Five Myths About Drinking Water

Take this, Eric:

Myth No. 1: Drink Eight Glasses Each Day

Scientists say there’s no clear health benefit to chugging or even sipping water all day. So where does the standard advice of drinking eight glasses each day come from? “Nobody really knows,” says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Myth No. 2: Drinking Lots of Water Helps Clear Out Toxins

The kidneys filter toxins from our bloodstreams. Then the toxins clear through the urine. The question is, does drinking extra water each day improve the function of the kidneys?

“No,” says Goldfarb. “In fact, drinking large amounts of water surprisingly tends to reduce the kidney’s ability to function as a filter. It’s a subtle decline, but definite.”

…Goldfarb’s advice: Just drink when you’re thirsty.

[NPR: Five Myths About Drinking Water, by Allison Aubrey]

Philip K. Dick on Sci-Fi

“I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That’s what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if’ - it’s ‘My God; what if’ - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.”

A Thought on Martyring

Martyrdom is the only way to witness to a truth that is not ours.  The witness to human truth cannot properly even be called witness, for it does not exist outside of itself.  Human truth is self-generated, and therefore must be self-defended.  The greatest witness to the fact that God’s truth exists outside of and apart from us is the fact that it does not need our defense, either through intellectual proofs or through coercive enforcement of assent.  It is God’s truth and therefore God himself will defend it.  This dynamic plays itself out already in the story of Cain and Abel, wherein Abel, since he acts in simple obedience to God’s command, entrusts himself also to God’s care. That this comes at the expense of temporal success, that it seems to indicate rather our abandonment by God, testifies only more strongly that to be embraced and upheld by God cannot be conflated with worldly prosperity.

Tripp York’s The Purple Crown

Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 2007), 200 pp.

In this review, I wish to second the back cover endorsement given to this book by William Cavanaugh: “I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the relevance of martyrdom to contemporary discipleship.” This book will win few converts, and will not be of much inspiration to those steeped in the contemporary debates around political theology. But for those who are already thinking in terms of the Church as an alternative polis which confronts the state with another way of being political, this book will be a helpful boon to their thinking.

The second volume in the Polyglossia series of Radical Reformation Theologies from Herald Press, The Purple Crown follows on the heels of last year’s contribution by Chris Huebner, A Precarious Peace, which I review here. This is an exciting series, with intentions to speak the gospel of peace in “other tongues,” and I can only hope it succeeds in that. The Purple Crown, though, is not such an adventurous book. I can honestly recommend it only to those eklessia project-types who will already agree with all of its basic insights. At its core, though, it is not an argumentative book, and does not engage opposing interlocutors. It is basically an test of the greatest hits from the likes of Yoder, Hauerwas, and Cavanaugh against the concept of martyrdom. This is not to say it isn’t worth wile, just that it will only be so to a select audience.

York argues that martyrdom is an inherently political act, in which a follower of Christ is put to death by the powers that be because of the inherently subversive nature of her testimony the Jesus is Lord. The otherness of the kingdom to which the martyr witnesses is supremely manifest in her submission to the cruel domination of the oppressor, testifying that this kingdom cannot be won or lost by coercion. Jesus is, of course, the supreme martyr, and it is his entrusting of his life to the Father on the cross that is re-presented in the lives of all of his followers. This occasionally is seen by the powers for the subversive act that it is, and in these scenarios, Jesus’ followers are led to the same end as their Lord.

To be executed because of one’s allegiance to Christ and, hence, as an enemy of the empire, is a public/political act that captures the attention of many citizens. Such executions are political statements that governments make to their people: competing allegiances will not be tolerated.

Here, York argues that the world is a stage, and that in the lives of the saints a cosmic battle is being acted out between two powers: those in submission to God, and those which rebel against him.

This leads to the interesting notion that martyrdom is, in some sense, a sacramental action. That this was the understanding of the martyrs and their contemporaries themselves is suggested by the way that their accounts take such care to demonstrate that continuities between their deaths and that of Christ. This is shown most clearly in the account, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, which tells the death of Polycarp as an a precise parallel to the death of Christ at the hands of hostile powers. In this sense, although the church has never recognized martyrdom as a sacrament, it is one in the very general sense of the term as God being specially present through human action and natural material. In this, God is actually confronting the fallen and rebellious powers of the nation state through the very bodies of Christians.

That our bodies would be the venue for such conflict necessitates that they must be trained and prepared through rigorous discipleship. Here, York gives an interesting case for reading the ascetic practices not as a renunciation of the body, but as a training course for molding their bodies into vessels of the Holy Spirit specifically in the context of political trials.

