Listening to Barack Obama’s victory speech the other night honestly gave me tingles down my spine. The man is a fantastic rhetorician, and the speech itself was beautifully crafted. Here’s a pertinent snippet from his final paragraph:
“This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.”
And yet I couldn’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable about the whole thing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I genuinely think Obama is a vast improvement on Bush, and I don’t deny that his election marks a truly historic moment in American (and global?) politics. But I was left uncomfortable nonetheless, and this evening, while sat in Starbucks, I think I may have found the reason why – but it first requires some context…
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Part of my reason for wanting to study in the theology department at Nottingham is my interest in Radical Orthodoxy (RO), which perhaps has it’s strongest base in the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, located here and headed up by John Milbank and Conor Cunningham (though not everyone in Nottingham’s theology dept is in the ‘RO camp’, of course). RO is a broad ‘movement’ which, since its inception, has created quite a splash on the British theological scene, and increasingly in the States as well. It has many supporters, but also many detractors (there is a surprising mix of both among the staff and students at the University of Nottingham). One of my aims whilst here is to ‘make up mind’, as it were, about RO; to see how far I can or would like to align myself with it.
One aspect of the RO critique of secular modernity (this critique may be RO’s central thesis) which got me thinking today, however, has to do with the assertion that the modern secular State, while portraying itself as areligious/neutral etc., is at its root a ‘parody’ of the church. While claiming to exist in a public, political realm beyond religious concerns, the RO authors contend that the secular State is actually quite the opposite, offering an alternative religious account to that of the church, and a deeply heterodox one at that. It is said that the state offers an alternative story to the Christian one, and an alternative path to salvation (albeit an earthly, immanent salvation):
“The modern state is best understood [...] as a source of an alternative soteriology to that of the church [...] The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” (Cavanaugh 1998:182).
Continue reading ‘Obama, RO and the State as Parody of the Church’
I was browsing around The Other Journal last night and came across a very interesting interview with Graham Ward, head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He discusses a whole range of topics related to academia, the interaction of theology with other disciplines and the church with culture. I particularly like one point he made, concerning the necessity of imagination for theological study. Discussing the problems with ‘analytical’ testing as a measure of educational ability, he said:
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