Theolog

Religion on the brain

By Amy Frykholm

Nina Azari has been looking at the brains of religious people. Azari is a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii who is working on a doctorate in theology at Illiff Seminary in Denver. She wants to find out what human brains do when engaged in religious activity. In its March 19 issue, The Economist reports on her scientific experiment:

[Azari] used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The Christians all said that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helped them enter a religious state of mind, so both groups were scanned in six different sets of circumstances: while reading the first verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a happy story (a well-known German children's rhyme), while reciting that story out loud, while reading a neutral text (how to use a calling card) and while at rest.

Worthless physicians

By Kevin Baker

In times of tragedy, death or suffering, people have a tendency to talk too much. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we stop talking at such moments, our Christian faith will be rendered mute and impotent just when it should be shining forth with great insight, purpose and meaning. Yet it is often our verbose religious defenses that chip away at a robust faith, not the awkward silences.

We make comments like I understand what you are going through. . . .I know it seems hard to believe right now, but everything happens for a purpose. . . .Well, I guess God needed an angel.

Prayer as paying attention

By Amy Frykholm

When I was in college, I encountered French existentialist philosopher Simone Weil’s awkwardly titled essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God.” It stirred up in me a strong interest in focused and concentrated study. I was fascinated by her suggestion that the right use of study was cultivating attention, an attention that paved the way for prayer. Weil argues this is the “real object and almost the sole interest of studies.” Whatever the success of the studies themselves and whatever the subject studied, the pursuit is attention, a quality that leads eventually to compassion and to love of God. “Quite apart from explicit religious belief,” Weil writes, “every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.” As we desire the light, we increase our capacity for perceiving it.

After college I spent a dark, lonely year as an English teacher in Tallinn, Estonia.

Learning from Mother Teresa

By David Heim

“She lived the joy she could not feel.” That’s the profile of Mother Teresa that emerges from recently published private letters (see also the Century editorial "Dark Nights"). They reveal that she felt profoundly cut off from God through most of the years that she pursued her celebrated missionary work among the poorest of the poor.

Creative dislocation

By Richard Kauffman

Christians often practice a little-known spiritual discipline called “creative dislocation” without realizing it: we engage in creative dislocation by going on a spiritual retreat or on a mission trip into a foreign environment—the inner city or a third-world country—where the usual markers of our lives are taken from us, and we’re subject to someone else’s way of doing things. When we’re dislocated, we begin seeing in fresh ways. We look for the familiar in the unfamiliar, and we see what is familiar to us in new ways. If we’re paying attention, we see the presence of God in new ways.

Sometimes that strange and unfamiliar place is a spiritual desert where we seem to experience the absence of God more than God’s presence. One of the most haunting of scriptures is 1 Samuel 3:1: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” I’ve known periods in my life like that.

Is tattooing an incarnational practice?

By Amy Frykholm

In the Left Behind series, people who become Christians after the Rapture receive marks on their foreheads—a kind of three-dimensional, holographic tattoo that only other Christians can see. These marks stand in contrast to the “Mark of the Beast” mark on the foreheads of those who have chosen to follow the Antichrist. I find the desire to inscribe Christians with a “mark” fascinating. In Protestantism, we have frequently reduced salvation to something intangible, unaffected by material practices. In Left Behind, a simple “mark” solves that perplexing, age-old question about who is saved and who is not. The tattoo removes all uncertainty. Whew. Problem solved. Except it’s not that simple, of course, since bad people learn how to imitate the mark and the true believers can be deceived by unbelievers and the cycle of uncertainty, even with the special mark, goes on and on.

Tim Keel’s recent article in the Century discusses Christian tattooing of another sort: Christians who mark themselves using permanent ink on their skin.

Walking a labyrinth

By Richard A. Kauffman

Recently I spent several days at the Taizé community in southeastern France. Taizé has three daily “prayers” that are largely sung, using repetitive chant-like songs. The community draws visitors from all over the world, especially youth and young adults from Europe. There must have been close to 1,000 guests present the week I was there.

One day at the end of the noon prayers I decided to remain in the sanctuary while the worshipers processed out. We were singing over and over again the chant, “Bless the Lord, my soul, and praise God’s holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me in to life.” As fewer and fewer people were left to sing it, the song got slower and slower, but with fewer people in the sanctuary there was more of an echo, so the response time was longer, and the slow pace seemed appropriate. Hearing a few people keeping the song going was incredible, and a small, earthly reminder that the praises of God will go on for eternity.

Advent in the waiting room

By Debra Bendis

This week I waited in a hospital waiting room with my mother while my dad underwent surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm (successfully). The staff was cordial and efficient, the coffee was free, and an RN came around every hour or so to give us an update on surgery progress. Still, it was a hospital, and during the eight hour wait we became lethargic, stuck in our chairs except for a few forays into the cafeteria.