We must never overlook the fact that the message of the Bible is above all a message preached to the poor, the burdened, the oppressed, the underprivileged. There is no need to remind the reader ho Marx capitalized on the fact. But Marx assumed that the Bible was essentially a deliberate fraud on the part of a ruling class to deceive the poor and make them accept their lot by means of a mystification. This is not the place to spell out apologetic arguments against the Marxian contention that religion is the “opium of the people,” when in fact we are also aware that even the revolutionary eschatology of Marx himself can be shown to be largely based on a biblical pattern. For precisely one of the central messages of the Bible is that the ultimate meaning of [humanity's] existence on earth is to be found in history, and that the human race is moving toward a final accounting in which history itself will see that the injustice of oppressors will be punished and those they oppressed will receive their just reward.

The Bible also points out that [humanity] is to act as God’s collaborator in setting up a definitive kingdom of justice and peace.

Here Merton anticipates the development of various forms of political theology — particularly that of the apocalyptic — and echoes some of his contemporaries in terms of the historicity of Christian theology, especially a theology of Revelation. It really makes me wonder where his thought would have gone if he lived another ten, twenty, thirty years or more.

Photo: File

The previous day began with a plenary session focused on Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. The panel session included those who knew both spiritual writers personally as well as those who have worked on biographies of Nouwen. The rest of the day included concurrent paper sessions on themes such as Merton’s spirituality of the inner life, Merton’s poetry, the influence of the Carmelite tradition on Merton’s thought, Merton and young people, Merton as an intellectual critic, among others. Additionally, there were concurrent workshops that invited participant reflection on pedagogical themes for teaching Merton, approaches to prayer, and discussions about Merton’s writing.

The highlight of Saturday was the final plenary session and keynote address delivered by Ron Rolheiser, OMI, a theologian, best-selling author on spirituality, and current president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. Perhaps best known for his 1999 book, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, Rolheiser spoke on the topic: “Merton, Solitude, and Difficulties in Being Present in the Now.”

“We live in a culture which is a conspiracy against solitude,” Rolheiser began. “We try to be attentive to everything,” he added, “I’m not sure that we’re attentive to anything.” Rolheiser’s point, one generally accepted by all who are scholars and or practioners of a spiritual tradition, is that our hurried, over-stimulated, and typically hectic lifestyle is not conducive to developing a practice of prayer and solitude.

Rolheiser defined solitude as “being inside the present moment” and aesthetic such that “we’re able to give the world the gaze of admiration.” Some of the cultural factors that “conspire” against solitude stem from our misunderstanding of solitude as something we can simply “turn on or off” as we please and as “something that we can do and continue living the way we’re already living” as opposed to something we do that changes us and our practices.

The plenary lecture, which was co-sponsored by Sacred Heart University and open to the public, drew a large audience.

With the close of the 2013 conference, Merton scholars and enthusiasts alike are looking forward to June 4-7, 2015 for the next ITMS general meeting, which will take place at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY, and celebrate the centenary of Thomas Merton.

This post was concurrently published at America Magazine.

Christopher Pramuk, a theologian at Xavier University, delivered the opening plenary address on the second day of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS) conference. The gathering, which is being held at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT, consists of more-than 250 Merton scholars and enthusiasts who come together to share research and celebrate the life and work of one of the Twentieth Century’s most famous spiritual figures.

In addition to being a well-respected systematic theologian and Merton scholar, Pramuk is a fellow member of the ITMS Board of Directors and was recently re-elected by the Society for a second two-year term. The author of several books, including the award-winning Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (2009) and Hope Sings, So Beautiful: Graced Encounters Across the Color Line (2013), Pramuk brought together two of his primary theological and personal interests – as represented by the respective subjects of these two texts – in his deeply moving plenary address.

