FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Fwd: *Sightings* 7/15/10 -- American Idolatry: The King James Version

[Robert Tapp (tappx001]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Robert Tapp <tappx001 [at] umn.edu>
> Date: July 15, 2010 12:54:11 PM CDT
> To: Humanist Institute Discussion Group Discussion Group <hidisc [at] 
> humanistinstitute.org>
> 
> 
> Even if you are not a basketball fan, these reflections upon what has 
> displaced serious news recently in MSM will prove valuable. In addition, they 
> can remind humanists of the ways that religious usages of words have pervaded 
> popular patois. To me, that is one more warning that we must understand our 
> varied audiences' understandings of words if we are to communicate with 
> minimal ambiguities.
> 
> A word like <faith> may have acquired non-traditional restrictions/meanings 
> for long-time Ethical Culture or UU members BUT this does not mean that it 
> will connote these for newcomers or outsiders or traditional religionists.
> 
> We at the Institute (and thus on this passworded list) are operating at a 
> graduate-level of intellectuality (our literature so insists!). That means we 
> cannot pretend innocence of history when it comes to philosophical and 
> theological matters. Nor can we get by with idiosyncratic claims about what 
> words <really mean> or <should mean>. Pace Santayana and the price we pay for 
> not knowing history.
> 
> For most EuroAmericans, faith, basically, refers to believing despite 
> evidence or despite an absence of evidence. It is thus the term to invoke 
> when <reason>, <knowledge>, proof> are not appropriate.  
> 
> If you won't take my word for this, go back to Aquinas who argued quite 
> clearly that we can't both <know> and <believe> a single proposition. They 
> are simply contrary modes of assurance! By the way, he preferred knowledge 
> whenever we could discover it.
> 
> Bob
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: Sightings <ktobey [at] uchicago.edu>
>> Date: July 15, 2010 9:10:28 AM CDT
>> To: sightings [at] lists.uchicago.edu
>> Subject: *Sightings* 7/15/10 -- American Idolatry: The King James Version
>> 
>> Sightings 7/15/10
>>  
>>  
>> American Idolatry: The King James Version
>> -- M. Cooper Harriss
>>  
>> Americans have “a thing” for the Decalogue, displaying it publicly – 
>> wherever a court injunction for its removal might be evaded – alongside 
>> American flags and presidential portraits.  Early in these ten commandments, 
>> we learn that YHWH forbids idolatry: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any 
>> graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that 
>> is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt 
>> not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4-5).  The 
>> foregoing translation comes from the “Authorized” or “King James” version of 
>> the Bible.  This week another “King James” looms large: LeBron James, the 
>> American basketball player who last week announced his intentions to leave 
>> his “hometown” Cleveland Cavaliers (James is an Akron, Ohio native) to sign 
>> with the Miami Heat in the most scrutinized and hyperbolized free agent 
>> signing in American sporting history. 
>>  
>> The ordeal that came to be known as “LeBronikah” serves as a broad critical 
>> accounting of our days and our distractions, and simultaneously offers an 
>> intriguing opportunity for exploring the religious valences of this profane 
>> festival of highlights.  James’s nicknames – the biblically evocative “King 
>> James” and the Messianic “Chosen One” – carry heavy religious inflections.  
>> Nike, who pays James more than he’ll ever make playing basketball to wear 
>> and hawk its paraphernalia, advertises that “We are all witnesses” to 
>> James’s miracles, though they fall short of encouraging us to tell no one of 
>> what we have seen.
>>  
>> More fascinating is the willingness of other actors to play along.  Shortly 
>> after the announcement, Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the Cleveland 
>> Cavaliers, posted an incensed open letter on the team’s website, mocking 
>> James’s authenticity to the point of demythologization (he places “King,” 
>> “witnessed,” and other adulatory language in scare quotes) and offering a 
>> soteriological critique of his former employee (“Some people think they 
>> should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there”) before weighing in on 
>> the blessing and the curse of the entire situation:
>>  
>>             But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can 
>> only serve                                  
>>             as the antidote to the so-called "curse" on Cleveland, Ohio.     
>>                  
>>  
>> The self-declared former "King" will be taking the "curse" with him down 
>> south. And until he does "right" by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town 
>> where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.
>>  
>> Curses, atonement, scapegoating, and even karma appear in the theological 
>> buckshot of Gilbert’s remarks.  Such harsh words might prove gratifying were 
>> they not also the calculated attempt of a man who has profited immeasurably 
>> from James’s popularity and success over the past seven years to capitalize 
>> upon public outrage in his team’s favor.  His demythologization, arriving in 
>> the wake of a free agent’s freely-made decision to depart, not only rings 
>> hollow but becomes doubly problematic when one considers that he, James’s 
>> “owner” in a system frequently compared to antebellum plantations, was more 
>> than willing to reap riches from his metaphysical “baller” for the better 
>> part of a decade, and hoped to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
>>  
>> James became the new scapegoat for Cleveland and Ohio, a suffering region 
>> that, the pundits say, has seen better days and sorely needs the hope that 
>> James represented.  Appropriately, the decision initiated rites of sacrifice 
>> as fans burned number 23 James jerseys to purify themselves of the betrayal. 
