Tuesday, December 02, 2003
(1:49 AM) | Anonymous:
Here I sit, for I can do no other
Every since Craig Keen and I had a conversation in Barnes and Noble around this time last year I have been struggling with whether or not I would focus on philosophy or theology (and my order of placement may show which one I prefer). I want, very badly I think, to focus on philosophy though I have beliefs that really prevent me from forgetting about the Church (I am not so sure about God sometimes, God seems to stay so distant it is hard to remember God). I think that's why my interests keep going back to politics and Jesus and ontology and Christology and on and on. Yet I can't give myself fully to theology, I can't say that theology should (like Milbank) become the master discourse because I think it would then be what it has always been - oppressive.
I recently started reading Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida and I really like it. It's been really interesting watching myself react to things, because much of what Derrida and Caputo say about God I can't seem to agree with (I still think Derrida is an enlightenment liberal of a higher order) and yet the way I disagree is in that way an adolescent disagrees with their parents - I protest too much. They are right, religion has killed millions upon millions and to an extent faith has to (Isaac for one). Even though I accepted during my freshman year that God does as God pleases, it doesn't seem that God is much interested in world peace as he is in calling for sacrifices. What worries me, when I start thinking like this, is that a theology that stands against the world stands against a world of peace. If God calls us, assuming we are people of faith, to kill then we kill, and even the Church ought not to stop that (if Abe and Soren are correct). So I can't understand why I would ever advocate the Church to have any say over anyone at all and so I don't except for those who have given themselves to the Church! After all, we are still shunning loving people away from our very doors (I speak of our homosexual brothers and sisters)! What can we tell the world at all!?!
It's strange, but it seems that I have to say that the church can only speak up in times of violence and even then it won't. Our undecideability about justice keeps us locked there and if we have the faith to decide we are surely bringing death upon someone.
But that is all, kind of, abstract for me. The main reason I can't really give myself to theology is everyone (save the exception of few) is damn mean towards other thinkers. I talked to Hauerwas about wanting to study philosophy and theology and he went on about how most philosophy departments don't give a damn about theology (certainly this is true) and when I mentioned I was looking at Villanova, a place that has tried to do both faithfully regardless of its failures, he made some snide remark about not liking Caputo's work. I really like Stanley, really, but that whole thing embodied the way I feel about theology as a part of academia and a part of living. On top it all I've been trying to get into Milbank but every time I just see critique after critique after critique of everyone and it drives me crazy! Where deconstruction strives to gracefully open up areas, to allow for thinking with a hammer, most modern theology seems to spitefully tear everything apart (with exceptions). And I just see too much of myself in that and I hate it.
I have struggled my whole life with tearing other people down, and I still can't quite convince myself that they don't deserve it for being so damn stupid. There is a certain kind of resentment inherent in that whole enterprise that is soingrainedd into the way I live and yet I desperately want to not live that way. It seems that theology exists to separate the sheep from the goats among the whole of the world and beautiful people like Derrida and some guy in China I will never meet are being put into the goat category. So, like Job, I cry violence even if I still can not curse God and die.
Yet I can't really side with philosophy either, or this undecideability that is so prevalent in the philosophy I like (excluding Marx) because something tells me that there must be a way to stand against Capital and not losing all sight of love and life in the process (like Levinas would have me do, and maybe God). And then when something does stand, I feel that I can't fully stand with it and that at some moment I will have to cut myself off from that movement to.
So, what do I do? In the words of some band that made millions on being working class, should I stay or should I go?
*Update*
In an unrelated tidbit, it bothers me that some country music rock star has my name and is quasi-famous.