Early in his address, which was titled “‘She Cannot Be a Prisoner’: The Lure of Wisdom as Bearer of Hope,” Pramuk said: “Hope is the capacity to imagine again.” In what followed, a deeply poetic, theologically rich, and vulnerably personal reflection on Merton, Sophia, sin and suffering, and hope unfolded.

Centered on Merton’s famous prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” as its starting point and connecting thread, Pramuk’s address drew the packed room of people into his welcoming and humble presentation, which concluded with an audience member rising to request two minutes of silence to let the profundity of what was shared sink in.

About the poem and its significance for us today, Pramuk said: “Merton is not just painting pretty pictures in ‘Hagia Sophia’…he seeks to articulate a Divine presence worthy of our hope,” adding that it was also a mode of presence faithful to the tradition.

In addition to Merton, who was a constant companion along this theological pilgrimage, Pramuk drew from the wisdom and insight of such diverse theologians as Rowan Williams and Melissa Raphael. He referenced Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said of Merton that what made the Trappist monk so significant wasn’t his “originality,” but the exact opposite. Not that he sought to be fashionable, creative, or innovative, but that in reading Merton the reader was drawn to look at what Merton was ultimately looking at: God.

The second section of Pramuk’s paper was dedicated to following the former head of the Anglican Communion’s insight – engaging the question of finding wisdom, hope, and God in our day alongside our Jewish brothers and sisters, a faith community important to Merton.

Here he cited Etty Hillisum, suggesting that the theological question after the Shoah or Holocaust was not simply, “Where is God?” but “Who is God in the unfolding of the Shoah. In addition to Hillisum, Pramuk drew heavily from the powerful theological wisdom of Raphael, the author of The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (2003). In challenging typical theodicy, Raphael argues that in post-Shoah theology, the patriarchal God is in fact accused for not being patriarchal enough. The question about omnipotence can lead us to miss the point, to miss God.

Pramuk concluded his talk with a personal story about the birth and adoption of one of his sons, who was born in Haiti. For more, one can see his latest book Hope Sings, So Beautiful.

Pramuk’s presentation was absolutely captivating and represented the best in both honest personal reflection and theological scholarship. He certainly gave me hope, something that was echoed throughout the day by others in attendance.

The rest of the day included several concurrent paper sessions dealing with topics including Merton’s poetry, Interreligious dialogue, Merton and peacemaking, Vatican II, and pedagogical insights and teaching Merton in the classroom today. The historical theologian Elizabeth Dreyer, of Fairfield University, delivered the afternoon plenary address. Tonight’s events include a musical celebration with Deanna Witkowski, a jazz musician from New York. Highlights tomorrow include a morning panel on “Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen” and a public keynote lecture by Ron Rolheiser, OMI.

This post was concurrently published at America Magazine.

Photo: Dan Horan, OFM

This year there will likewise be a host of academic papers, workshops, and plenary sessions. Among the plenary speakers this year are Elizabeth Dreyer, Christopher Pramuk, and Ronald Rolheiser, OMI. A full conference schedule is available online here. I will try to post some “Dispatches from ITMS 2013″ here at DatingGod.org as time accords, but will certainly keep everyone up-to-date by way of twitter (@DanHoranOFM) and you can follow tweets from the conference with the hashtag (#Merton2013).

I want to share just a few passages from early on in the book where Wiman is introducing the readers to his experience of faith and the struggle he has and continues to make sense of what that word even means. It’s especially timely, in my opinion, given the ongoing debates among bishops and theologians about what precisely constitutes “authentic faith.” I’m certainly on the side of someone like the great German theologian Karl Rahner or the well-known sacramental theologian Mark Searle, who both advocate for an emphasis on the fides qua or the intrinsic faith that is inherently relational and connected to divine revelation as God’s free self-disclosure and humanity’s capability for hearing or receiving it.

