Twitter Chews Over Election Results: "Thoughts and Prayers to all the Republican Politicians Who Lost Their Seats Today"

Thoughts and prayers to all the Republican politicians who lost their seats today. We won't do anything to prevent it from happening again.

— Bess Kalb (@bessbell) November 8, 2017

Why Wheaton College Is Really Going After Dr. Larycia Hawkins: The Full Story Begins to Emerge

Several days ago, I took note of Wheaton College's firing of its controversial tenured theology professor, Dr. Larycia Hawkins. Many of you will know that Dr. Hawkins teaches political science at Wheaton, the "Harvard of evangelicalism," and ran afoul of the college's administrators when she chose to wear a hijab (as an evangelical Christian) to protest the targeting of all Islamic Americans as terrorists. The ostensible reason Wheaton has given for moving against her is that this gesture and statements she made about it contravene the college's statement of faith by implying that the God worshipped by evangelical Christians is the same God worshipped as Allah by Muslims.

Alice Walker Feature Documentary "Beauty in Truth" Premieres

Back in October 2011, I told readers of Bilgrimage about a film being made to celebrate the life and work of Alice Walker--"Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth." Pratibha Parmar is the writer, director, and producer.

American Nuns and Vatican Investigation: Who's Footing the Bill?

Some fascinating—and important—information is emerging these days about the seamy underside of the current Vatican investigation of Catholic religious women (that is, nuns) in the United States (and here). To be specific, what’s emerging is a strong suggestion that this investigation, which is premised on the notion that American nuns are rebellious, disobedient daughters of the church, is being spearheaded and funded by groups outside the Vatican itself.

Last week, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents about 95% of American women religious, met in New Orleans for its annual meeting. At the end of the conference, the group issued a press release. (The press release in question is the first on the page to which the link points—the 17 August press release). This document states,

Following analysis of the experience of these studies [i.e., the Vatican investigation of the quality of religious life of American nuns, and of the doctrinal fidelity of LCWR itself] thus far, the leaders noted that while their orders have always been fully accountable to the church and plan to collaborate with the Vatican in these studies, they request that those conducting the inquiries alter some of the methods being employed. Among the expressed concerns are a lack of full disclosure about the motivation and funding sources for the stud¬ies. The leaders also object to the fact that their orders will not be permitted to see the investi¬gative reports about them that are being submitted directly to the Vatican.

American religious women want to know who is paying for this probe of the quality of their religious life and their doctrinal fidelity. Where’s the money coming from? Who wants this investigation undertaken?

Religious women are asking. And Rome’s not telling.

As Paul Moses says in a posting to the Commonweal blog yesterday, it would be prudent for Rome to aim at “reasonable disclosure” in response to these concerns. And as he also insightfully notes,

The larger issue lurking here is the extent to which major donors wield outsized influence in the Catholic Church. That is a story that would really take off with the right opening.

Several recent articles provide valuable information about precisely why American nuns are seriously disturbed by the way in which this investigation is being conducted. As Sr. Sandra Schneiders notes in an article yesterday at National Catholic Reporter, there are concerns (and these are shared by some bishops and priests) about both the fact and the mode of the investigation.

In Schneiders’ view, several features of how this investigation is being carried out are “problematic or repugnant to intelligent, educated, adult women in western society.” Though the Vatican has known for some time that it intended to conduct this probe, those who are the object of the probe—American nuns—were not done the courtesy of being told this by the Vatican. American women religious discovered that they were under Vatican investigation by reading this in the secular press.

And that fact in itself appears to confirm the suspicion that someone (or several someones) outside the Vatican is funding this investigation for political reasons that have little to do with its ostensible goals. It appears that independent parties, perhaps those who are funding the investigation, clearly have had much more knowledge about what is going on, how the investigation is going to be conducted, and why it is being conducted, than nuns themselves have had.

And so I think American women religious are quite right to ask: Who’s paying for the Vatican to investigate American nuns? And if the investigation is being spearheaded and funded by groups outside the Vatican, what’s the motive of those groups?

