To explain a bit of what I’ll be working on, I thought I’d share most of the statement of research interest I used to apply to TST and two other Canadian programs. (For non-academic reasons, I only applied to schools in Canada.) I do not know how important my statement was in my application – I’ve heard wildly varying claims on the subject – but I know examples of theology statements are hard to find, so here’s mine, with some commentary to explain my thoughts.

“Once emancipation is pulled from incarnation, the flesh of one Palestinian Jewish male, this Jesus cannot be trusted to free us. We then must free ourselves.” In “He Became Truly Human,” Willie James Jennings describes the trajectory of modernity away from “trusting flesh,” both divine and human, in the pursuit of freedom. A similar mistrust of flesh can be seen in the new eugenics made possible by genetic medicine and the new Gnosticism of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, for whom salvation involves abandoning bodily existence altogether to merge with machine life. Often, these visions exploit a parody of Christian eschatology: a future without tears not because God dwells among us, but because limited bodies no longer do.

Jennings is a professor at Duke, and I discovered his article through a link on Fors Clavigera. In it, he examines the disintegration of the idea of a common humanity, but instead of the usual lament for natural law, universal truth, and so on, he suggests our attack on anthropology is rooted in a definition of true humanity as emancipation. But this definition is simply “another version of abstract humanity.” The goal is worthwhile – freedom from forces of confinement and surveillance – but critics fail to separate “the ideology of emancipation from those terrorism(s) that are the underside of modernity’s image of humanity.” Rather, Jennings advocates a return to “trusting flesh.” In a meditation on Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Lyotard, he argues we can keep emancipation and incarnation together: putting to death “the false universal of a common humanity” through recapitulation, crucifixion, and then resurrection, rather than by denying flesh.

There’s much more there, but already several parallels to medicine are clear. Certainly all modern medicine is emancipatory to some degree, and that’s a good thing! But the testing, sorting, and selection of eggs, sperm, embryos, and fetuses is subtly different from the temporary restoration of ailing bodies. Genetic selection promises parents that their children will be permanently emancipated because they will not be discoloured, disabled, dumb, or worst of all, of the wrong gender. Like many technologies, biotechnologies tend to be profoundly conformist, offering entry into the good life by erasing those particularities that “produce” social and economic disadvantages. Transhumanism goes one step further: we are all disadvantaged because we are simply human, and our emancipation will come by transcending bare flesh through technology. And for some transhumanists, the eschaton will arrive with the total abandonment of material existence altogether. Total freedom from everything – except the dynamics of economics and power, of course, which is another indication that transhumanism, like the new eugenics, offers a fairly conservative vision of the good life.

Against such forces, I hope to research how the narratives, theology, and practices of the Christian tradition can shape Christian communities – and society as a whole – as we all grapple with the strange new world of modern medicine. One project I am interested in is how the tradition’s long meditation on incarnation and embodiment – from Irenaeus, Augustine, and Athanasius through to Barth – can help the Church reform its desires for medicine beyond emancipation alone. I am convinced theology best guides Christians not by providing a “bigger and better” bioethical framework, but by training their ecclesial imagination to see the world differently and refuse to accept a truncated politics that polices against any common concept of the good except the fear of death. Contemporary models for such an approach include Stanley Hauerwas’ Suffering Presence, Gerald McKenny’s To Relieve the Human Condition, Joel Shuman and Brian Volck’s Reclaiming the Body, Brent Waters’ This Mortal Flesh, and John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics, as well as the broader work of thinkers like William Cavanaugh, Ivan Illich, M. Therese Lysaught, and Oliver O’Donovan.

This next section is fairly straightforward. I almost certainly won’t end up doing the project I mentioned, but likely something along those lines: retrieving the tradition for the sake of providing an alternative vision for modern medicine and helping  communities discern which technologies to affirm amid limited resources and limited bodies. Obviously my method and my models for doing so put me firmly in a theological camp often labelled as “postliberal.” I then listed my rather meagre qualifications for pursuing such a project, followed by the professors I’d hope to work with and why they would be the best guides along the way – I won’t post that here, but I can email you the whole statement if you’d like.

In other words, I am often the eschatological horizon of my own giving. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a few gifts I was quite happy to receive back recently. First, I have seen proof (thanks Bethany!) that my article, “Toward a Moral Theology of Genetic Screening,” has been printed in the Fall 2010 issue of Crux. Unfortunately it’s not yet available on the web, but I’ve uploaded a final draft to Scribd, if you’re interested in a Hauerwasian/Augustinian take on prenatal and preimplantation screening. It also functions as a rough synopsis of my thesis, although it’s considerably easier to read, thanks entirely to my editors, especially my friend Rob.

I must also thank Nathan Hobby, the editor of the Anabaptist Association of Australia & New Zealand’s journal On The Road, for stumbling across some of my older posts Yoder and inviting me to contribute to their December issue. Well worth a read.

