CULTURE CLASH IN THE SEMINARY

Dissenting faculty at the General Theological Seminary

Starr King School for the Ministry in Berzerkley is a marginal, energetic, socially conscious outfit where uproar breaks out now and then, not unlike a Unitarian Universalist congregation or the denomination itself.  General Theological School in Manhattan is a dependable, mainstream, dignified seminary in a resilient, well-mannered, tolerant mainstream denomination, the Episcopalians.  What does it mean when they, too, go into uproar?  Especially when the management (president and board) react as though they were Hong Kong officials, firing 8 out of the 10 professors.  They hardly look like renegades.  Their photos show neat, short-haired ladies and gents, all white.  

The Reverend Kurt Dunkle

Their President Dunkle’s manners sound so seriously lacking, so obsessed with sexual imagery and politically insensitive statements, that I think he needs a good medical checkup.  Something has gone wrong.  Big shot white administrators at the top of their game can become grandiose and overbearing without any help, but their lifestyle often includes enough steaks and martinis to invite constricted blood flow to the brain.  This man needs one of those monitoring bracelets.

The Rev. Ellen Tillotson, clerical member of the board who sides with Dunkle.

Consent to be governed is the subject of this post.  If eight out of ten professors do NOT consent to be governed without dialogue, then the institution is in trouble.  (They had asked for a conference, threatening a walk-out, and the management simply pretended they resigned.)  The institution is already in trouble due to high debt levels (of the school rather than the students) which have just been addressed -- successfully, it seems, though by selling off property.  88 (some say there are 70) students is not a large student body.  Will aspiring clergy consent to be educated there?  Ultimately that will decide the fate of the institution.  If I were guessing, I’d say they’re more likely to side with their professors than with Dunkle, certainly if the accounts of his corporation CEO sort of behavior are true and have been observed by students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Theological_Seminary  for some general background.

Dunkle should not be stiff-necked about this.  If feminists can bring down the President of Harvard University, which also acts as a UU respected seminary, then conciliation would be the wise strategy.  The reports are not optimistic.  http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2013/05/15/kurt-dunkle-elected-dean-president-of-general-theological-seminary/  

Tom Wojtowick and Paul Huff in front of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Lewistown, MT.

Here in Montana a young priest, 27, was assigned to the Lewistown Catholic Church.  Arriving full of zeal and eager to get things off to a nice neat start, he informed two gentlemen of retirement age -- the kind of reliable folks who are often pillars of a congregation -- that their decades-long relationship, protected by a civil contract from Washington State but not consecrated by the church, was evil.  They would have to give up their partnership, which surely must be based on sins of the flesh (flesh of the same shape organ-wise), and would not be able to receive communion or any other benefits of the Church.  They had been key members of the choir, which has now fallen apart.  The congregation as a whole is split down the middle.  Pope Francis must be pounding his head on the wall.

Now a secular example.  (I’m resisting jokes about spelling God backwards.)  When I was an animal control officer, I had many opportunities to consider the trade-offs between the letter of the law and what I considered to be just.  The first was early in my so-called career:  a little wire-haired terrier who had been hit by a car.  I took him to a veterinarian.  The official position was that an animal hurt that badly should be euthanized.  The veterinarian said he would not treat the dog for recovery unless someone guaranteed the bill.  

This dog had tags, a red harness, and a recent clip.  I called the office, found out the address of the owner (a very nice, well-kept house), and went there, but no one was home.  I went back to the vet who was administering first aid but refused to go farther, since the bill could rise into hundreds of dollars.  I appealed to my boss.  He said a rule was a rule, deal with it.  So I personally guaranteed the bill.  I had almost no money to spare but it was the right thing to do.  The veterinarian got to work.  Late in the evening the owners came home, found my note, and were grateful.  They were happy to pay the bill for their beloved dog, who was saved.  It was a compassion-based strategy that broke authority, but also saved it.

