MeyerBros

How the hell can you argue with this list of courses and course textbooks for my fall semester? You can’t, so don’t try. It kicks ass.

Narrative Theology - Keith Graber Miller

Theologies of Whiteness - Dean Johnson

Love and Justice - Malinda E. Berry

Can you really argue with that? I’m lovin’ it…

Interesting (and, not surprisingly, somewhat fiery) conversations in the blogosphere recently about diversity, gender, exclusion, and affirmative action in the web-geek world. Our favorite Meyerbro homonym web-geek Eric Meyer started things off by posting his personal manifesto about why he doesn’t care about diversity, and why when he plans conferences he chooses speakers based purely on “merit” and without considering gender or race. (To borrow liberally from the pithy genius of the other Eric Meyer: “Race and gender are irrelevant. That’s what I (white male) always (white) say (male).”)

(update: I shouldn’t have given Eric Meyer credit for “kicking things off” - he was responding to this Jason Kottke post where he simply lists the percentage of female presenters at various recent “webby” conferences.)

Tantek quickly weighed in with his thoughts, in which he a) blames women for not taking enough initiative to promote themselves in the industry, and b) wonders why nobody is concerned about including enough green-eyed people. (”It’s women’s fault for not working hard enough. And anyway, gender doesn’t make any more difference than eye color. That’s what I (male) always (male) say (male).”)

Then Anil Dash jumped into the fray and chastised Eric Meyer and John Gruber for “defending the boys-only nature of [their] treehouse,” and followed it up by offering a list of “the essentials of Web 2.0 your event doesn’t cover”, following which he notes “Where are the men? Don’t worry - the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr…”

Today things took an interesting twist. Apparently Eric Meyer (the non-Meyerbro one) is doing some serious soul-searching about all of this, which is great. (Though apparently there hasn’t been sufficient soul-searching yet for him to stop trying to defend the innocent goodness of what he was “really trying to say”).

In all seriousness, wrestling with privilege — with the stupidity and blindness it sometimes causes us to display, even with the best of intentions — is really gut-wrenching stuff, and I wish Eric all the best. I hope he can come to a place where he might even recognize that “what he was really trying to say” itself might have been coming from a place of privilege and ignorance, and that “who he really is” is a good person whose identity, like all of us with privilege, has been deeply warped and shaped by the blindness of privilege.

so i saw Syriana the other night (i should note that i watched most of the movie by myself, because aparently it wasn’t good enough to keep the attention of hannah and kelly for more than 45 minutes). i thought it was a decent movie, but way too complicated to really understand without rewinding a few times. i have to admit that i actually watched 3/4 of the movie, read the wikipedia synopsis, and then finished the movie. i had most of the plotlines and characters correct, but there were a few things i definitely would not have caught without reading the synopsis, even after watching the entire movie. perhaps the characters are a bit stereotyped (especially how all Arabs are presented as puppets of the US). oh, and it criticizes the US, which is why columnist Charles Krauthammer says “Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.” well, i’d like to see him try anyway.

Eduardo Machado is a Cuban (/American) playwright with a lot to say. He gave a pretty gutsy talk a couple weeks ago that I find inspiring, challenging and moving. I am in the midst of finishing up plans for the next New World Arts season, and some of what he said hit me right in the gut.

He weaves together thoughts about immigration, the wall being built on the Mexico border, and his own experiences as a green card-carrying immigrant. His treatment as an “outsider” by a profession (theatre) that I believe should be on the cutting edge of acceptance is appalling. This flows into his thoughts about theatre, about not trying to make audiences happy, and about bravery. He rails against rampant entitlement issues, including the “entitlement” to be trained as a theatre artist - which really just plays into making theatre more corporate-minded.
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(As a newbie, I don’t know when to “write post” and when to “reply.” This started out as a reply in a thread where Carl commented on talking with “value voters” and Eric tried to figure out how Jeb Bush could like X-Men 3 . . . So does some wise person file these things where they belong?)

