September 11th, 2016

09-11-2016

Victims of Conscience

Dr. Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, published the following open letter to students.

“This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable. I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.” I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.”

We should not be distracted by jargon and vitriol in the dog fights and exaggerations around questions of “trigger-warnings” and “safe spaces.” The real issue is that just as conscience demands discomfort, democracy demands talking with, hearing, and understanding those with whom we deeply and even desperately disagree. After coming to understand someone whose politics or opinions we find wrong, we may still believe them to be mistaken. But in the process of hearing and talking we will have begun to create the threads of commonality that comprise our shared commitment to democracy and public life. Democracy is not about bringing everyone to agree on political questions ranging from abortion to police reform. But it is about respecting our fellow citizens enough to hear them and confirm our fellowship as citizens. No doubt democracy is hard. The fracturing of the political and media worlds through the internet has made it easier to avoid opposing and uncomfortable opinions. But if colleges and universities stand for something, it should be as ivory towers where we are safe to be deeply uncomfortable and confront those ideas and people most challenging to who we are. —RB - The exploration of the meaning of discomfort is the theme of the Arendt Center’s upcoming conference “Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion.” You can register and learn more here.

Form more information visit: https://edubirdie.com/translations/this-is-not-a-day-care-it-s-a-university/

On Being Destroyed

Babette Babich reflects on why we must keep reading the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Beyond academic politics — which always matters, given the dangers of equivocation — the conjunction includes a conundrum. Heidegger, who offered a Seminar in 1937 entitled Nietzsche, über Sein und Schein, would later reflect on the challenge that it is to take oneself to “know” Nietzsche, only to say at the end of his life, Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht. My teacher along with Hans-Georg Gadamer at Boston College, Bill Richardson, knew Heidegger cold. He followed Heidegger’s courses as a student in Freiburg and even got Heidegger to write a preface to his book, Through Phenomenology to Thought on the distinction Richardson introduced between Heidegger I and Heidegger II.[v] But knowing Heidegger backwards and forwards — there is no more sensitive reading to this day — Richardson could not abide the notion that Nietzsche might have undone Heidegger, no matter Heidegger’s own report, no more than Father Richardson could ever abide Nietzsche. What on earth does it mean to say, he would ask, that Nietzsche ruined Heidegger? At the very least it means, and we really should begin to think about this, that an engagement with “the substance of his thinking,”[vi] will have to be a demanding one. Nietzsche is always other than we take him to be, as Nietzsche warns us: do not mistake me.”

Form more information visit: http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/babette-babich-heideggers-nietzsche-virgules-conjunctions-being-broken/

The Game of Thrones at Plaza Vista

Christopher Goffard in the LA Times has an extraordinary story about a tale of revenge and ruin among the well-to-do soccer-mom set at the Plaza Vista School in Irvine, California.

“The cop wanted her car keys. Kelli Peters handed them over. She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys. They were outside Plaza Vista School in Irvine, where she had watched her daughter go from kindergarten to fifth grade, where any minute now the girl would be getting out of class to look for her. Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program. Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. Watched as the cop emerged from her car holding a Ziploc bag of marijuana, 17 grams worth, plus a ceramic pot pipe, plus two smaller EZY Dose Pill Pouch baggies, one with 11 Percocet pills, another with 29 Vicodin. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name. Her legs buckled and she was on her knees, shaking violently and sobbing and insisting the drugs were not hers.”

Form more information visit: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/#chapter1