A few years later, we did a neighborhood sweep where people had become very lax about managing their pets.  The rule of the day was to cite every dog not obeying the letter of the law, which was to be on a leash or behind a fence.  A man I approached was letting his dog run around loose while he worked on his yard.  The dog could easily and quickly have darted into the street or confronted someone on the sidewalk.  I pointed this out and the man gave me lip.  I cited him.  It went to court.  He was VERY indignant!  

The judge was amused, but dismissed the ticket.  I didn’t care.  It cost him time and emotion.  But it was also clear that I had pushed it far enough.  If I had grabbed the dog, put it in the truck, and cost him a hundred bucks to reclaim it (he had not licensed the dog nor gotten it rabies shots), that would have been too far.  I would not have argued with him as much as I did if there had not been five other officers on the block, all paying close attention.  It was an authority-based action, tempered by strategy.

A quote from a paper in Cerebrum (a group that studies the brain) by Peggy Mason, Ph.D.  “Membership in a social group brings benefits that scale with the ability of the group to work together.  Thus social cohesion, more than simple sociality, most powerfully promotes survival.”   Being a seminarian is not a matter of accepting dogma or authorities, but rather social cohesion that derives from knowing each other, trusting exchanges, and feeling secure in one’s position.  GTS, according to Wikipedia, is a liturgically driven institution with theologically prominent professors.  If Dunkle, who comes late to the ministry, is pressing hard to make them “grow the seminary,” then his motto of “Both/And” becomes a compulsion to work double-time.  One solution for strapped seminaries is to go to "low residence" -- one-step above correspondence schools.  No social cohesion.  The seminary is in a gentrifying nabe, Chelsea, maybe a little more "artistic", gay and free-thinking than some Episcopalians might prefer.

Former seminary building sold and converted to fancy condos there in Chelsea.

The personal dimension of leadership, which is the point of ministerial “formation” or the training of a cop (both authority-based), is always the end point of a system.  It’s sensitivity and resilience is key.  Law enforcement people across the country have so fallen in love with the military model that are having to relearn this.  Evidently seminary presidents must also learn not to fire without justification.  Dunkle must know he is looking at lawsuits since most of his life he was a prominent lawyer.  Already he has made his seminary look unattractive to youngsters who want to be peacemakers.  To say nothing of replacement professors.

Bibfeldt

I note two things.  The big new initiative that Dunkle was proposing was called the “both/and” which at the U of Chicago Div School was the key credo of a theologian called “Bibfeldt” like those other “Big B” fellows coming out of German.  He was arguing in contrast to Kierkegaard, whose catch phrase was “either/or.”  Without getting into the contrasting dogmas, the main difference between these two prominent scholars was that Bibfeldt was imaginary, invented as a prank by students.  Over time he somehow managed to write papers, enjoy feschtshrifts, be the subject of seminars, and even publish books.  Some of us began to really appreciate his ideas!  Dunkle should have been there.  

The Reverend Wray Mackay

I see that a former professor, the kind of wise old man that seminarians look for and love, died in a climbing accident last April.  I suspect that there is still unaddressed grief at that seminary.  Losing iconic buildings can also trigger grief.  Compassion would be far more effective than compulsion.  Obedience to authority is Old Testament.  The Gospels are about something else.

CONSENT TO BE GOVERNED

This series within the strip follows the idea of the Holy Fool 

that was used in the comic strip called "Brother Juniper."  It's also part of the story of the historical Saint Francis.

The world is confronting many issues of confidentiality and disclosure, which emerge from and deeply affect the prioritizing of authority.  We ask who can know, who has the authority to decide what is censored or hidden, and when it is justified to turn out the secrets that may make previously trusted authority ineffective.  “Consent to be governed” is particularly challenging when it has a religious component.  Two interesting cases reward reflection.  At the liberal end of the religious scale is the slow investigation by Starr King School for the Ministry where a student who had been a dedicated activist in the larger world, even taking damage for the cause, evidently turned the same weapons (disclosure) against the seminary.

Most lay people who have a simplistic understanding of law do not understand the nature of authority in the Western legal world.  The first fact about law is that it is useless without enforcement -- note “force” is in the long word.  Law is derived from war.  It is meant to prevent the violence of war, not justify it.  War derives from nations.  Nations derive from consensus.  When the consensus is lost, the people do not consent to be governed.  They march, they fight, they leave, and the nation dissolves.  It’s in the news every day.  In Europe and her empires, authority finally went to Christendom -- we still swear by God.