What is important about these ascetics is not whether they actually provide a glimpse of angelic bodies, but that they understood that f they were to live continuously in the presence of God, their very own materiality require transformation.

Although York offers some nice thoughts here, ultimately his argument gets very tired and over-stated. That bodies are good and essential to the Christian life does not need to be proven again. It’s affirmation in the context of martyrdom is a good insight, but fifteen pages worth of it is simply unnecessary where it isn’t advancing anything new.

York must be commended for framing an exquisite problem in his third chapter, “Performance: The Sixteenth-Century Debacle.” In it, he raises the question of how we are to think of those lives recounted in the Anabaptist classic, Martyr’s Mirror, which were ended at the hands of their fellow Christians, both Lutheran and Catholic. That York offers no conclusive answers cannot be held against him. I suspect there really is no clear sense to be made of Christians killing other Christians. The real problem that he highlights is what a disaster it is for Christians to meld their allegiance to Christ to their allegiance to the state. Here, those who claim a conflict between the two become enemies of Christendom, and as such must be prosecuted (note, not persecuted) for the good of Christians everywhere. Only in this context of muddled allegiances can one Christian kill another in the name of love.

York rounds out the book with a quick biography of Oscar Romero, which offers a very nice test case for what is argued in the book. It is certainly confusing why Romero has not been canonized by the Catholic church yet. York remarks that “his life obliterated the distinctions among what is political, social, ethical, and religious. He found no arena of life that was not subsumed under the command to follow Jesus.” This is precisely what a martyr is - one who testifies to the Lordship of Jesus precisely in the context of the psuedo-lordship of earthly powers. This book is to be commended for contributing to the recovery of this kind of understanding of martyrdom in the American church.

Personal Updates

The vast majority of this blog’s 40 or so regular readers are personal friends of mine, so I figure I’m give a few personal updates.

First, many of you have been witness to my trying to figure out what I’m going to do with myself after I finish my undergrad degree at Multnomah this semester.  After flirting for a while with the idea of trying to get myself accepted at one of the many fine east coast schools to study historical theology, I soon realized that what I wanted more than anything was to stay in Portland.  This city holds so much for me.  I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by friends and family here who know me and put up with me pretty admirably.  My church is in a vital stage of growth as a congregation, and the bonds that are being formed between us are beginning to go much deeper than simply being a product of convenience.  I’m really hitting my stride as a pizza-maker, and can’t imagine a job that I’d rather have through another three years of studying.  Reflecting on all of this, I realized that the only reason I felt the pull to get myself into the most prestigious institution possible was because I’ve been told that I’m supposed to feel that way, that it’s my responsibility to follow my dreams and leave the rest of my community to just deal with it when I peace out.  Obviously, I’ve become very disenchanted with that way of making decisions.  For whatever reason, though, I still held out the idea that it would be real cool to go to Duke, so I applied there.  My continued presence in Portland is sealed now, though, since I got my rejection letter from Duke this past Friday.  This only made it sweet as beet juice to see West Virginia hand Duke’s asses to them in the second round of the NCAA tourney on Friday.  So there it is Portland friends - you’ll be seeing me around for another three years at Multnomah.

By the way, the face you’ll be seeing doesn’t have a beard anymore.   I shaved it easter morning.  Check back around October to see it again.

Finally, I just spend a wonderful couple of days up in Bellingham catching up with some of my best friends, Ryan, Matt, Aaron, and Nick.  We managed to have a great time up at Bayview state park, in spite of the biggest display of wienery in the history of park rangers and camp hosts.

If the divinity is true…

But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary.  That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever.  Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.  Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.  Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.  For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break. In this indeed  I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.  But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt.  It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”  No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.  In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God.  He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism.  When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry of the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.  And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighting all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power.  They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt.  Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god.  They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 144-155.

Dolorean Rules

Once I was a college freshman with something of a crush on a girl who loved Pedro the Lion. I didn’t know who this band was, since I had been listening to 92.3 KGON’s Classic Rock pretty much exclusively for the past five years, and quit buying secular CD’s because I was that sort of a Christian. But I jumped at the chance when she suggested we go see their concert, and did my best to red-herring questions like, “didn’t you just cry the first time you heard ‘Secret of the Easy Yoke?’” At any rate, we got to the Crystal Ballroom real early and a band called Dolorean opened for them. They were from Portland and they didn’t seem to have any pretensions beyond consistently sounding as awesome as Neil Young. I was taken. The girl married some dude a year or so later, but that’s hardly anything to be too sad over when I got a band as rad as Dolorean out of the deal. Since then they have gotten all kinds of grown up in their sound, with last years’ engrossing album, “You Can’t Win,” which has a haunting but comforting darkness that isn’t heavy-handed, but runs deep into the fabric of all the songs. Their concert last night at the Doug Fir was tremendous. If you haven’t heard this band, go buy “Violence in Snowy Fields” immediately. I wish there were a video to share with you, but sadly, there is not. You can, however, download to of their songs for free here.