Schneiders notes other problematic aspects of the process being used: there’s a single Vatican “visitator” who will investigate all 60,000 or so American nuns. Mother Mary Clare Millea of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus has been given that task, with no consultation of American religious women as she was selected. As Schneiders notes, Mother Millea has spent much of her life as a nun outside the United States and belongs to a small community with a single tiny American province.

Communities and individual nuns will be administered a lengthy, detailed questionnaire (compiled by whom? Rome is not saying), whose results will be collated—apparently by the sole “visitator”—and reported to the Vatican by the “visitator.” In a secret report. Which the nuns under investigation will not see, nor have any chance to respond to.

A subsequent phase of the investigation will also involve “site visitations” of selected religious congregations. Teams for those visitations will be chosen for this purpose—you guessed it: by the “visitator”!—and they’ll be asked to swear oaths of loyalty to Rome.

As Sandra Schneiders notes, the way this process is being conducted seems to have more to do with Rome's desire to engage in an unwarranted surprise attack on American nuns than on listening to and dialoguing with these daughters of the church:

In other words, whatever the Vatican may have intended, the initiation of this "visitation" was calculated to appear to many Americans, Catholic and others, inside and outside religious life, not as an invitation to respectful and fruitful dialogue and ongoing improvement of their lives but as an unwarranted surprise attack. One religious speaking to me referred to it as "the Pearl Harbor model of dialogue."

The very fact of the visitation implies that American nuns are already under suspicion, that they have already been found guilty in “an ecclesiastical analogue of a grand jury indictment” which bears all the hallmarks of such legal processes (which have long since been abolished by most western nations): “. . . the grand jury can compel witnesses to testify under oath; proceedings are secret; defendants and/or their counsel may not hear the witness against them.”

Oh, and as Mary Hunt points out in an article yesterday at Religion Dispatches, all this—the unwarranted and intrusive probes, secret reports, loyalty oaths—and then more: the nuns being investigated are expected to provide hospitality for the “visitator” and her teams. And for their travel, too, if possible.

Stinky, stinky business. All about power and control. And the need to slap religious women in the face because they provide a convenient symbol of a generalized “disobedience” on which the Vatican and people like Cardinal George are fixated now, as things fall apart. As people stop listening. As people shake their heads about the fact that there has not been a similar investigation of American dioceses to find out why two-thirds of American bishops have harbored priests they knew to be child molesters. And how much money has been spent to silence victims, fight mean-spirited court battles, silence the media—money donated by faithful Catholics to support parishes and schools and Catholic ministries.

As Hunt notes, only the men in the Vatican itself seem to be under the illusion that most of us are hanging on the words of their latest proclamations. Many nuns have been too busy to be preoccupied with concerns about playing self-protective political games with the Vatican. Instead, they’ve been preoccupied with what they see themselves called to do: live the gospel and the charisms of their founders in ever-changing cultural contexts.

As they have done so with a fidelity and creativity that puts their male counterparts to shame, they have pioneered faithful yet creative ways for Catholics in general to appropriate their religious tradition in a postmodern cultural context:

Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns, perhaps more than many other Catholics, took the mandates of Vatican II seriously to rethink and reground their communities in the charisms of their founders, and to develop ways of living out those values in contemporary society. Their many ways of doing so have given rise to a variety of communities, ranging from very traditional to interreligious groups that serve as models for how the rest of us can live. This variety is emblematic of the whole Church, which has changed from being “Catholic” in the strictly identifiable Roman-focused way, to something closer to the original Greek sense of “catholic,” meaning universal, broad, and inclusive. It is this tension that is at play in the investigations.

And note that even as this investigation is underway, unfortunate news continues to break regarding the founder of the powerful, highly funded male religious community the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel. Back in February, we learned that, in addition to his well-documented history of sexual abuse of seminarians (which finally earned him Rome’s censure), Maciel had also fathered a child whom he supported in secret with funds from his religious community.

Now, as Colleen Kochivar-Baker reports in an incisive posting yesterday on her Enlightened Catholicism blog, it appears that Maciel fathered not one but several children. And he may have introduced them to Pope John Paul II, one of his strongest defenders in the Vatican.

