The last while, obviously, has been a fallow period for me as blogging goes. It hasn’t really been one for writing in general—among other things, I’ve been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount manuscript, which is now nineteen chapters in—but it means there are a lot of ideas rattling around in my brain that I haven’t taken the time or place to get down in print for exploration. For the moment, then, I want to capture a few of them (as many as come to mind, anyway) to develop later. These are undeveloped fragments—seeds of thought that have yet to yield a harvest.
- Morality is fractal: scale it up or scale it down, the patterns are the same. For a great many people—all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time?—morality is whatever they figure they can get away with. What’s the difference between someone cutting in the school pick-up line, or running a red light, or cheating the grocery store when using the self-checkout, on the one hand, and a politician lying to the media, or giving family members inside information and fake jobs, or trading favors with the rich and powerful? Only one of scale. It’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
- Is racism systemic? As someone trained in family systems theory, I have to say, “Of course it is,” because everything intra-human is systemic. The real question is, if racism is systemic, what does that mean? The one thing I can say with confidence is that it doesn’t mean what people assume it does. In particular, it doesn’t mean the way to deal with racism is creating or changing a whole bunch of structures and rules. That has its place, but while it would be overstating the point to say that structures don’t really matter . . . well, structures don’t really matter. They’re important insofar as they amplify or restrict the functioning of human relational systems, but it’s those systems which truly matter. Thinking about racism as actually systemic—as a thing which exists in relational systems as an expression and multiplier of the anxiety of those systems—is a lot harder than arguing about structures. I don’t know where that thought leads, but I definitely want to follow it.
- How can we in the church intentionally and intelligently do the work of discipleship and spiritual formation with various types of neurodivergent people? I had an experience recently which opened my eyes to something I had somehow never seen: my repeated failures at practicing some spiritual disciplines are at least in part because those spiritual disciplines were developed by and for neurotypical people. My ADD brain responds to stimuli differently and has different feedback and reward systems than a neurotypical brain; someone on the autism spectrum, to take another example, operates in yet another way. What would it look like to develop spiritual disciplines, or structures for spiritual formation, or tools for discipleship, for children of God with these and other types of neurodivergence? What would it look like to take that seriously instead of assuming that what works for neurotypical folk ought to work just as well for us?
I know there are more things I’ve been pondering that I need to get out of my head where I can look them over and interact with them; whether I add them to this post or put up another one later, it’s time to start putting them down as I think of them so I can get to work.
Photo source unknown. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