Wiman seems to have a similarly a priori and non-cognitive sense of what faith is, or at least where faith begins. He refers to this as “the faith that was latent within me.” Here’s some of what he offers us to consider:

When I assented to the faith that was latent within me — and I phrase it carefully, deliberately, for there was no white light, no ministering or avenging angel that tore my life in two; rather it seemed as if the tiniest seed of belief had finally flowered in me, or, more accurately, as if I had happened upon some rare flower deep in the desert that had known, though I was just discovering it, that it had been blooming impossibly year after parched year within me, surviving all the seasons of my unbelief. When I assented to the faith that was latent within me, what struck me were the ways in which my evasions and confusions, which I had mistaken for a strong sense of purpose, had expressed themselves in my life: poem after poem about unnamed and unnameable absences, relationships so transparently perishable they practically came with expiration dates on them, city after city sacked of impressions and peremptorily abandoned, as if I were some conquering army of insight seeing, I now see, nothing. Perhaps it is never disbelief, which at least is active and conscious, that destroys a person, but unacknowledged belief, or a need for belief so strong that it is continually and silently crucified on the crosses of science, humanism, art, or (to name the thing that poisons all these gifts from God) the overweening self.

He presents a sense of faith that is intuitive, pre-themtic, always present, yet oftentimes unacknowledged. It manifests itself in the human gifts of creative expression, it exists amid and within true and good relationships, it is occluded by the drive to be self-sufficient and satisfied wondering in the desert of our parched hearts.

In addition to this latent sense of faith, Wiman also writes about what faith is not — it is not concretized, propositional, and — most importantly — unchangeable. Faith does change and is organic because at its core, it is about relationship.

Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change. I don’t mean simply that faith changes (though there is that). I mean that just as any sense of divinity that we have comes from the nature order of things — is in some ultimate sense within the natural order of things — so too faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product. Those who cling to the latter are inevitably left with nothing to hold on to, or left holding on to some nothing into which they have poured the best parts of themselves.

Such wisdom.

Photo: Chicago Tribune

Photo: J6 Media

Between participating in the CTS conference at Creighton University in Omaha and delivering this commencement address in Utica, NY, I spent the better part of the past week outside of Syracuse, NY, along with about 25 other Franciscan friars from Holy Name Province who are involved in education ministries. There we discussed the future of our relationship to our two sponsored institutions, St. Bonaventure University and Siena College, as well as what the future of education ministry in our province might look like in more general terms. It was, as all gatherings of this sort tend to be, a wonderful opportunity to catch up with other brothers who are working in a similar line of ministerial work. The room included friars who are graduate students, professors, administrators, a college president, among others. Institutions represented included SBU and Siena, Boston College, NYU, New York Medical College, University of St. Mary’s, several secondary educational institutions, among others.

In addition to these Central New York events, I will be traveling to Vernon, NY — located midway between Syracuse and Utica — on Sunday to give a talk about Franciscan spirituality. I’m looking forward to that event amid the other festivities and excitement this week.

Next week I travel to Sacred Heart University in Connecticut for the International Thomas Merton Society conference. This is one of my favorite events, which occurs in North America once every two years at some university around the United States or Canada (on alternating years, there is an ITMS conference held in Europe, usually in the UK). I was recently informed by the ITMS that I have been reelected by the society’s membership to the Board of Directors for another two-year term, which means that I will have to be in town early for the annual Board meeting.

This is a “just the facts” sort of post, but I thought folks who are interested might like to know what is going on and why posts here will be more sporadic than usual. Thanks for your patience — I hope to get back to the regular schedule in the very near future. There are also plans to Tweet at the ITMS conference, so look for #Merton2013 next week to follow what’s happening!

Photo: Stock

Video: CNS

I have been frustrated with the generally poor quality of academic writing for years — and here I’m referring primarily to theology, my own field, but recognize this is a much broader phenomenon. As Toor points out, oftentimes the motivation for a given article, conference paper, or monograph originates from a place of passion and commitment for a topic, thinker, or cause. However, the finished product turns out to be frequently dry, convoluted, arcane, pretentious, long-winded, jargon-laden, or just poorly written. Toor summarizes what is missing in a word: soul.