And that story is extremely apropos. It provides a necessary backdrop to the sordid Roman investigation of American religious women. As Jason Berry and Gerald Renner note in their exhaustive investigation of Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ Vows of Silence, Maciel and the Legion are powerfully wedded to wealthy right-wing Catholic (and secular) groups, who undoubtedly played a key role for many years in helping to suppress negative information about Maciel’s life, and in shielding the community from Vatican investigation.

If those same wealthy right-wing Catholic and secular groups and their filthy dollars (and euros) are not behind this investigation of American nuns, with its demeaning insinuation that Catholic religious women are disobedient daughters of the church, I’ll eat my hat. And recite a loyalty oath to Rome as I swallow it.

The Way Forward as the Way Backward: The Effects of a Leadership Vacuum as Societies Change Their Moral Minds

I'd like to add a brief autobiographical gloss to what I wrote earlier today. What may not be apparent in my analysis of how societies change their moral minds is a strong concern underlying that analysis: this is a concern about what happens when leaders block rather than facilitate necessary shifts in the moral mind of a group they’re charged to lead, and/or promote empty language about change as a cover for their passivity, qua leaders, in promoting necessary moral change in their society.

As I’ve noted previously, when leaders who profess moral vision and commitment abdicate their responsibility to spearhead necessary moral change in the groups they lead, those groups are likely to find themselves moving rapidly backwards rather than forwards, in terms of moral development. On many blogs and news sites that are discussing the Obama administration’s curiously passive (and even retrogressive) approach to the human rights of gay citizens in the past several days, I’ve noted this concern surfacing again and again.

If the administration continues to do nothing, people are saying, we’re likely to find ourselves moving backwards even in areas where we’re taken forward steps recently. We’re likely to find ourselves further back than we were before this ostensibly gay-affirming administration came into office.

I share that concern. This is why I am particularly disturbed by the attempt of the DOMA brief to undercut the claims of the gay rights movement to moral legitimacy. I consider that attempt not only misguided and downright nasty. I think it’s dangerous for our entire society.

And here’s why . . . . In our work life, Steve and I have lived through a number of experiences in which one or both of us were hired by an organization that wanted to make a progressive statement about gay rights, but had not yet counted the cost of that statement, and was therefore unprepared to deal with backlash when the organization did step forth and do what was right. Because of our training as theologians, which has often placed us in church-owned institutions, each of these experiences has occurred in a church-related context.

Invariably, each time we’ve walked into a situation like this, we’ve seen the organization regress rather than progress, once it encountered backlash due to its moral commitment, and once it had slammed the door on those gay folks it had courted as poster children to signal the enhanced moral awareness of the organization. Each of these organizations has become not merely more viciously homophobic after expelling the gay employees it had courted in an effort to appear morally enlightened. In each case, the organization has also ended up becoming more downright corrupt in general, in its overall treatment of all employees, in its leaders’ blatant disregard for the moral principles of the church sponsoring the institution, and in the leaders’ abdication of any commitment to fair, transparent, professional standards of leadership.

In one case, in fact, the organization simply dismantled after its leaders refused to deal with a church-grounded homophobic purge that targeted Steve. In another case, the organization has reverted to pre-1960 governance procedures and has embraced the far-right fringe of American Catholicism, after having announced (when it hired us) that it wanted to move in a Vatican II direction.

When a group begins the slow, painful process of moving towards a new moral consensus demanded by new moral perceptions among a critical mass within the group, and then steps back on its new moral commitments, it tends not just to move backwards, but to do so with a vengeance. It places itself in a worse, a more regressive, position than it found itself in before it ventured forth to do the morally right thing. It fulfills the biblical parable about what happens when people sweep out a house but leave it empty: seven spirits worse than the one they intended to sweep out return and occupy the house.

One particular work experience has been paradigmatic in showing me this. One of the principles of the Jesuit tradition of spirituality that has shaped my adult spiritual life is a caution against making important decisions of discernment when one is experiencing turmoil.

Jesuit discernment calls on one to avoid making important decisions in a time of turmoil because our vision is likely to be limited in such a moment, and good discernment requires that we seek to see as clearly as possible. This principle calls on those who set forth on a spiritual path to learn to hold together a number of different viewpoints in tension with each other. Spiritual growth is about learning always to see more rather than less. It’s about challenging ourselves to doubt and discard our peremptory judgments, since such judgments tend to be based on too little evidence and limited vision, and to wait a while until we see more clearly—and more broadly.

