It’s been a long time since I’ve posted — work and life have been busy! For those who might be interested, here are some presentations I’ve recently given:
Cyber-terrorism as a Crime and Cyber-surveillance, NJIT Cybersecurity and Terrorism Conference
Dealing with Hackers, Practicing Law Institute Cybersecurity Panel
This is the cover image from last week’s Economist magazine. The cover article offers some frightening insights about the global economy. But even though this is genuinely disturbing news, we in the Church can take great comfort in Christ’s words in Revelation 1:17-18: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.” This, in fact, is the central message of Revelation, the hermeneutical key for the entire text: “do not be afraid.” This is why it’s particularly a shame that so may radio and television preachers distort the message of this text. It’s not about predicting the future of the “end times,” the “rapture,” and so-on. It’s about patience, endurance, perseverance, and not being afraid when the world around us seems chaotic. It’s about not being afraid because not even death and Hades can overcome the victory of God in Christ.
Here’s a video I did on theological hermeneutics for an adult class I’m teaching.
I’ve written at times about my son, who has epilepsy and apraxia of speech. He is a living lesson in grace. Lately he has been very into reading the Bible — both an illustrated kid’s Bible, and a real one. After a sermon last week in church on Job, he lugged my old NIV upstairs and started reading from Job 1! I have no idea what he understands.
A few nights ago, he told me he wanted to show me how to read the Bible using sign language. He learns sign at the school he attends. I suggested we try the book of Proverbs. I turned to Proverbs, and he flipped randomly to Proverbs 3. He signed through these words, which I have known from my youth and have recited many times:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight. (Prov. 3:5-6)
Again, I don’t know how much of this he “gets” cognitively. He can say and sign the words, but for him, language just doesn’t work the way it does for most of us. I think he understands quite a bit, but just how much is a mystery. But then, “getting it cognitively” isn’t really what this text is all about. Maybe it takes someone like my son to teach us the deep truths of texts like this one.
Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted, has many names. In what precisely it consists, is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide him from the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success.
— Bernard Lonergan, Insight
Now this looks interesting.
Last weekend I was in Atlantic City to give a talk on cybersecurity and computer crimes law at the annual convention for New Jersey State Prosecutors. My wife came along so we could get away for a day.
I want to say that I don’t “get” Atlantic City. It’s the cheesiest place on the East Coast, and it doesn’t seem to possess any sense of irony about its cheese factor. In one of the shops at the Taj, there’s a classic quote stenciled on the wall from Donald Trump: “You have to think anyway, so why not think big?” Um… yeah.
All of this over-the-topness can be fun, and indeed my wife and I had a nice time walking the boardwalk, gawking at the Jersey Shore most of the world knows, only an hour down the Parkway from our beloved and peaceful vacation spot of Long Beach Island.
The layer of reality just beneath the facades of such a place, of course, can also look quite sad. There are the folks parked at the slots, many of them senior citizens, pressing the “bet” button over and over and over with glazed expression. There are the slots themselves, which are so automated that bettors don’t even need to insert quarters and pull a lever — you buy electronic credits and push a button until your credits are gone. (I did try it — $15, gone in ten minutes, and that was it). There are the young people wearing “Jen’s Bachelorette Bash 2011” T-shirts, wanting to play high-rolling let-it-ride party girls, but mostly looking tired, lost, and lame. The are legions of regular working people, black and white and Asian and Latino, who by their rumpled dress and manners seem nothing at all like the spiffy dandies flashing smoky, knowing grins towards the ad agency’s cameras in the Casino billboards along the Boardwalk.
It’s tempting to play a class card when visiting such a place. My class of person, so I’d like to think, might dip into AC once in a while just to revel in the irony of it all, but we quickly come back up to Bergen County and shower it off. But I came away feeling a solidarity with these crowds. It would be an interesting place, I said to my wife, to plant a church.
What I felt underneath the thin veneer of faux opulence was a longing for community and love. The god of the Taj is the god of this age: the god money-sex-pleasure-bling. This is a stern, impersonal god, whose promises are lies, who always, sooner or later, leaves his worshipers alone and abandoned, sacrificial victims for new generations of acolytes. At the Taj, in AC, money-sex-pleasure-bling shows himself openly. Up in Bergen, out on LBI, there are churches and families and institutions and healthy pursuits that help keep him at bay. But he is there, too, in the cracks and shadows, often flashing violently through those churches and families and institutions and pursuits, threatening to burn them to cinders. His is the kingdom dismantled by the cross and resurrection of Christ and against which the community of the Church is called to prevail.
Here is Brian Daley’s talk abstract from the Regent College Center for Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue conference on theological interpretation. Looks like a great conference, wish I could go. The theological interpretation movement, in my view, is one of the most fruitful efforts to understand scripture-as-scripture, avoiding the extremes of both literalistic and demythologizing heremeneutics.
Today, as a result of renewed interest in early Christian biblical interpretation, and of the widely shared sense that the historical-critical study of the Scriptures cannot, by itself, nourish the spiritual hunger of Christian disciples, many people who read the Bible as the norm of their faith and life are convinced that the only kind of interpretation that can do justice to the biblical text must be theological: a style of interpretation that takes God and God’s work in the world seriously, as the true shaper of the text and as its final meaning. Here, with the help of some of the Church Fathers, we will set out to ask what “theological interpretation of Scripture” might mean. The God proclaimed by the Christian Bible is a God who is always engaged with history, and with human beings: the God who creates, judges, heals, unifies, and steers the human race steadily towards union with Himself. Christians understand that this takes place because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that it is in the history of creation and salvation itself that God’s Trinitarian identity has gradually become known: that what Patristic authors called “theology,” in the strict sense — speaking about God — itself becomes possible. For Christians, this takes place in the Church: the community of disciples unified by hearing and living from God’s Word, the place in which the scriptural canon is identified and its messages interpreted. Because we always live and speak in the context of history, we need to use all the tools of modern historical and philological scholarship to identify what any particular biblical text originally may have been intended to say; but we need also to hear that text in our own context of lived faith, if the text is to remain the saving Word of God for us, and not to be simply an ancient religious document. To read any particular passage of the Bible without historical and critical awareness may well prevent us from understanding its full meaning correctly; but to read it without faith, and apart from our own context within a worshipping community, keeps us from understanding that full meaning as a part of Holy Scripture, and as the Word of life.
