also able to war against an idea: Terrorism. In Western Christian history, the idea of the “Just War” developed to provide some insight into the always sticky prospect of Christian participation in war. One thing that just war theory, and most wars up until our “War on Terror” commenced, assume is a known enemy. War, as it has been redefined, is not limited to a particular theatre, enemy, or timeframe. Instead the war against terrorism mirrors those socio-political “wars” in that it is a protracted, consuming struggle, or “jihad” as the concept is known in Islam. In Christianity, an analogue might be asceticism. I don’t believe that Bush43’s polarizing statements about an “axis of evil” and a fight between the forces of good versus evil are gaffes. I think that in those moments he is being truly transparent and revealing in that language his moral understanding of the stakes of this war. This is truly and epic, ongoing, and eternal struggle.

If that doesn’t trouble you, then I suspect that you are among the growing number of American revolutionists that wish to change our form of government. If you are troubled by the thought of becoming the (nominally) Christian answer to RadIslamism (not to mention the financial stake that this administration, broadly imagined, stands to gain from perpetual war) our call to action is simple. We need a radical politic of peace.

In the process of working for peace, Christians must be careful not to make the struggle an end unto itself, but understand such work as serving Christ, however disfigured His image might be, in our enemies, in the poor and destitute, in those imprisoned, and those dealing with spiritual and physical illness. We have to be careful not to expect Paradise here on earth (chiliaism), but to be good stewards of the economic and political power we’ve been granted. We Christians that have the privilege of living in the United States should certainly be grateful for the freedom we enjoy to practice our faith. At the same time though, that security is not worth mortgaging our faith. We should look to the early martyrs as examples of fidelity. If we truly believe in Christ’s radical transformation of reality, and that we have the opportunity to participate (however imperfectly) in Paradise now, we need step into a role of active peacemakers, forgiving and loving our enemies. For the obvious reasons, this would be an inappropriate stance for the United States government to take, given its role in the social contract to protect its citizens. Indeed, this would be an inappropriate stance for any secular government to take, as it would require its citizenry to be willing to become martyrs. As individuals, however, we can utilize the means at our disposal—wealth, influence, and votes—to influence a compromise in the direction of true Peace.

My response to my wife’s concern about perpetual war, that we have to proactively wage peace, is ultimately a personal choice with universal implications. St. Seraphim of Sarov told us that if we could acquire peace, thousands around us would be saved. I believe that St. Seraphim is talking about physical and metaphysical salvation. Ghandi’s experience with Christianity in practice led him to conclude that Christians aren’t much like Christ. As Christians practicing in what is arguably the most permissive (on all sides) society we have ever known, we don’t all naturally get the privilege of suffering for Christ. Like the men and women that fled to the desert to preserve Christianity, I think that modern Christians can find a useful ascetic yoke in pursuing peace through practicing a personal politic of peace. We have few examples of this path which seems difficult to our comfortable sensibilities.

In persons like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa and Mohandas Ghandi, Christians can distill a sense of the spiritual import of waging peace. For Orthodox Christians, the example of St. Maria of Paris, and countless other Holy Fools for Christ stand out as shining examples of how we can put into practice the hard sayings of our Lord. Nor is this a journey that needs to be taken alone. The Orthodox Peace Fellowship is one of many Christian organizations (also Sojourners, CPT, Fellowship of Reconciliation) that persons with pacifistic mindsets can turn to for support and guidance in waging peace. There are analogous peace organizations that represent a number of religious and political affiliations. The crux of the matter is that peacemakers can’t be passive; we have to actively assert love and forgiveness, speak truth to power, and engage in these actions in our own lives.

Selected peacemaker resources:

Orthodox Peace Fellowship

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

The Saints on Peacemaking

The Early Fathers on War and Military Service – Louis J. Swift (out of print…I have permission from the author to distribute copies to my friends as necessary. Contact me if you need one)

The Peace Alliance – Campaign to establish a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace

Ladder of the Beatitudes - Jim Forest. This is a nice meditation on how to actually live out the "hard sayings" of Christ.

Love is the Measure - Jim Forest. A biography of Dorothy Day.

Mother Maria Skobtsova - Essential Writings - St. Maria of Paris

Noah at 3 Weeks

Last night Noah turned three weeks old. To mark the occasion, we held a bath party. It wasn't so much a party as a well-documented bath, but it was a bunch of fun. Noah seemed to enjoy the comfort of floating in warm water again.

Yesterday also marked our transition to cloth diapers. Much thanks to Pam for providing the bulk of our cloth diapers. Our Ebay purchased Swaddlebees made overnight changes much easier.

Pictures will be added as soon as I can figure out how to do frame capture from DVD (or even better, add video from YouTube).

Kucinich: The Black Candidate?

The current Doonesbury Straw Poll asks which candidate has the most authentic claim to blackness

Obama. His grandfather served as a houseboy in Jim Crow-era Africa. His white mom's from Kansas. How much more African-American can you get? If he wins, he goes down in history as the first black president -- so why are we having this conversation? Say Amen, somebody.

