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This short text (>40 pages) is a quick read, but is well worth it. Published by Wide Margin, “a new Christian publishing house focusing on books on Christian living particularly from first-time and non-Western authors,” the essay examines the “climate of crisis” — economic, environmental, and otherwise — that characterizes the contemporary world.
I highly recommend this essay as a manifesto for the necessity for radical political, social, and cultural action by Christians. The author, a former missionary, combines down-to-earth Christian experience with academic acumen, and did a good job shattering my own stereotypes about what sorts of things people doing missionary work believe. Drawing from such diverse authors as C. S. Lewis, Walter Wink, Naomi Klein, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek (who is cited the most frequently), Ingleby unapologetically calls for very left-wing solutions to the crises that face the world.
Ingleby does a good job of critiquing several inadequate Christian approaches to environmental and economic crisis in the world, dispelling the myth that “this world is not our home” and that therefore we should ignore its problems. The author’s admirable goal is to contextualize the message of the Gospel to the real-world circumstances that face twenty-first-century humanity, and thus he is unashamed to see Christianity as being inherently environmentalist, anti-capitalist, and justice-oriented.
Two insights struck me as particularly valuable. Ingleby makes the much-needed point that “because relationships are at the heart of all this, we can say that even more important than survival is justice.” Borrowing from Walter Wink, Ingleby straightforwardly describes systems that privilege survival over justice as demonic, and correctly notes that sacrifice will be needed for justice. Though easily (and, I feel, wrongly) critiqued as naïve, this moral clarity is a much-needed reminder in the current political climate.
Ingleby’s other key insight is his appropriation of Žižek’s call for an alliance between political radicals (particularly in the environmentalist movement) and proponents of Christian apocalypticism for the creation of a “radical emancipatory politics.” Ingleby is correct in his assertion that these two groups (often viewed as polar opposites in popular discourse) share many of the same goals. It is tempting to imagine what American politics would have looked like over the past few decades if this call for a leftist Christianity had been heeded earlier.
Constrained by the shortness of his essay, Ingleby presents few solutions to the crises he trumpets. But Christians and Catastrophe effectively presents the Biblical case for a renewed and contextualized Christian apocalypticism, and, perhaps most importantly, reclaims apocalyptic rhetoric and vision as a tool of radical hope rather than destructive despair. For this vision of Christianity as a call for action in crisis, I recommend this short book as a basic, coherent introduction to its topic — and even as a manifesto for a differently-politicized Church of the third millennium.
[this post derives in large part from a comment i made in the vigorous and ongoing discussion to this post on my blog]
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that there is exactly one ethical principle and that it is universal and absolute, but also contextualized and played out in specific cases. In Christianity, it is called the Golden Rule; almost every other major religious tradition has an almost identical formulation. In Kantian ethics, it is called the Categorical Imperative. In modern political terms, it is called “sustainability.” In all cases it is a way of expressing the conviction that ethical action consists in reciprocity and mutuality of action.
The reason this is universal and valid is because it is the natural ethical conclusion of the idea that every human person has absolute and equal worth. (In Christian terms, the human person in made in the image of God; in Kantian terms, the human person is an end in herself.) All moral principles that cannot be reduced to this principle of reciprocity are not ethical at all, but are merely ways of enshrining oppression and injustice in the language of morality. Because such pseudo-moral rules do not spring from reciprocity and mutuality, they must rest on some principle that denies the inherent equality and absolute worth of every person.
For most people, this ethical principle is known and integrated into life through traditions, communities, and narratives — in a word, through religious systems. Of course, many religious systems add their own baggage to this basic universal (Christianity has certainly done so at times, and in large part continues to do so today). But religious traditions also tell stories of how this principle has been understood and applied and interpreted in a diversity of contexts and situations, and they give us guidance in figuring out just what it means for our lives. A key epistemological insight of postmodernity is that no knowledge is universal, that all epistemic experiences are conditioned by social location, by context, by communities and by personal narratives. Religion is one such context-space, one such way of making relevant the principles that are theoretically universal but can only truly be known in the particulars of day-to-day life.
Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker, May 24, 2010: 
If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshipped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism. All faiths have fights, but, as MacCulloch shows at intricate, thousand-page length, few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one; a song of children, stables, psalms, parables, and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other. The two spin around each other throughout history—the remote Pantocrator of Byzantium giving way to the suffering man of the Renaissance, and on and on.
Thoughts?
- A blog I’ve been enjoying lately: Contagious Love Experiment, by Josh Stieber (joined also by Conor Curran), tells the ongoing story of an solider-turned-pacifist who is travelling across the country speaking about his experiences and his realization of the nonviolence of Christ. Stieber is speaking mostly in churches, but has also appeared in other venues, including a mosque. Check it out.
- Over at Resident Theology, Brad East continues his excellent series on Christian pacifism by returning to the question of martyrdom and by discussing the idea of “becoming God’s peaceable people“.
- Jonathon Zasloff over at Legal Planet offers an interesting perspective on the ways that religious traditions can contribute to environmentalism. His key idea: “religion is not economics”, and therefore can offer other systems of judgment through which environmental problems and solutions can be considered.
- Leslie Savan writes for Alternet about Lou Dobbs’ ongoing tour of foreign health-care systems. Dobbs has been remarkably inconsistent on the issue, but at the moment seems to be presenting single-payer and other government-backed systems less negatively (gasp!).
Today, I read My Name is Rachel Corrie. This short play, edited by Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman, is drawn from the diaries and emails of Rachel Corrie, an American killed in Palestine while nonviolently defending a civilian house from destruction by the Israeli military in 2003. The play was performed on London’s West End and has seen some limited productions in America, though it has engendered controversy because of its frank attitude towards the reality of the ongoing violence being perpetrated against civilians in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The work is deeply moving: a sad yet inspiring look at the life and death of a passionate child who became an equally passionate adult. The text of the play comes directly from Rachel’s own journals and letters (with the exception of a few letters sent to her, and minimal stage directions). Her writing comprises sometimes prose, sometimes lists, sometimes poetry — but whatever the form, it remains throughout poignant and compelling, drawing the reader into Rachel’s world and into the development of her ideas and emotions. At the end, I felt not as though I had met a character on a stage, but had actually grown to know, in whatever small way, the person behind the words.
As Rachel lives among the Palestinian people, she is both surprised by, and admiring of, the way they deal with the horrific realities of their existence. In a letter to her mother, she writes:
I am amazed at their strength in defending such a large degree of their humanity against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death. I think the word is dignity.
A little later, she reflects on the possibility that more people will recognize and protest the true brokenness of the world, a fracturing of which the oppression of Palestine is symptomatic, but that extends far beyond the Middle East:
I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in: a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that the future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.
Rachel Corrie’s tragic death served to stir up public opinion about the situation in Palestine. (Sadly, this discussion was quickly overshadowed in the media by the American invasion of Iraq.) In the ongoing debates about the true nature of the occupation and of the Palestinian resistance, Rachel’s writings offer a valuable insight that is underappreciated in the mainstream discussion. The final pages of the play contain her reflections on the response of Palestinians to Israel’s military activities, and here she presents the argument that, despite the fringe cases of terrorist activity by some groups, the vast majority of the population is continually countering the occupation through nonviolent methods in the truest sense. In a letter to her parents, she writes:
You asked about non-violent resistance, and I mentioned the first intifada. The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance. … These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn’t that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance?
My Name is Rachel Corrie thus offers the reader (of, if you are lucky enough, the audience-member) three things: a poignant look at the life of an inspiring figure; an uplifting reflection on the capacity of the human spirit to deal with injustice — the hope for a better future despite present pain; and an intriguing, if cursory, discussion of the role of nonviolence in the conflict. I give the work my highest recommendation to anyone interested in these issues — but be prepared to be deeply moved and greatly inspired.