I had to write a short “This I Believe” statement for a wonderful “Seminar on Mission” that I’m participating in at Seton Hall’s main campus. My statement is way too theological-ish. It was interesting, though, how many of the participants structured their statements in reference the Creed, as I did:
I believe in the God who is in His undivided essence the fullness of every perfection. He is fully good; fully merciful; fully holy; fully just; fully beautiful; fully wise; fully love; all of these, without division, without lack, without tension or contradiction – “simple,” and complete.
I believe the God of perfection is the Triune God. He is Father, Son, and Spirit, three persons in one essence, undivided yet distinctly personal, coinhering in each other in the perichoretic dance of eternal fellowship.
I believe in creation. The God of perfection and Trinitarian relationality created a universe that flows from, but is distinct from, His own nature and being. Goodness, mercy, holiness, justice, beauty, wisdom and love inhere in the fabric of the cosmos because the cosmos is the craftwork of the Divine logos. The logic of creation is a word of blessing imbued with a Divine origin — “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31) – and a word of promise imbued with a Divine future – “So that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). And the adamah, the human creature, is imbued with the Divine neshemah the “breath of life,” breathed by the Divine ruach, the Spirit that “was hovering over the waters” of primeval chaos before structuring life (Gen. 1:2; 2:7).
I do not “believe” in evil, or sin, or death, though I know they threaten the creation God called “very good,” not least the adamah who can choose or not choose the good. Evil, sin and death are nothing – no “thing” – no kind of essence or being in the ontology of the very good creation of God. Yet evil, sin and death invade, deprive, corrupt, distort, and we of the adamah participate in its deprivations continually.
I believe in revelation, incarnation and redemption. The God who in His essence is transcendent of creation and thus unknowable is immanent in creation in His energies, and therefore can in a manner be known. The same God has disclosed Himself – “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14) – and called a community of justice and redemption in Israel. And the same God, the very Logos, who created, entered into the suffering of creation as a human peasant and took on all the power of evil, sin and death as a suffering servant executed by an imperial power.
I believe in resurrection. The Christ who suffered and died on the cross rose again, defeating evil, sin and death. By the power of his victory all of creation will be renewed. The creating Logos who is also the suffering Christ who is also the victorious Christ will pronounce the final verdict by which all that could threaten the very goodness of creation will be banished forever (Rev. 20:11-15), and every tear will be wiped away from the eyes of his people (Rev. 21:4).
I believe that in this time in between times, the life of a teacher and scholar is a life in participation in grace. It is ideally a life of participation in goodness, mercy, holiness, beauty, wisdom, justice, love, a product of the Divine energies, a breath of Divine spirit, a vehicle of redemption.
Something compels you to travel by plane. There are people to meet in another city; or there is work to be done in other places; or there are deep and rich and painful histories embedded in earth and stones you must touch to experience; or there is a pleasant oasis to refresh your dry spirit. You must go.
At the airport, you are aware that home already has been left behind. This is not a stable place. It is a transitioning place. Any stopping here, even for a meal, is temporary.
The cabin door is locked and the plane pulls from the gate. There is no turning back now, not without literally creating a federal incident. Taxiing to the runway, waiting in the take-off queue, you stare out from the constricted aperture of your window portal at the great sliver-skinned dragons thundering into the sky ahead of you, hauling faceless cargoes of souls to the far corners of the Earth.
A slight but persistent force compresses you into your seat as jets hung from wispy airfoils — engines of power most people in history could scarcely have imagined — rocket you above solid ground. The beast dips a wing and banks upward, a resistant mass of pressurized air pushing you up, up, towards a solid bank of clouds, against gravity’s heartless grasp.
Into the cloud deck, all is gray-black-oily-wet. The beast shivers, wing-tips flexing, skin stretching, rivets straining. Nothing appears through your portal. Nothing but a Brownian motion of storm. You are noplace and you could be anyplace.
Suddenly the dragon’s nose pierces through cloud tops and everything is light. A dazzling Sun breaks over endless miles of rolling marble-white, perfections of the classical forms, pillars of Hercules, thrones of gods. From here it is clear: where you have been, where you are, where you are going. The petty embroilments of the city you have left have dropped away, the horizon stretches ahead, and everything you see fits into a crisp and beautiful pattern.
Hours later, there are subtle shifts in cabin pressure. Passengers and crew grow more alert, tense. Soon the flight will descend once more through a cloud deck of chaotic uncertainty. It will thump rudely onto the tarmac of a different airport, another transitional space, open to a new city.
In this new city lie your urgent appointments and tasks. There wait the wisdom and refreshment you seek. If you stay for any time at all, you will encounter also new entanglements, pains and mysteries, much like and yet much different from those you knew at the place you had called home. Memories of clear Sun on cloud-tops arrayed over limitless horizons will seem false, inaccessible, unreal. And you will once again pass through cities and ports and clouds and heights, heights and clouds and ports and cities, stretching out and summing up, rolling on and on and on, until you arrive at the Final City at last.