Barack Obama vs. Jeremiah Wright on Race

I’m going to post an extended quote from this morning’s speech by Barack Obama on race in Philadelphia. As I’m sure everyone is aware, there has been alot of uproar over comments made by Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama refers to Wright’s comments as using “incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.” Notice that nowhere in the “univocal condemnation” is there any reference to the actual accuracy of Wright’s claims about race in America. This is because of the unfortunate matter of fact that Wright happens to be right about the nature of race in America, for the most part.

Now, as far as I can tell, the only incidence of Wright’s “incendiary language,” is when he stated that 9/11 was a judgment against America’s racism, a reminder from the third world that black people haven’t gone away, etc. This is wrong, and we should rebuke him for it, just as we did Rev. Jerry Falwell when he blamed it on gays and lesbians. But all of the other things he says are only offensive to people who want to maintain a pristine image of America as a peculiar nation in the history of the world, a city on a hill shining out freedom and justice to all. To those who experience the brutal reality of America from the underside, he is simply telling things as they are.

Obama, then, is distancing himself from his pastor because he falls in that first camp of people. His hope is absolutely not audacious: it is exactly the same message with which Ronald Reagan swept the nation in the 80’s, telling people that on the inside they really are good and loving, that to be American is to be a magnanimous lover of all races and creeds, etc. Put simply, in the words of James Cone, Obama believes in an American dream, whereas Wright believes in an American nightmare.

In the following quote, notice how Obama sees the fundamental character of America as a nation struggling against bondage and oppression.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people.

Clearly, Obama sees the true American spirit as something existing somehow separate from the racist, oppressive structure of slavery upon which the nation was built. This removal of the American spirit from the concrete scenarios of America as it has actually existed turns Obama’s promise of hope into an empty cipher. If real change is to come in America, it must begin with a radical commitment to the truth about who we actually are. The real place of hope in politics is not to look towards the future with our backs turned to the past, but rather to look our pasts squarely in the eyes, and believe that in spite of what we discover to be the truth about our birth, there will yet be resources made available to us for healing.

Scott Stephens, in a recent essay at Faith & Theology, makes an important statement in regards to a similar desire on the part of the Australian government to distance the present generation from the guilt of its forefathers:

For me, this leads to an inescapable conclusion. The reason that Kevin Rudd had to reiterate that this apology “does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people” is not because we don’t believe we are complicit in the misery of indigenous Australians, but because we know that we are and don’t want to have to admit as much. As a nation, we have a pathological aversion to guilt precisely because of the objective guilt we all share.

Barack Obama is in a unique position, precisely because of his complex personal history of sharing in both the lineage of privilege and oppression, to demand that this generation not see itself as innocent of the guilt that this nation bears. It is time for a genuine movement of repentance in America for the way in which we have built ourselves up on the backs of slave labor. It is not the time to put up our hands and protest our essential goodness.

Against the Disciplined Palate

There are many reasons why I would advise against disciplining your taste buds. To a certain extent, there is a virtue in training your tongue to be able to recognize the finer flavors of, say, wine, chocolate, or coffee. The benefits are obvious. I just want to point out a few of the dangers.

Aside from the obvious relational problems of becoming a snob, a pretentious bastard, and so forth, I have a very practical concern. There are just so many scenarios in life where you need to be able to drink bad coffee. Your grandma offers you a cup, you’re late for work and have to get some from the costs-a-quarter “cappuccino” machine before you spend ten hours on a spreading hot tar on a roof, you need to get to Sacramento in ten hours - I could go on. And that’s just coffee, not to mention Totino’s pizza.

The point is that life is just so much easier if you can be satisfied by bad coffee. This doesn’t mean that we should settle for mediocrity, just that the goal shouldn’t be a “refined” palate. The way I like to think of what I’m going after in my appreciation of the good stuff is a palate with a switch - one that doesn’t demand excellence, but still knows the difference.

(an)Other Blog

A big and overdue welcome to the blogosphere for my good friend and basement-mate Eric Roorback.  A sometime fellow Multnomah student, Eric is employed by the Portland Public School District as a substitute special needs para-educator, and by Banana Republic as a vendor of fine clothing and “the cards.”  He enjoys Emanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, Bridgeport IPA, and long walks on the beach.  Check it out!