Far too much “academic writing” lacks soul, Toor insists. I agree. She explains that in the case when writing lacks soul, it can appear as though the text was written by some machine or generic producer of “academese” nonsense that aims to be “objective” and ultimately occludes the author entirely. Toor explains: “Indeed, one of the problems with much scholarly writing it that we can’t see the men and women—with sweaty hands and occasionally overfull stomachs or caffeine-buzzed nervous systems—who compose it. It seems, often, to come straight from central processors, with formatted bullet points, weak verbs, and multisyllabic Latinate phrases.”

She explains what is meant by writing with soul.

Writing with soul doesn’t have to be personal, confessional, or raw, but it can’t be pretentious or inflated. Most of the great essayists knew that a plain style didn’t hurt. Sit down with Montaigne, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, Goldsmith, Bacon, and Lamb and you’ll feel like you’re in a tavern or a book-lined private study, chatting with a smart, wise, and often witty friend. Academics learn to dress their ideas in bulletproof, jargon-ridden suits, to parry attacks before they are launched, to make small and careful points rather than allowing themselves to be vulnerable by pitching big and strange ideas in direct and forceful sentences. But that is not the path to making yourself compelling as a writer.

I remember when I was an undergrad simultaneously studying theology and journalism. At one point one of my theology professors gave me what I came to later realize was very bad advice. The concern was that my writing style in theological essays seemed too concise and “journalistically” and that my style in writing for theology should be more elaborate, lengthier and, essentially, filled with more jargon. The implication was that this is what a “theological essay” should look and feel like, this is what is makes a scholarly essay. And that is simply wrong.

It is not some scholarly platonic idea of a “scholarly essay” in which your essay participates or according to which it should be modeled that makes it legitimate. It is your ideas, research, cogency, and ability to intelligently convey those ideas that makes it legitimate. Yet, like my well-meaning professor a decade ago and so many grad students, people continue to think this is the case and that they need to emulate what is essentially bad writing in order to “be taken seriously” or to “sound scholarly.” What makes something scholarly is its original contribution according to good research and a good argument. And, counterintuitively, crappy writing according to some preconceived “academic style” can actually obscure and ultimately undercut that intended goal.

Rachel Toor warmed my heart with the following paragraph.

The moves that academics tend to make in their prose are often antithetical to “soulful” writing. Long, windy, semicolon-flecked sentences with recycled and ready-made phrases can create barriers that establish distance between writer and subject, author and reader. Often when I’m reading academic work not only do I feel like there’s no soul, I feel like it’s not even written by humans. Or for humans.

One reason I love this paragraph so much, as my former students and many of current colleagues know, is that I believe that semi-colons are a gateway drug to terrible writing. There is almost never a reason that one needs to use a semi-colon (the one exception is in a complicated series in which several commas are already in use, but even then one could technically rework it to avoid using semi-colons). Unlike periods, commas, and colons, the semi-colon is almost entirely elective. And, quite unfortunately, like commas and colons (to name but two), the semi-colon is almost always misused or at least imprudently used. When tempted to use a semi-colon, consider writing two tighter independent sentences. Your ideas will be more concisely and clearly expressed, thereby strengthening your argument and presentation.

In these summer months when so many students and scholars are working on this or that project, it might be a good time to take Toor’s comments to heart and reconsider how one appropriates good and bad writing habits. If you’re the type of person who thinks that she or he “needs to sound a certain way” and struggles to replicate an “academic style” of a platonic sort — stop right now. Focus on the content of what you’re saying and say it in the way that comes naturally to you. Work on it so it is technically correct (grammar, punctuation use, vocabulary, etc.), but please do not perpetuate the bad habits of academic-writing mythology.

There is no such thing as “good academic writing.” Good writing is good writing. Period.

If we all do our part to write with soul, maybe academic writing won’t always be so terrible.

Photo: Stock

Photo: Stock