Because I value that approach to the spiritual life, and have found it promotes spiritual growth (resulting in greater peace and more ability to love, hallmarks of the presence of God’s Spirit in our decisions, according to the Jesuit tradition), I have sometimes walked into work situations in which I sensed that something was not quite right, but because whatever troubled me was not immediately apparent to me, I decided to work with the situation, listen, discern, and let my vision be made wider and deeper, as I trusted God’s call for me in that particular vocational moment.

One of these situations involved working with a supervisor who professed, on the front end, a strong commitment to gay rights, from the time I began working with her. She is one of several women under whose supervision I worked in my academic career. And she is one of several female supervisors who also happened to be African American. I mention this because her background plays a significant role in the story I want to tell—as will be apparent shortly.

In the years in which I worked with this ostensibly gay-affirming supervisor, I came to recognize (at least in part) what was not quite right, what I couldn’t quite identify as I began to work under this person’s supervision. Part of what was not quite right was that the profession of a commitment to respect for gay persons and gay rights was only rhetorical. It was a smokescreen.

In fact, this supervisor had (and continues to have) a history of hiring gay employees only to terminate them, one after another, without affording them any due process as she targets them, and with conspicuous malice towards them precisely as gay persons, when she decides to fire them. Several of us who have experienced this supervisor’s twisted managerial approach to her gay employees have concluded that her malice is rooted in some autobiographical experiences of her own that make her want to deal with the fact that people she loves are gay, but which also prevent her from permitting those family members to be close to her.

And so the tortured push-pull, slap-hug way in which she deals with gay employees reporting to her, ultimately shoving them decisively away from her in the end in each and every case. As she has done with those gay family members in her own life . . . .

Part of what was not right, as well, in this person’s approach to leadership is, as it turns out, that she is completely unbalanced mentally and emotionally, but most of all morally. And that lack of balance is rooted in her complete lack of any moral center. She is willing and able to remake herself on a daily basis, as needed, in order to remain on top.

And remaining on top is her sole goal, as a leader and personnel manager. While spouting language about moral commitments and caring communities that derives from the church that owns the institutions in which she works, she belies that language in everything she does as a leader and personnel manager. The religious-moral rhetoric is a cover for her moral emptiness, and because her church does not regard the claims of gay people as legitimate moral claims, she is able to get away with what she does to gay people (and to other employees) again and again.

I did not, of course, see all of this when I began working under this person’s supervision. Though I knew from the outset as I worked with her that something was not right, I could not place my finger on it. And I wanted to suspend judgment, to listen, to discern, to remain open to the possibility that my own vision of this workplace was constricted and inaccurate.

And this is where the question of this supervisor’s background comes into the picture, and why I have to mention it: because this supervisor was both a woman and African American, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, over and over again, as she made decisions and engaged in behavior that shocked me. I told myself that I did not live within her cultural universe, and therefore might be perceiving her decisions and behavior in an inaccurate and prejudiced way.

I wanted this person to succeed—I wanted her to succeed because she is an African-American woman, and I stand in solidarity with women and people of color as they struggle for rights. I am committed to promoting the rights of these groups who experience marginalization as I do, because of inborn characteristics that ought not to be the basis of discrimination, but that are used to marginalize.

I put up with behavior from this supervisor that I ought never to have tolerated, because she is a black woman. I found, in the end, that what I was trying to see and excuse as cultural particularity in her behavior is simply dysfunction, and dysfunction of the most dangerous sort—dysfunction rooted in moral vacuity.

I hope I will not make that mistake again. I am reminded of that mistake over and over these days, however, as I struggle to understand and respond to the Obama administration’s approach to gay rights and gay persons. Just as I did in my work with the supervisor described above, I find myself in recent days bending over backwards to try to imagine the push-pull, slap-hug behavior of the current administration toward gay citizens as a manifestation of some higher reason, some pattern I don’t quite understand yet: the hurtful but not intentional oblivion to my needs that comes from being focused on other issues, which are perhaps more important than mine; the cultural limitation that comes from not living life in a gay skin, and therefore not being able to see what one sees through gay eyes, etc.