In Europe -- not so long ago -- there were long periods of time when people fought mercilessly, ceaselessly, just as the Middle East is doing now.  Ever hear of the Thirty Years War?   The disorder was so violent and bloody that even the king’s claim of being authorized by God was contested.  There were competing kings, all claiming to be God’s favorite.  So the Pope stepped in, on grounds that he was closer to God -- in fact, a personal and historical confidante.  When he could make that claim stick, he could mediate between nations and authorize kings by crowning them.  Until the Roman Catholic church became so corrupt that it triggered both the Protestant movement and the Reformation, everyone mostly went along with a religious consensus.  It began to break down when the Pope at the time of WW was so afraid of the claims of the Nazis and the possibility that the authority of the church would be diminished, that he failed to challenge the Holocaust.

Today we have lost our religious consensus.  We don’t even agree that there IS a god.  The Pope has to rely on reason, compassion, good will, fancy buildings and juju to maintain his authority.  He uses big rule books and some formidable old crustaceans who know things that will keep their underlings under control.  (I’m exaggerating to make the point.)  Then pedo-predation is revealed everywhere and introduces a new consensus, that children must be protected.  When it becomes apparent that the church representatives have not obeyed this rule, which is rooted in the teaching of Jesus, the whole justification of the church as a source of virtue is destroyed.

One of the control management mechanisms was undoubtedly knowing about and threatening to reveal corrupt behavior among church leaders.  Now the revelations have emptied that element of control and revealed that corruption was tolerated for convenience and to protect the reputation of the church.  Before the trial of this ancient and disposable old pedophile, Ex-Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, now confined in the Vatican, the only crime prosecuted was Paolo Gabriele snitching on the previous Pope by “liberating” his confidential papers.  Both of these men are accused, confined and tried by the Vatican as an autonomous nation by its own laws, though it is only a claimed diasporic "nation", scattered around the world as the international corporation it really is without God’s authority.

The REAL reason the Roman Catholics will not allow secular prosecution of their priests is that it is a challenge to their sovereignty.  If the secular nations can enforce their laws on the Roman Catholic church, the next thing after prosecuting pedopredators will be civil prosecution of financial corruption.  If nations begin to investigate and prosecute money matters, the sanctified exemption of the church from taxes, sheltered transactions, and the protection of the inventory of their assets will be removed.  If anything can trump the RC “machine,” it will probably be abuse of children.  Some forces have been waiting for this moment.

Now let’s change focus back to the other end of the spectrum, the liberal seminary of the Unitarian Universalists, Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley.  In this context, the ultimate source of authority is the Protestant claim of individual conscience, a matter of relationship between the person and his or her God -- or at least their better self.  Now that we’ve pushed God out of the room, individual conscience, esp. as enacted in social activism, has claimed precedence over everything else and allies with political forces.  Civil disobedience challenges authorities when there is a consensus among some persons that the laws are unjust.  This is how we resist slavery, starvation, cruelty, abuse of children -- issues of injustice and abuse generally generating consensus.  Though Americans may be arrested for demonstrating, persons are generally protected from violent harm and may sue for damage.  One of the weapons effective against overbearing authorities is disclosing privileged information, like the Pentagon Papers, or the recent Wikileaks breaches of internet secrecy.

At Starr King seminary, which is well-known for supporting individuals who are social activists, a new president of the institution was chosen that some students did not accept.  They didn’t resort to violence, but they did break confidentiality by distributing records of the process, which they evidently assumed would bring the consensus to their side.  It’s unclear whether any opinions were changed.  But consensus did not achieve authority.  The social activism in this case was seen as fouling the nest of the mother institution, which continued with its planned course of action but used its authority to withhold degrees of the suspected tattlers and start an internal investigation.  This is not secular, not accessible to civil secular authorities.  It’s a “Vatican” crime.  Sovereignty within an institution.  In fact, the institution of the seminary inside the institution of the denomination which has standards of confidentiality and ministerial performance of its own.

