Like there weren't some other choices. Oh well. Looks like the republican party wants another year based on lowered expectations.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Saxby's Choice
A mini-screen shot from Saxby Chambliss' web site at http://chambliss.senate.gov/
Like there weren't some other choices. Oh well. Looks like the republican party wants another year based on lowered expectations.
Like there weren't some other choices. Oh well. Looks like the republican party wants another year based on lowered expectations.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Judges or Lawyers, Who Gets to Say?
Dear Mr. Yoo:
Commenting on your advising President Bush to direct NSA surveilance without warrents from FISA courts Peter Slevin of the Washington Post quotes you as saying,"It would be inappropriate for a lawyer to say, 'The law means A, but I'm going to say B because to interpret it as A would violate American values. A lawyer's job is if the law says A, the law says A."
I believe Slevin has exposed a slight but indeed very consequential flaw in your thinking. Let's hope this is just a onetime occurence for you or maybe you've been misquoted but it seems to me that you failed to properly portray our system of government with its three branches marvelously allowing even lawyers to say whatever they want about laws and American values because we ultimately rely on judges - not lawyers -- "to say, 'The law means A . . . "
Maybe next time you could advise the President to rely on a judge -- like FISA intends -- instead of a lawyer, or even a bright legal scholar such as yourself. That should offer us all some protection from the slight but consequential flaw in your thinking.
Daniel Brown
Chaplain
The Episcopal Center @ UGA
PS: Thanks to Truthout.org for citing Slevin's article
Scholar Stands by Post-9/11 Writings On Torture, Domestic Eavesdropping
Former Justice Official Says He Was Interpreting Law, Not Making Policy
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005; Page A0
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Stuck in Stage 4
I've been reading again on James Fowler's Stages of Faith. Google "Fowler's Stages" and the first five or so links will be good summaries of his profiles. Fowler, while at Emory in Atlanta, sort of synthesized Piaget, Erickson, and Kohlberg as he saw their work explaining faith development. Faith being more broadly defined than the "just believing in Jesus" that I grew up hearing about. I like Fowler's work and take it with the grain of salt, a grain Fowler himself offers. it is a careful appreciation for the vague territories between "stages."
The way I see it, transition is the work of faith and when we are faithful we will be moved beyond the comforts of familiar thoughts and beliefs. Either you move through faith or you stall in bitterness and fear. It seems to me that part of our faith development is eventually to grow more comfortable with and to be more forgiving of our limitations. Or said another way, part of faith development is remembering that we take our childhood with us wherever we go. Fowler talks about this as one of the constant "edges" that makes each stage "penultimate." We are stirred by the dissonance of, we are stretched in the tension between the way things are and the way things us to be. The tension is always with us but our recognition and appreciation of it is the stuff of transition.
I've been curious again about Fowler's ideas because they help me to understand the machinations and postures of one George W. Bush. Briefly, I think W is "stuck in stage 4" and he exhibits all the symptoms of bitterness and fear that literally block one's transition, ones faith development. Some would argue that he is not yet "into stage 4" such that transitioning out can be a thing to consider. Remember, we need to maintain a healthy respect for the vague boundaries. Some of us, still carrying the faith of childhood with us, are in 3 stages at the same time. So think with me and let's talk a little about W's faith and it's development. Here's a summary of stages 3, 4, and 5. Let me know what you think.
In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.
Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held-the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically.
At Stage 3 a person has an "ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in "kind" of person. Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in the consensus of a valued, face-to-face group.
The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth-the myth of one's own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality.
The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy with God unrelated to mundane relations.
Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular, or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are to one's particular group or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home"--emotionally or physically, or both--precipitates the kind of examination of self, background, and lifeguiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.
The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.
Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct it and that for a significant group it emerges only in the mid-thirties or forties). This stage is marked by a double development. The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self (identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions, interpretations and judgments one makes on the actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings. This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.
Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook (ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives of others into its own world view.
Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.
Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a "second naivete'' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.
Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are "other." Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.
The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination-a capacity to see and be in one's or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.
Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some few cases this division yields to the call of the radical actualization that we call Stage 6.
The way I see it, transition is the work of faith and when we are faithful we will be moved beyond the comforts of familiar thoughts and beliefs. Either you move through faith or you stall in bitterness and fear. It seems to me that part of our faith development is eventually to grow more comfortable with and to be more forgiving of our limitations. Or said another way, part of faith development is remembering that we take our childhood with us wherever we go. Fowler talks about this as one of the constant "edges" that makes each stage "penultimate." We are stirred by the dissonance of, we are stretched in the tension between the way things are and the way things us to be. The tension is always with us but our recognition and appreciation of it is the stuff of transition.
