By the time i get back the workshop on the free-market and the sinfullness of liberalism already started. So i didn’t hear everything, but most of what i heard was haunted by the ghosts of “China taking our jobs” and protectionism. It’s actually refreshing to hear economic justice being treated as a moral issue, after the religious right so succesfully managed to reduce morality to issues of gender and sexuality. But i can’t stand the anti-globalisation slant. (Not unfamiliar though, there are always fractions at the ESF doing precisely the same.)<\/p>\n
The plenary sessions. An angry tirade by Rabbi Lerner against the article that NYTimes ran about the conference. When i manage to read it later that evening i can’t help being surprised by his anger. It’s not the most flattering article, true, and his critique of the journalist’s way of working holds: among all the workshops she could have chosen to go to, she went to the one on personal relationships. The only one which didn’t concretely prepare to take policy concerns to the political representatives. Then she suggests that this new movement doesn’t really have a political agenda and is focused on personal relationships. Silly, and while i’m writting this up i can perhaps imagine that, after all the months of work of developing the Convenant and arranging hundreds of appointments with the people in power, this must be disappointing. But i can’t help sympathising with the article’s mockery of the new agie Ama Zenya, Reverend at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, and part of the NSP board. She strikes me as a bit of a caricature of new age fluffiness (when she speaks, i really need to switch off), which also makes it clear that the entire conference is not new agie, but that some fractions are.<\/p>\n
And an interesting question, that gives some insight in what this crowd is made of. “Who is from a mainline denomination trying to change from within?”, we are asked. Almost a third of the people raise their hands. That’s kind of impressive (yes, they get applaus). These are churches and synagogues that for a good part are dominated by right-wing theologies and ideologies by now. “Who identifies as spiritual and is outside institutionalized religion?” Again, almost a third of the people raise their hands. The rest then are progressive denominations.<\/p>\n
S. is searching for me to go out for dinner with him, but i disappoint him. Irene, my working group leader, had kind of figured out that we could both join the queer caucus, abandonning our working group. So why is there already a queer caucus on the second day of the conference? There was a conflict in the personal relationships workshop yesterday (yes, that workshop seemed much more explosive than all the others…) about the Tikkun and NPS line (well, it’s actually more clear to say the Rabbi Lerner line…) on so-called gay marriage (which i actually like, nadia, it made me think of a discussion we had!). A civil contract that is open for everybody, without any distinction between heterosexual and gay. That’s one field of struggle. A second field of struggle are the religious authorities, with the aim to open the religious ceremonies and rituals within religious congregations and communities for same-sex religious marriages. Perhaps it was the fact that the civil thing was called “civil contract” and the religious thing “marriage”. In any case, some people at the conference took offense, and the dinner was meant to discuss and prepare a petition to the organizers. It was interesting to be part of the discussion, but i couldn’t help not getting worked up about the whole thing. Perhaps it should be better to call it the same thing – civil marriage, religious marriage (although why should we pretend they are the same thing? and i don’t mind using contract for the civil sphere, and marriage for the religious, it seems rather appropriate.) Lerner had argued the point in terms of a separation of state and religion, and in case you would doubt: in the public sphere only the civil contract or marriage would count; the religious marriage is all about affirming a bond in the eyes of god and in the eyes of a religious community. Moreover, i didn’t feel it was a cheap trick to focus only on the civil contract struggle and leave believers alone with the struggle within their religious communities, as there was a lot of talk of how to struggle for same-sex marriage within various denominations, and the Beyt Tikkun synagogue indeed does same-sex marriages.<\/p>\n
And yet, people here got quite upset… takes my thoughts in different directions… one of them: how religious and civil marriage is, whether in actual fact or in the imaginary, quite mixed up here… (in the discussion at some point someone refered to how she thought<\/em> that in Germany civil and religious marriage were separated, and then there was much discussion trying to grasp the modality of such a separation – things which to me felt quite self-evident…). Throughout the discussion, the tone and claims of the petition were softed, and in the end i think the main thing was that lgbt people should be actively involved in any position the NSP with regard to personal relationships, family, sexuality and marriage. Makes sense of course, but i must say that i found the “caucus logic” (which now has it own mailinglist, etc.) a bit tiresome… But it was good to talk with my table guests: a bunch of lesbian preachers (methodist church), non ordained, and a tranny (sufi) muslim woman. All the stories of exclusion but also insisting inclusion as they stood their grounds, and were supported by believers-friends among them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By the time i get back the workshop on the free-market and the sinfullness of liberalism already started. So i didn’t hear everything, but most of what i heard was haunted by the ghosts of “China taking our jobs” and protectionism. It’s actually refreshing to hear economic justice being treated as a moral issue, after … Continue reading “spiritual activism (day two)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,18,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}