It would be wonderful if everyone could know everything, reflect on it rationally and come to opinions that were clear, actionable, and valid.  It can’t happen.  Partly it’s a matter of the unforeseen consequences of knowing, partly it’s the ease with which most people can be scandalized and overwhelmed by their own personal opinions, and partly it’s the old Jack-says-you-can’t-handle-the-truth. 

Much of life is negotiated by being a tight-wire walker -- not looking down.  They say 1% of men [sic] are psychopaths.  That means there are maybe four in this little town of 400 or so.  They say one-fourth of boys and one-third of girls are sexually hassled or outright assaulted in their lifetimes.  As a minister I knew of maybe ten men in ministry and a few women who acted sexually outside the guidelines, but they were rarely identified or defrocked.  One of the worst was, but a wrong-headed congregation hired him anyway.  I never heard how that turned out.  We’ve been confused by the sexual revolution as well as the impulse to “level” authority figures, not holding them to a higher standard, so that they feel entitled to indulge themselves.

Human beings are a roaring mess and it’s a wonder any of us survive unscathed -- maybe none do.  The least we can do is arrive at a consensus we can all live with and stay aware to the extent that we can bear it.  Not easy to do in a nation of immigrants obedient to inner voices from far different places.  That means if we know that children are being abused, whether sexually or in some other way, then we’re all obligated to do something about it.  But if we are just objecting to the choice of leaders of some movement, we should probably be the ones to move on.

I've used comic strips as illustrations.  This article describes how a sense of humor can be effective, an idea missing from the above cases EXCEPT by the inspired cartoonist.
http://www.ozy.com/c-notes/protests-go-absurd/34130.article?utm_source=dd&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10012014

WHEN CONAN ISN'T ENOUGH

This past week’s postings had me bumping into some crucial issues.  Mostly they were about the nature of authority and their efficacy in protecting the vulnerable.  Our authority has been based on wealth and the wealth has come from victimizing the vulnerable.  When there are enough vulnerable individuals to create a critical mass, the correction for this is often violence.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/07/politics-of-unconscious.html

I’ve been kidding around about Conan.   Dmitry Orlov’s takedown of the figure (see above url) was posted by someone anonymous as a comment.  It is strong enough to deserve a separate post.  Orlov is a known and respected survivalist, born the first year I taught in Browning (1962) which was both a time and a place that believed deeply in this pattern and has not really left it until recently when women were elected to the Tribal Council, one of them in a wheelchair.  This pattern is threefold.  

Below are quotes which I have edited to remove the pejorative, even contemptuous tone of Orlov’s comments.  (He seems to think vulnerables are simply weak.)  I agree with the concepts but not the contempt.  If we don’t honor our animal origins, we will tear ourselves apart.

1.  “. . . the spontaneous development of a warrior mentality—a cultural universal marked by a desire to prove oneself in battle, contempt for death, and a tendency toward what Emile Durkheim called “altruistic suicide.”

“The pattern is the same among Homeric heroes, Mongol conquerers, Japanese samurai, European knights of the age of chivalry or Moscow's bandits and racketeers during the violent 1990s. Meaning is created out of meaninglessness through heroic acts of violence performed in keeping with a code of honor.”

2.  “ . . . those who feel themselves to be weak and vulnerable.. . . find and cling to a strong . . . father figure. . . . [This] helps to reduce the anxiety that is born of helplessness and alienation.

3.”. . .[an idea] that predominantly affects women: the impulse to ingratiate oneself into an imaginary group of superior individuals as a beta-female . . . in order to gain a sense of belonging. It manifests itself in the expectation of the emergence of something wonderful yet unborn.”

Compare and contrast this with the story in the New Testament (use the Jefferson version so you won’t be distracted by miracles) or with Joe Campbell’s version of the hero cycle, in which the excluded person leaves, achieves, grows, and returns to benefit his community.   What’s missing from this 3 part account is compassion for the vulnerable, particularly those on the growing edge: children, artists, outliers, and the “Other.”  These are sources of renewal which over time will inevitably dismantle the status quo. 