Finally, I recently had the pleasure of leading a small book study through N.T. Wright’s new After You Believe. More often than not, we widely departed from the questions I came up with, but I’ve put them up on Scribd also, and I’ll have some more thoughts on the book in the new year. Enjoy!

Guroian, an Orthodox theologian, wishes to develop an appropriate ecclesiology and way of life for churches after Christendom, or after Christianity’s “cultural disestablishment.”[3] He rejects attempts to resuscitate ‘neutral’ and tradition-grounded natural-law arguments, finding more promise in exploring, like St. Basil of Caesarea, “forms of community and discipline that would enable Christians to live the gospel and show others the way to the kingdom of God.”[4] Guroian also recruits St. Augustine and St. Benedict for his project to “rediscover the ecclesial context of Christian ethics.”[5] Indeed, Guroian believes that without such retrieval, Christian morality will become impossible in highly secularized societies like North America. How does the ecclesial context help? By being the place where the Christian tradition is transmitted, received, and made normative through worship and liturgy.[6] In other words, the liturgy keeps tradition and moral practice linked, and Christian moral arguments today seem unfounded precisely because this connection has been lost, forgotten even by moral “‘specialists.’”[7] Such integration is biblical: the epistle to the Colossians does not make a “forensic or discursive argument” against the false teachers, but reminds readers of their baptism, the catechism that accompanied it, and the practical consequences of the death and resurrection in Christ they have “anamnetically experienced.”[8] Therefore, to recover ethics’ ecclesial and liturgical context, Guroian suggests Christians need to exercise “the Pauline style of parenesis” seen in Colossians and other letters, reject liberal concepts of agency for a relational, communal, and “dialogic paradigm,” and become “better practiced in their own language of faith” and in engaging others in imaginative dialogue.[9] Guroian also draws an intriguing parallel with icon theology: because icons are “dialogic and kenotic,” Orthodox ethics is “iconic ethics.”[10] Overall, Guroian makes a powerful argument for reclaiming the Church’s liturgy and distinct identity, yet his grounding in the tradition and in Orthodoxy helps him evade the ‘sectarian’ label often levelled at others.

To Rowan Williams, Guroian’s “iconic ethics” is a good term for the ethic presented in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics.[11] Anglicans Hauerwas and Wells’ goal for the Companion is to alter readers’ vision of Christian ethics by “stretching” their understanding of worship and the liturgy.[12] Contrary to the common Kantian distinction between the serious real world of ethics and the unreal spiritual world of religion, they assert that life here is actually rehearsal for the worship that will occupy eternity and for which everything was created.[13] They also argue worship is not only words but also “an ordered series of activities” that “suggest habits and models that inform every aspect of corporate life.”[14] These are bold claims, yet buttressed by their observation that “the Church was able to form and sustain disciples” even when Christian ethics, as we now define it, did not exist.[15] Rather, Christian ethics had to be invented in modernity as a method of separating Christian convictions from the Church’s practices so they could be plausible as an ‘ethic’ available to anyone.[16] According to Hauerwas and Wells, this disintegration began with Kant and continued through H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, which “reproduces a Kantian Christ freed from ecclesial embodiment, who can do no more than hover as a transcendental reminder of human finitude.”[17] Naturally, the concrete practices of the Church thereby became meaningless, and Christian ethics was reduced to cataloguing and dissecting “ideas about ethics by theologians” without reference to the Church’s life, identity, or tradition.[18] In short, Hauerwas and Wells demonstrate the modern concept of Christian ethics is a concession to Enlightenment ideology, incompatible with the historic mooring of morality in the Church’s liturgy.

Yet the question remains how the liturgy actually applies to the novel issues Christians face today, including those raised by new medical technologies. Lysaught, a Roman Catholic, provides such an argument in her analysis of baptism and human cloning. She observes that though reproductive and therapeutic cloning[19] are typically legitimated by appeals to reproductive freedom and potentially tremendous cures for disease, respectively, comments by biotechnology leaders suggest a greater end is in view: scientific progress towards a “promised land” where “illness, aging, and death” have been defeated.[20] Lysaught then asks whether the Church could use cloning as another means to care for children, or if it conflicts with how Christians generally nurture their children, as shown in baptism.[21] Her answer: those “who mean what they do when they baptize their children must find cloning deeply incongruous.”[22] First, baptism questions the narrative of parenting that “privileges biological relationship” by reminding us children are not ours, but God’s; further, it teaches that biological parents alone are insufficient to rear children in the Christian faith and that “spiritual kinship is more fundamental than biological.”[23] Second, baptism “locates the goods of healing” claimed for therapeutic cloning “in a very different narrative and vision of the transcendent.”[24] Christians know healing is not “an end in itself,” but must proclaim God’s reign; baptism trains parents to resist the false god of “bio-utopia” by acknowledging death’s inevitability and affirming God’s constant presence, care, and ultimate triumph over death.[25] Baptism thereby provides the true counter to the hopelessness revealed in the (semi-voluntary) configuration of parents as “desperate”: because children are baptized into Christ, who “has truly risen from the dead, Christians have hope that their children’s death will not be the end for them.”[26] Lysaught ends by describing baptism as an “exercise through which Christians gain virtues necessary for resisting the ways in which culture would shape us.”[27] In other words, baptism is a liturgical discipline that opens up an alternative way of being in modern technological secular culture.