Hillary Clinton. Sure, technically she's white, but you could say the same thing about Obama, whose mixed parentage doesn't make him any more black than white. Also, she grew up in Chicago, city of blues and hoods, whereas Obama was raised in Honolulu, about as gay a hometown as there is. Plus, Hil's guy, headquartered in Harlem, still brings it, community cred-wise.

Not surprisingly, Dennis Kucinich is invisible in this discussion of Democratic candidates. What is troubling is that the good folks at Doonesbury had to stretch to include Edwards in this lineup:

John Edwards. Looked down on for being a trial lawyer, referred to by Rush as "Breck Girl", bashed by Ann Coulter as a "faggot" -- Edwards knows about having to fight for respect. Besides, we need three choices for the poll.

(emphasis mine)

Dennis Kucinich, on the other hand might have been and easy choice to include in the line up if there was actually some equivalent coverage of candidates. The Black Agenda Report ran a story with the headline, "Kucinich: The Black Candidate." BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon notes that Kucinich's voting record matches up with the best of the Black Congressional Caucus' voting record "across the board."

The Doonesbury Straw Poll cites "a recent poll" that says 84 percent of Americans claim that a candidate's blackness will have no bearing on the way they vote. Since the performance of racial/ethnic identity is something of a personal project (another story, another time?) I am very interested in the implications of both polls. First, the inherent privilege of whiteness is to disavow the existence of privilege. From Beverly Daniel Tatum's concept of passive racism (and here, and here), we see that uncritical participation in the accumulated privilege of whiteness is problematic. I don't trust the majority of white america to know that they would unconsciously seek to consolidate their relative positions of power by limiting access to the Oval Office (or any other threat, real or perceived to their way of life). Second, BAR's implicit and explicit (re)definition of blackness vis-a-vis Kuchinich mirrors my own thought that there is a voluntary, cultural element to black identity that could be universally accessible. I say the foregoing with full understanding that such a train of thought could go in a number of wrong directions including thinking of black identity and culture as a monolith; ignorance of/insensitivity to the involuntary participation in being stigmatized, excluded, and violated based on skin color.

What remains to be seen is just how accessible media-poor candidates like Kucinich will be to a voting public who desperately needs them. I got a call from a Democratic National Committee fundraiser the other day, who despite his persistence, finally got the message that the DNC screwed up '04 by encouraging the major media outlets to focus on Dean and then Kerry almost exclusively in the primaries. He finally conceded the point that while the DNC is going to support who the public supports (in the primaries) they have the power to make sure that the primaries are, in fact, democratic.

He's Red, He's Curly...

Thanks to Amy Toth for this delightful homage. = )

I am working on the burly part...

More about Fish Camp, the biggest, baddest and most successful student-led college orientation program there is.

A Very Merry-Unbirthday...

This particular unbirthday finds Noah at one week old (well later tonight it does). An unbirthday is not the same as a half-birthday, which Becca always manages to remember. Noah is continuing to adapt to home life despite daily visits to the doctor's office (and/or phlebotomist's office) for follow-up bilirubin tests.

This post will have a side-rant now to talk for a second about quality of healthcare. I am a supporter of Dennis Kucinich's Healthcare for All plan, and think that socialized medicine is the only way that we're going to correct the incredible disparity between rich and poor peaople's healthcare access in our nation. One issue that is being solved is the doctor shortage, and while med school enrollment is going up, we need to also address patient care expectations. In the last week we've had a doctor tell us that our baby is starving (he isn't and wasn't) and have had pescriptions for bilirubin management made without consulting--much less being familiar with--Noah's patient history. I explained to the healthcare worker that was relaying this recommendation that I understood that they talk to many patients every day with the same problem, but that this was our first time to deal with it. She agreed and thanked me for correcting her when I said that it was irresponsible to make reccomendations without knowing the context of our case. Our goals for building a sustainable, openly accessible healthcare system, I think, depends on training enough capable doctors to know their patients personally.

Oh, and we need an ethics examination prior to medical training. Our national "Burger King Mentality" has resulted in a generation of doctors (and I realize this is a broad brush; take some responsibility for the integrity of your profession...physician, heal thyself) that are more willing to do surgery than insist on lifestyle change.

[/end rant]

Poor bedside manner aside, we're doing well given where we are at with the jaundice. We had a wonderful consultant come out yesterday to talk to us about making sure that Noah is getting enough food. Why can't they all be like this?

So, now for some photos...

Our phototherapy has gone from Tron/Buckaroo Banzai sci-fi

to

Aeon Flux


Perspective...Grandparents for the first time...
grandparents for the eight time...

Thanks to all who have called, written, and visited. Hope to see you again soon!

Baby K...

Has arrived. Presenting Anthony Noah Kotinek!

Through the prayers of St. Anthony the Great and the All-Praised Theotokos, God grant wisdom, health, and grace to this our first-born child.

Noah is a Bradley Baby. We had a wonderful experience with our nurses at St. Joseph Hospital!


A QUICK UPDATE: We're still at St. Joseph's waiting on the results of a second bilirubin test after some intensive phototherapy. Though jaundice is common in all babies, hospital staff knew that it could be an issue for Noah because his extremely ruddy color indicated a lot of blood volume at birth.








Mom and Noah are doing great! Here we are enjoying a brief respite from those horrid goggles and nasty bright light.