Another part of the story that’s missing here, that Orlov would know if he were a hunter or rancher, is that young male animals go apart into their own society to strive against each other for worthiness.  THEN they can claim the right to reproduce and start a new order.  And for horses, at least, there is always a double leadership: the wise old mare who knows where the water is, who knows where to lead the herd while the stud horse is busy fighting.  But we are more than animals and our protection of the vulnerable is more than instinct. 

This morning I was vulnerable.  I went out, half-asleep, to water the tomatoes and while the sprinkler was working, I took shears to the invasive alfalfa, big tangling invasive stuff.  People use poison on it, but I find that ill-advised, so I cut the plants back by hand.  This time the tough stems tangled in my clumsy rubber shoes and pitched me on my face in the alley.  Now I look like a Cinematheque kid who’s taken a face-plant in a skateboard wipeout, except dirtier -- they tend to fall on cement but I went down in the dust.  Eat dirt, bitch!   Right.  Revenge of the Alfalfa.

Should we ban alfalfa?  Should we force me to spend my grub money on someone to get this yard in proper shape?  Should we make me leave this house and go back to living in an apartment where it’s “safe?”  Should I just ignore the alfalfa and let it do its thing?  Authority generally responds to vulnerability with restrictions or exclusion.

It was hardly a mass shooting.  It didn’t even break my glasses, thank -- um -- Fate.  I was already quite aware of my vulnerability.  I accept it.  I do all the mitigation I can, and then just take the lumps, as do the boy skateboarders.

Now media attention is shifting from James Holmes, the dangerous shooter, and moving to the authority that was supposed to protect the community:  Dr. Lynne Fenton, Holmes’ psychiatrist.  Her resumé is already under fire.  She was not just a therapist, but also the medical director of the Student Mental Health Services.    According to an AP report, in 2004 she was disciplined for prescribing Xanax for herself when her mother was dying, and again for prescribing Ambien and Claritin for her husband and pain killers for an employee with headaches.  She was an acupuncturist with the U.S. Air Force in Texas before changing jobs to Colorado.  

More damning, if true, is that an acupuncturist in Colorado in 1998 named Lynne Fenton in a Denver Post discussed how acupuncture could be used to “enhance women’s busts.”  She’s quite a pretty woman, which may or may not be relevant.

Given the reputation of the Air Force and the University of Colorado (ask Ward Churchill), the behind-the-scenes scenario I suspect is that the authorities were not too particular about the qualifications for running the Student Mental Health Services (serving vulnerable kids) and that she is one of those touchie-feelies who never sees catastrophe until a burning piano falls on their head.  Now who’s vulnerable?  Who’s going to pay the price when the University is sued?  Orlov might say this silly Beta cow should never have tried to be an Alpha shrink, which is a job for a man who can carry authority and make decisions.  Others will say Student Health Services are for people with bad colds and nutcases should automatically be thrown out.

Is it James Holmes who has schizophrenia, or is it US?  Was Fenton really seeing James as he was, or was she indulging in the fantasy of the Great Healer?  Is that a Catwoman mask under the desk?

ENTITLEMENT TO AUTHORITY

Entitlement to distinction in society arrives in various ways, depending on what the society values and how approval is shown. In some societies difference is rewarded (twins are considered special) and in others difference is quickly eliminated (twins are killed at birth). With distinction comes obligation mixed with privilege. In recent Western society, the professions of medicine, law, theology, and university teaching were rewarded with high prestige and allowed privileged and confidential access to vulnerable people -- but they were monitored rigorously.

At first this was the assigned task of colleagues through boards and professional organizations. Slowly that duty has vacated, government bodies have taken over, and the idea of “professional” has shrunk to a matter of how one dresses. Corruption has undercut all professions, major and petite. The professionals are rich, but the vulnerable are unprotected. This was a cycle that has probably lasted several hundred years. Maybe it was an industrial model.