>>  The Internet plays an interesting role in this ritualization of grief.   
>> The sports website Deadspin compiled more than a dozen videos from YouTube 
>> of fans burning James’s jersey.  Gawker, Deadspin’s sister site, noted a 
>> growing trend of homemade videos in which fans filmed their (distraught) 
>> reactions to James’s decision as the announcement happened, bringing the 
>> proverbial sackcloth and ashes to YouTube’s mandate to “broadcast yourself” 
>> in almost real time – an interesting twenty-first century revision of 
>> traditionally conceived modes of public outcry and communal mourning.
>>  
>> What, finally, does the LeBron James decision say about our present cultural 
>> occasion?  It reveals idolatry, to be sure, in how we find distraction in 
>> less-than-ultimate concerns and delude ourselves into believing that the 
>> idol is without fracture; that money, agility, and fame matter more in the 
>> grander scheme of justice than compassion, humanity, and love.  But, while 
>> true, such diagnoses avoid the more trenchant valences of this occasion. 
>> Sightings periodically turns to sporting events because they reflect 
>> something profound about peoples’ cultural imaginations.  Christian 
>> Sheppard’s observations about baseball and American football, and Joseph 
>> Price’s reflections upon the Super Bowl, for instance, suggest that the 
>> highest levels of athletic competition reveal something transcendent in 
>> human striving – virtue, courage, the sanctification of national identity.  
>> Following their examples, then, we are left to measure what this all means: 
>> the manufactured outrage over disloyalty, our marketplace of allegiances as 
>> fans, idols, and saviors.  What do such properties convey about the social 
>> order we inhabit, which we reflect in the myths we create, and destroy, 
>> together?  Nike has this much right:  We are all witnesses.  Accordingly, 
>> may we neither bear such witness falsely nor overlook the insights that 
>> these myths reveal.
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> References:
>>  
>> Dan Gilbert’s open letter may be found here: 
>> http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/news/gilbert_letter_100708.html
>>  
>> For more on comparisons of the NBA’s division of labor to American slavery, 
>> please see Mark Anthony Neal’s Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the 
>> Post-Soul Aesthetic (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
>>  
>> http://deadspin.com/5583347/a-lebron+jersey+burning+video-roundup  (Please 
>> note: Deadspin features satire that some readers may find crass or vulgar.)
>>  
>> http://gawker.com/5582924/here-are-people-overreacting-to-lebron-james-decision-to-join-the-miami-heat/gallery/
>>  
>> Read Christian Sheppard here:  
>> http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2005/0811.shtml
>> http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2006/0202.shtml
>>  
>> Read Joseph Price here: 
>> http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2005/0210.shtml
>>  
>>  
>> M. Cooper Harriss, a former junior fellow in the Martin Marty Center and 
>> editor of The Religion and Culture Web Forum, is a Ph.D. candidate in 
>> Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  Next 
>> month he becomes Visiting Assistant Professor of Race and Religion in the 
>> Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech.
>>  
>> ----------
>> In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum ("The Primacy of Rhetoric"), 
>> Marty Center Senior Fellow (2009-10) W. David Hall addresses the centrality 
>> of rhetoric in the Western humanist tradition by engaging the work of 
>> Ernesto Grassi, whose commentary on the Renaissance, especially, diverged 
>> from standard Platonic models of interpretation to include arts such as 
>> rhetoric, literature, and poetry. Of especial interest for Hall is Grassi's 
>> "retrieval of the humanist tradition" during this era and the possibilities 
>> that thorough understanding of such a retrieval opens more broadly in the 
>> fields of philosophy and religious studies.  With invited responses by 
>> Jeffrey Jay (University of Chicago), Santiago Pinon (University of Chicago), 
>> Donald Phillip Verene (Emory University), and Glenn Whitehouse (Florida Gulf 
>> Coast University).  
>> http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml 
>>  
>> ----------
>> Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago 
>> Divinity School.
>>   
>> Submissions policy
>>   
>> Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to 
>> illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society. 
>> Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for 
>> acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues 
>> related to religion and public life.
>>   
>> Attribution
>>   
>> Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author 
>> of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of 
>> Chicago Divinity School.
>>   
>> Contact information
>>   
>> Please send all inquiries, comments, and submissions to Kristen Tobey, 
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>