Sitting by a Christian Zionist on my last flight from Tel Aviv to Newark brought me to the conclusion that all of these conversations with Christians need to start with (or include early on) an honest look at how all Christians who have any use for scripture use scripture, i.e. (1) that we all choose which passages/themes are authoritative for our lives, relativising other passages/themes, (2) that we all use some hermeneutical principle for doing this, and (3) naming that principle is part of knowing ourselves and communicating with others. I think it is worth a LOT to get this on the table, because otherwise politically conservative Christians claim to respect the authority of scripture and discount social progressives as “not believing the Bible.”

So state the themes that seem most important to you. (If, for purposes of this exercise, which involves communicating with self-described Christians, you can find a verse to represent that theme, then you may call it a “Biblical theme.”) Then name the hermeneutic that prioritizes these themes. (For extra fun, name some BIBILICAL themes that you reject, and why: “Paul having a bad patriarchy day” or “who knew we could overpopulate the planet?” or “Oops, there’s that ethnocentric nationalism again!”)
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Got this on email today and found it self-examination-provoking.

Glenn Singleton, author of Courageous Conversations about Race, offers the following characteristics of individuals committed to being anti-racist leaders:

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i just posted my latest research paper on my posts page. this one is on Tink Tinker and Native American Theology, and the tension(?) between Native Christianity and Traditional Native Religion. Eric deserves credit for writing a paper on a similar topic last year, and I used his paper as a starting point for my own. while i’m proud of this paper (and the 97% grade it received), i have to admit that i sat down and wrote it in one sitting, from 11:15 pm to 6:15 am. thus, it could be organized better–and i’m still dealing with the sleepiness resulting from an all-nighter 2 days later. read it and comment on it.

most importantly, just be aware that you can read most of my college papers at http://wiki.meyerbros.org/wiki/JonnyMeyer/Posts, and you can comment on them at http://wiki.meyerbros.org/wiki/JonnyMeyer/Comments. if you don’t want to take the time to figure out how to edit a wiki page, just email me some comments and i’ll post them (unless you ask me not to). i post my papers not just so you all can see what i’m thinking about, but so that i can receive thoughts from all of you and keep the conversation going. one of the worst parts of school is that only one person usually ends up reading the papers that students write, and the ideas end there. don’t let that happen.

carl, i enjoyed your post about anti-racism, and your response to tim’s message on TameTheMONSTER.org. interesting stuff.

i’m taking Liberation Theologies with Keith Graber Miller right now, and it’s incredible. how much James Cone have you read? or Gutierrez (who might be coming to talk to our class next week)? there are a lot of things that would be interesting to talk about, but my main point was just to mention that i’m writing a research paper on Native American (Liberation?) Theology, and i’ve been reading Tinker’s Missionary Conquest as well as Spirit and Resistance and A Native American Theology. what a great writer. i had a wonderful conversation with him about the war in iraq (and a little about your work at the oglala lakota nation) last fall when he was speaking here on campus. oh, and he can go for hours on columbus day…

i watched the movie hidalgo last night. bad move. i don’t know if i’m just becoming much more aware because of my Liberation Theologies class (which deals with racism, sexism, classism etc. as much as anything else), or if it really is one of the most racist movie in the world. on the plus side, i think viggo mortensen is ruggedly handsome. on the down side, it’s clear that all arabs and muslims (which are one and the same) are evil and mean, and everyone wants to be a cowboy. ugh.

Part of a comment I wrote today in response to Stance Analysis, a post by Tim Barr on TameTheMONSTER.org:

Find the book Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and check out the essay “A Centennial Minute From Indian Country”. It ends with this right-on paragraph:

Some may say there is great sympathy for the dreadful situation in which Indians find themselves politically and economically. Certainly that is true of many churchgoing people in the region, but they have developed no active intellectual position beyond the pledges of support illustrated at the beginning of this essay. To develop such a position would take real, coherent, harsh, and truthful self-criticism of the role of Christian churches in public Indian policy.

Also: George Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide.

I think we (Christians) need not only a critique of the ways that Christianity has been so easily turned to the service of colonialism and oppression (which I have heard some of, at least in Christian anti-racist circles), but a deeper critique of the ways in which our own understanding of our faith needs to be deeply “de-colonized”. Dealing seriously with questions like, “Is Christianity cultural appropriation?” “What does it mean for a spiritual tradition imported from halfway around the world via conquest and colonization to learn to really care for the land, in relation to spiritual traditions indigenous to that land?” Etc.