Until recently, I have tried to understand and to excuse, and I have wanted to do so because my understanding of the spiritual life requires me to do that, before I make judgments. I would hope others do that for me, and I am obliged to do it for them, to treat others as I would hope to be treated myself.

Now, however, I’ve moved to another stage. I’ve decided that we may be dealing with dysfunction rather than higher reason, and that, at the center of that dysfunction there may be lack of moral commitment. I’m not yet ready to decide where that lack of moral commitment lies.

I prefer—perhaps because I cast my vote for him and found him inspiring as a candidate—to continue thinking, for now, that the president himself remains committed to human rights for gay citizens, on moral grounds. I prefer to think that he is perhaps being very badly advised by some of his key advisors. I suspect that I know who some, at least, of those advisors are, but I do not know enough to be certain of any judgment I might want to form in that regard.

I also suspect that the president has imbibed from various religious communities—including some African-American ones—a perception that gay rights are not really as pressing as some other issues that demand his attention now, on moral grounds. I suspect his religious outlook and religious associations afford him the illusion of skill at sorting and classifying the various moral issues that now face him as president, and that he imagines that gay rights are at the bottom of the list, because the religious culture on which he depends makes that deceptive judgment about gay people and our rights.

In my fifteen years working in church-sponsored historically black colleges and universities, I heard over and over a litany of rationales that many churched African Americans use to deny moral validity to the movement for gay rights and the moral claims of gay human beings. I could recite that litany in my sleep.

Though I would like to believe that the president's remarks about the need to combat homophobia in the African-American community mean that he is aware of the speciousness of these rationales, I also do not doubt that his outlook has been shaped in some respects by that litany. And he knows that it remains significant to some of his strongest supporters, to many African Americans.

I also think that as these games are being played out, the clock is quickly ticking, and there will soon be no time left to address gay rights issues—because we will have started on the backwards path. At which point, I fear, things will become much worse for gay and lesbian persons in the United States, because of the lack of leadership we are now seeing from our president despite his claims to be a fierce advocate for LGBT people.

Worse, in fact, than they have been for a long time . . . .

Charles Blow and Pam Spaulding on Black Women and Prop 8

I’ve said several times on this blog how much I appreciate Pam Spaulding. I find her consistently insightful, engaged, articulate, and balanced—rarely balanced. I’m impressed today by her comments about Charles Blow’s recent op-ed piece in the New York Times regarding polling data about black women and proposition 8 (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=BF8070BF4306460C2CC0A446D621D258?diaryId=8449, and www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/opinion/29blow.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

Blow notes that, while it is inaccurate and unfair to blame African Americans for the success of proposition 8, “the fact remains that a strikingly high percentage of blacks said they voted to ban same-sex marriage in California.” He draws attention, in particular, to polling data suggesting that 75% of black women in California may have voted to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens.

Blow advances a number of theories to explain this finding, and offers suggestions about ways for the LGBT community to build effective dialogue with the African-American community regarding gay marriage. He notes that black women tend to be churched, and as a result, tend to have conservative views on moral issues.

In his view, another factor deserves consideration as well: “Marriage can be a sore subject for black women in general.” Blow notes that black women are more likely than all other groups of women to be unmarried, and more likely to be divorced. As he maintains, “Women who can’t find a man to marry might not be thrilled about the idea of men marrying each other.”

In Blow’s view, the LGBT community will not be successful in engaging African-American women if it debates religious issues (“the Bible”), or compares the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage with the struggle to legalize cross-racial marriage. Blow thinks that the most successful way for the gay community to talk about the issue of gay marriage with black women is to address the health costs of silence regarding sexual orientation in the African-American community—that is, to note data showing that HIV infection continues to rise precipitously among black women, while the African-American community maintains silence about issues of sexual orientation.

Pam Spaulding responds to Blow in the posting I cite above. In particular, she subjects his three suggestions to the gay community to searching critical inspection. Re: the first suggestion—that the LGBT community needs to refrain from discussing the Bible—Pam Spaulding argues,

[W]e cannot throw up our hands and cede a "religious beliefs" or bible-based excuse to those who don't support marriage equality. The Right and black religious conservatives don't own religion. There are black leaders of faith who do support equality, and they need to be front and center and supported by the LGBT community to do outreach.

