Deliver Us From … Hypocrisy: The US Senate Chaplain Speaks Truth To Power

He's a clergyman who looks sharp in a bow tie.  He's a retired Rear Admiral US Navy chaplain with an impressive CV.   He's a Seventh Day Adventist preacher who describes himself as being "liberal on some [issues] and conservative on others".  Each morning, recently, he berates 100 lawmakers in the US Senate for being a bunch of doofuses.

If that makes you curious about Barry C. Black, the US Senate chaplain, you can read a NYT profile of him and his work here and video excerpts of his prayers during the current US government shutdown here.

Given what I'm reading about the intransigence and foolishness going on in Washington DC, I'm thinking that Chaplain Black may be the last best hope of the USA.

Friday Theology - David Martin

For one of my grad courses this fall, I am being introduced to the work of David Martin, a sociologist associated with the London School of Economics, and an Anglican priest, who has made a long and distinguished career thinking about topics such as secularization.   

This paragraph, from Martin's On Secularization: Towards A Revised General Theory (Ashgate 2006)  jumped off the page at me today as a remarkably succinct description of what can happen to Protestantism when it divests itself of its traditional ritual expressions of the holy and reserves holiness to what Martin calls "heartwork".  I also like it because of the metaphor of the road roundabout, of which Kitchener-Waterloo traffic planners appear quite enamoured.

"In spite of this necessary retention of institutional and conceptual boundaries, evangelicalism incurs a cost on account of the ease with which the heartwork can be taken to imply that there is no need for efficacious ritual and institutional mediation.  Ritual and mediation are all too easily dismissed as mere mumbo jumbo and priestcraft: that is the sentiment or sediment deposited by a receding Protestantism.  Christianity comes to be popularly received as no more than neighbourliness or decent personal attitudes and well-meaning sentiment.  Decency is the eminently natural virtue and in political terms it has to provide the agreed point of reference for moral consensus.  It offers the working version of faith in the political sphere.  The reason is that a public institution, like a road roundabout, requires a decent law-abiding citizenry, not Christianity."

I'm thinking I might make Friday theology a regular feature of this rather irregular blog.

Military Picture Of The Week

 In continuing this rather irregular feature of a fitfully published blog, I chose this picture because I think priests and tanks look funny together, and I challenge you to prove me wrong on that one.

This photo was taken at the Russian Arms Expo last month in the Urals, as covered in a recent feature published here on Foreign Policy.  The FP commentary wondered what these chaps were doing hanging out in the tank park - I'm guessing they may be Russian Army chaplains, but I'll defer to someone with more knowledge on that score.