In the earliest societies certain people seemed more effective at hunting or more persuasive at settling quarrels -- they became “chiefs” in Native American parlance. (There was no election, one-person-one-vote.) Some were more skillful or more beautiful and they were also distinguished. Today important people tend to be basketball players (jokes) although Eloise Cobell is clearly among the most distinguished Native Americans in the nation and will never lose her position as one who “fed her people.”

Among the students I taught there were occasional individuals -- the ones I remember were young men -- who carried an aura. They were often alcoholic, though it was hard to know whether the addiction was the affliction or an attempt to deal with it. They were poets, story-tellers, musicians, but didn’t get good grades. Some were gay. None whom I’m thinking of lived past youth. I cherished them, maybe as much because of their outsiderness as in spite of it. Certain families seemed to produce these visionaries, but they were quiet about it. They were not always a force for good, partly because of their effect on the people around them. They did not seek prominence. Quite the opposite.

Remarkable but not particularly respectable people exist in every society, often pushed out to the fringes. A friend in Valier feels that all artists are entitled to a free pass when it comes to conventional life, that they should be supported, even if they cause suffering. The Sixties and Seventies pulled them out into the light -- who knew there were so many? They took a Dionysian approach -- approach, hell! Assault! Break the rules, climb the walls, search and question. They harrowed the status quo, turned it over to get the energy and wealth hidden on the dark side of the world. Then they crashed. In the Middle East the cycle seems to be at the top. Evolution denied becomes revolution. Force cannot suppress it.

Religion in the sense of dogmatic institutions seems to be of two sorts: those who support the status quo (and protect themselves) or those who join the revolution, even lead it. The Pope knows this, so to divert attention from the sexual abuse of children by priests and the blocking of measures to end AIDS, he is now beginning an assault on Big Money. This takes him close to Liberation Theology, which could use a little energy, though one version (non-Christian) is on fire in the Middle East. He is neither a shaman nor an artist. This is political.

Other realms exist. Now rising is science, partly visionary and partly self-searching in a near-moral way. (Not fully moral because it is not anthropocentric but morality is.) The brilliant non-conforming individual exists here but will need to attract and keep a team that is content to work in that context. Because of the reflexivity of the enterprise, this discipline is able to support continuous evolution, though occasionally there is new evidence, unexpected results, that send the whole field tail over teakettle.

A subsidiary enterprise is the “think tank,” the groups that buffer society and science by trying to analyze and integrate what science finds. I’m thinking of edge.com and, to a lesser extent, TED videos, plus the magazine racks laden with pop science mags, and the websites that are another aspect of them. The challenge keeps getting more intense.

For the 19th century Transcendentalists and amateur natural history adepts, nature was a great source of reassurance. In the 21st century we have come to a place as disconcerting as our displacement from the center of the solar system. As we look at evolution more closely, we (thinking of Nick Lane now) see that fittingness (NOT fitness) depends upon the ecological niche as much as our ability to adapt and that we are busily damaging (changing) our niche through overpopulation and resource consumption. The resulting anxiety is evidently not effectively addressed by our existing religious institutions. The word “apoptosis” comes to mind. Write it on a dinosaur fossil. Throw it through a stained glass window.

We study ourselves in many ways, but I am most interested in how we study our own thinking, particularly that which is based on experience, the senses, their ordering and meaningfulness. This is rhizomatous in metaphor, abandoning our old preoccupation with hierarchy and received book wisdom. Thus, the dynamics of entitlement endorsed by institutions or tradition are diminished. Entitlement seems to me to split out between personal charisma and persuasiveness or on the other hand rational considerations. The Internet serves both, but very much undercuts the status quo, whatever it is. Control of juried journal publications in slow publication cycles that weight the existing “experts” lose power. Online discussion of ongoing research speeds up the process of re-evaluation and peer review. But also the capacity to use visual sleight-of-hand and global rumor are greatly expanded.

My entitlement to comment on the matters I address, despite my academic degrees and ceremonial participation, rests only on my capacity and desire. Whether they are enough cannot be known. What is “enough?” It is enough to have the freedom to consider these matters, but all that I’m recommending at this point is a little formula for worship. No promises of contact with another world or miraculous healing. Just a way of thinking about a lot of interesting matters. But who knows where it could lead?