I've been curious again about Fowler's ideas because they help me to understand the machinations and postures of one George W. Bush. Briefly, I think W is "stuck in stage 4" and he exhibits all the symptoms of bitterness and fear that literally block one's transition, ones faith development. Some would argue that he is not yet "into stage 4" such that transitioning out can be a thing to consider. Remember, we need to maintain a healthy respect for the vague boundaries. Some of us, still carrying the faith of childhood with us, are in 3 stages at the same time. So think with me and let's talk a little about W's faith and it's development. Here's a summary of stages 3, 4, and 5. Let me know what you think.
In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.
Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held-the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically.
At Stage 3 a person has an "ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in "kind" of person. Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in the consensus of a valued, face-to-face group.
The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth-the myth of one's own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality.
The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy with God unrelated to mundane relations.
Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular, or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are to one's particular group or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home"--emotionally or physically, or both--precipitates the kind of examination of self, background, and lifeguiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.
The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.
Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct it and that for a significant group it emerges only in the mid-thirties or forties). This stage is marked by a double development. The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self (identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions, interpretations and judgments one makes on the actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings. This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.
Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook (ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives of others into its own world view.
Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.
Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a "second naivete'' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.
Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are "other." Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.
The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination-a capacity to see and be in one's or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.
Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some few cases this division yields to the call of the radical actualization that we call Stage 6.
Niemoeller's Lament is Our Warning
Ed Bacon, Rector of All Saints from his sermon of November 13, 2005, titled "The IRS goes to Church."
We are all remembering those dark days in history when religious people thought it was not spiritual to get involved in social action and politics and so remained quiet. A Christian Pastor, Martin Niemoeller, after he was released from Dachau, ended all of his sermons the following way, “First they came for the communists and I was not a communist and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the labor organizers and I was not a labor organizer and I didn’t speak up, and then they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I didn’t speak up, and then they came for me but there was no one left to speak up.”
Monday, December 26, 2005
John Dear of CommonDreams.org
Published on Saturday, December 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
“Peace on Earth” Means “No More War”
by John Dear
". . . Like Herod, Pilate and their soldiers, we have rejected the angels’ call for “peace on earth.” When Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their warmaking supporters celebrate Christmas, they mock Christ and his steadfast nonviolence, and carry on the massacre of the innocents. . . ."
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Saturday, December 24, 2005
L'etat, c'est moi.
"L'état, c'est moi." I am the State:" Louis XIV (1638-1715).
Bush being Bush, he would probably say: "Me, I'm the law, that's me, the law is me!"
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Who Will Hold the President Accountable?
This is the text of a letter I sent to my Senator, Saxby Chambliss. Mr. Chambliss likes to tell Episcopalians that his mom has been faithful to the Altar Guild of St. Margaret's Moultrie. She is currently listed as manager of the Clergy Retreat Cottage owned by the Diocese of Georgia in Saluda, NC.
Senator Chambliss:
I write to apologize for what I'm now calling "Part 1" of my letter to you concerning our president's in/ability to protect the Constitution and the people of this country at the same time. I am trying to understand how confusing it must be for the Chief Executive, what with all these threats that he knows about now that there are no more errors in intelligence. At least no more like the ones which mislead us into removing Saddam and destroying the Iragi infrastructure. But since he knows enough to decide without FISA oversight which international phone calls -- it is just phone calls? -- to detect (not monitor) then I have to give him the benefit of the doubt which you seem to extend to the same bureaus which gave us faulty intelligence in the first place.
In your letter to your collegues naming your concerns for the results of the conference on reauthorization of the Patriot Act you say "I am also disappointed that certain of my colleagues have seen fit to oppose the conference report over a single issue -- the appropriate standard of judicial review of the National Security Letters non-disclosure provisions. These opponents would ask courts to assess potential damage to national security rather than the officials in our government in the intelligence and diplomatic community who are the only ones capable of making such determinations based on all available intelligence and investigative information."
I guess if I had actually read your letter to your collegues, especially the last sentence of the portion I've just quoted, before I wrote Part 1 of this letter then I wouldn't have made the mistake of assuming that you and I mean the same thing when we say "checks and balances" or even "branches of government."
So I am sorry for assuming that you would be the member of the Senate majority in position and of sufficient courage to hold the President accountable when he authorizes the NSA to "detect, not monitor" the international phone calls -- again, just phone calls, right? -- of persons who as far as we know are U.S. citizens.
Finally, and so that I never again ask you to do something untoward a member of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, could you tell me now just who are the "officials . . . capable of making such determinations" on holding the president accountable to whom I should be writing with my concerns and questions?
Praying for Peace on Earth,
respectfully,
Daniel Brown
Chaplain
Episcopal Center @ UGA
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