In Spaulding’s view, too many LGBT leaders refuse to engage the black community about religious issues and write off both the black religious community and the black community in general (as if it is monolithic) because this engagement creates discomfort in the gay community. Spaulding thinks that irrational fear of the Other and lack of cultural awareness causes many gays of the dominant culture to “write off the demo rather than confronting racial, religious, and cultural differences through outreach . . . .”

I’m impressed with Pam Spaulding’s consistent attempt to build bridges between the LGBT community and the African-American community. The cross-cultural dialogue she embodies in her own thinking is exceptionally difficult: it requires holding several points of view, and several loyalties, in tension. It’s easier to collapse one’s loyalties into primary and subordinate loyalties—to privilege either sexual orientation or race, if one happens to be, as Pam Spaulding is, both black and gay. It is easier to construct what Keith Boykin, in an excerpt cited today by Waldo Lydecker, calls a "hierarchy of oppression": easier, that is, to define black suffering due to racism as real suffering and gay suffering due to homophobia as illicit suffering (http://waldolydeckersjournal.blogspot.com/2008/12/rosa-parks.html).

I welcome Pam Spaulding’s attempt to create a dialogic space for this cross-cultural conversation, and her call to the gay community not to write off all African Americans. The health of our culture demands such difficult conversation. The health of both the gay community and communities of color demands such conversation, impossible though it sometimes seems.

At the same time, I have to note—as I have noted several times on this blog—that creating that space and keeping it open for dialogue is not easy. I will have to admit that when I first read Charles Blow’s piece, I felt defeated by it. Like Pam Spaulding, I am not persuaded that it is in anyone’s best interest for us to give up the battle to wrest ownership of religion from the hands of the religious right. I keep blogging here precisely because I believe this is a crucial task for our culture, if we want to build a participatory democracy (and to safeguard faith commitment from religious and political ideologues who distort the meaning of that commitment).

But I also understand the frustration and fatigue of gays who don't happen to be black and who are tempted to give up on the black community. I understand the discomfort. To many of us who have sought to engage in these dialogues, the reaction of the African-American community (or of some of its spokespersons) can seem fiercely defensive, to an extent that positively defies conversation. One can only be told so many times that these are issues for the African-American community to resolve for itself and on its own terms, before one politely accedes and walks away.

And I say this as someone who committed himself at the beginning of his academic career to work in HBCUs, precisely because he was committed to addressing racism. And who committed himself to enter that dialogue as a learner and not a messianic savior figure. And who has found himself rather decisively expelled from that conversation precisely due to the fearsome homophobia of a particular African-American leader, who refuses to address issues of sexual orientation while she demands respectful attention to her insights as a black female.

I have come to think that, to a large extent, the frustration and fatigue of many of us in the gay community vis-a-vis dialogue with perople of color is a necessary response, as long as there are strong dynamics within the African-American community that react immediately to attempts at dialogue on the part of members of the dominant community as culturally ignorant or unconsciously racist. To a large extent, the African-American community has to resolve questions of homophobia and sexual orientation on its own terms, in-house—until it is willing to open dialogic spaces that do not automatically invalidate the testimony of gay people who happen to be white, and that do not exclude the testimony of such witnesses when those witnesses ask questions that the black community does not wish to hear.

Pam Spaudling’s posting about these issues ends by asking, “Where do we go from here?” In my view, the only healthy place to go is a dialogic space. And that space must be opened by members of the African-American community such as Pam Spaulding who want to carry on this dialogue. But to be an effective dialogic space, it also must be a safe space, a space in which people are free to talk freely without being attacked as racist before they have even begun to talk.

It is, I believe, this fear—and the experience of being so stigmatized, repeatedly—that inhibits the attempt of many gay members of the dominant culture from engaging in the much-needed cross-cultural dialogue with people of color. And I think that the primary responsibility for addressing these issues belongs to African Americans themelves. Not much is going to change until African-American leaders—and, in particular, black church leaders—begin to call for healty dialogue about these issues, which welcomes the insights of the gay community.