These four theologians present a powerful defence of our need to reintegrate liturgy and ethics and thereby relearn who we are and how we act as Christians today. Guroian demonstrates the historical and biblical basis for liturgy as ethics, Hauerwas and Wells expose the Enlightenment captivity of modern ‘Christian ethics,’ and Lysaught identifies the hidden power of baptism to controvert our medical and techno-scientific idolatry. Yet those from supposedly non-liturgical traditions may wonder what this means for them, especially if they reject infant baptism. It may help to remember that all Christians who meet together have some leitourgia, or public service, and that Evangelical and Anabaptist practices of child dedication are analogous to infant baptism in many ways needed for Lysaught’s argument.[28] Ultimately, though, many may need to discard notions the Church’s liturgy is only for ‘high church’ traditions, or is simply arbitrary human innovation. God has given us his Spirit and his Church as well as his Word, and we need all his gifts to follow him rightly.

Why the revolution will not be tweeted: Malcolm Gladwell compares social media’s potential for real social change to the American Civil Rights Movement, NAACP, and the black church. Guess who wins.

According to Metacritic, The Social Network is already one of the highest rated films of the decade. So what? Well, Wikipedia leads us to at least one technological idealist/imperialist that labels it the anti-geek movie. Unfortunately, Jeff Jarvis fails to recognize the ontological/political differences between Web 2.0 and the Internet. (More on this later.)

The Last Psychiatrist ‘reviews’ Catfish and the ideas of online privacy and identity. Quote:

The agreement we’ve all accepted, it is there in your ISP contract, is that we are willing to trade exhibitionism/voyeurism for greater respect in real life.  Or, less privacy online for more privacy offline. …

Nev breaks the deal. You can’t fault him for googling and investigating, but he’s not permitted to go to her house.  That’s the deal. …

Only — and I can’t believe I’m about to say this — a male dominated, female-as-commodity narcissistic perspective would think that the moral of [Catfish] is that a man might get fooled.  The real moral is that some men will drive 300 miles just on the chance that you are hot.  Imagine how far they’ll go to kill you.

A new blog chronicles horrible accounts of sexism in Philosophy departments. I’m afraid to think what an equivalent for theology would look like.

Along with linking the above, Adam Kotsko advocates the abolition of undergraduate minors, and perhaps even majors. I concur.

At The Other Journal, Jamie Smith skewers poser Brett McCracken and his critique of ‘Hipster’ Christianity, and KJ Swanson continues her confrontation with the Evangelical embrace of Twilight.

Reactions to the Pew Forum’s Religious ‘Knowledge’ Survey abound, including from Ryan Dueck, Martin Marty, and The Immanent Frame.

Multiculturalism: it doesn’t work, at least as long as it ignores identity; it works, at least in Quebec; it has something to do with Zizek, I am Legend, and Stephen Colbert.

Also from Canada: a hard-hitting yet heartfelt defence of Insite, a supervised injection site in Vancouver.

Finally, The Onion presents arguments for and against teaching both sides of the end-times debate: Biblical Armageddon and Global Warming. Who says modernity lacks an eschatology?

It is on that last bit that I would like to ask for some help. I need to write some ‘statements of purpose’ or ‘statements of research interest’ for the doctoral programs in Theology and Religious Studies I will be applying for. In general, I understand such statements should:

• Suggest a specific, interesting research topic, without implying I already have a predetermined answer or agenda;
• Demonstrate I know the history and contemporary context of my field well enough to use appropriate terminology and reference major scholars;
• Make a clear connection to the faculty of the department, such that it is evident they will be capable of and interested in supervising my work;
• Acknowledge the work of my potential supervisor and their colleagues, but very lightly, without effusive adjectives or praise;
• Frame my previous studies and preparation to highlight how I am able and suited to do the work I propose to do; and
• Generally present myself as a thoughtful, intelligent, perceptive, and persuasive yet credible candidate.

Easy! Sigh. Anyway, although I have some clear ideas about my topic, context, connection to departments, and so on, I’m having some trouble visualizing how to put all the pieces together in a mere 500-700 words. So I thought I’d try some crowd-sourcing. Do any of y’all have any insights on such statements? Or, for those of you who know me personally, would you be willing to e-mail me one of your past or present statements? (Assuming, of course, that you’re not currently applying to start a PhD in Theological Ethics with reference to Bioethics at a Canadian university for Fall 2011.) My email address, if you don’t have it, is:

As for the blog, I will endeavour mightly to provide some new content this month. Until then, ponder this portrait of the deontology of damnation, and how it reflects the PhD application process (at least in my mind):