Talks: Discipline, Death and Don’t Get Me Started
Over Greenbelt 2010, get the lowdown from our team of talented, opinionated and observant Guest Bloggers.
after devoting my attentions to the music lineup last night, Saturday was the day to plunge myself headlong into the beating heart of greenbelt_ that is the talks program.
i started and finished my stints of sitting and listening with two sessions with the inimitable Texan theological agitator that is Stanley Hauerwas, and in between took in the enlightening musings of, amongst others, Mark Yaconelli and Peter Oborne.
Mark is co-director of the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project (YMSP) which (somewhat bizarrely) has turned endowments from the company that makes Prozac into a program to introduce young people all across the U.S. to the practices and ideas of contemplative spirituality. as one might expect, therefore, his talk centred around the relationship between action and reflection in the Christian life. drawing inspiration from, among other places, the story of the prodigal son, Mark highlighted a theme that i found would reoccur for me in Stanley Hauerwas' later session, that of the creative potential and radical importance of spiritual discipline.
following on from the morning session in which he concluded expanding on issues arising from his recently published memoirs, Duke's Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics presented his thoughts on the nature of the god to which American civil religion pays its homage. summarising his conception of the modernist, Liberal foundations of popular American theology by means of the phrase "the story that there is no story except the story that we chose when we didn't have a story", Hauerwas illuminated how the basis for spiritual discipline - along with, for example, covenants like marriage - is devastatingly corroded by the notion that humans are (and must be) free to choose who and what they are, and that death has become the ultimate, inconceivable scandal.
discipline, dear friends, was something i needed in spades during The Spectator and ex-Daily Mail political commentator Oborne's 'interesting' talk about the nature and role of virtue in politics. if i were being supremely placid, i would say that i was disappointed (if not surprised) that references to Aristotle, Kant and MacIntyre were absent while those to Machiavelli and Plato flowed fairly freely. if, however, i were allowing the anger to rise once more, i would rant on and on about how infuriatingly reactionary, ill-conceived and poorly delivered the session was.
by means of a via media, perhaps i will instead focus on my sense that it was a waste of a good opportunity for a someone from a political and philosophical stable significantly distinct from that of the average contributor, to challenge a GB audience with something as well reasoned, well researched and well presented as it was, well, provocative.
all in all it has been a day of talks that has offered stimulations of various ilk, the majority of which were welcome and worthwhile.
