Train Ride

On the train from Dresden to Prague. We follow the Elbe between ridges speckled with high-peaked homes. Two sheep barely notice me pass, but I will remember their calm meditation at the base of a river-tree; maybe forever. They do not know the beauty of this place, they are it.
Roof tiles darken and plaster crumbs float away with the wind. Roots reclaim foundations as the old fisherman's cottage sighs its concession and stops waiting for his return. He has long since returned to the water and soil.
The antiquity here is startling. It forces an awareness of one's legacy. What will I leave? What will wait for my return? What will curse my having come at all? In a place where the lives of the long past are the very bones of daily life, it is harder to maintain the illusion of transience.

Meaning vs. Utility

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 10:36am

Her face haunted my mornings for 6 months. The sadness behind her nameless eyes pierced the books and beer cans that littered my desk. At the end of the year, I was sick of her melancholic influence. To me, she was simply an emblem of my skill. To keep her would have been vanity.

The last morning of my college years, she gazed in disappointment at the minivans and SUVs from a mound of discarded office furniture and broken televisions. Useless symbols of a life left behind.

On the seventh of Mr. Harris' thirteen trips from his daughter's dorm to his Caravan, he heard the tones of her silent lament echoing his own pain. He rushed to the heap of useless items and lifted out the bust I had made in sculpture 101. He knocked on five doors before he found me.
“Did you make this?”
“Oh.... yeah. Do you want it?”
“Why did you throw it out?”
“I don't know, I don't have any use for it... What are you going to do with it?”
“...”

He packed her carefully among his daughter's possessions; the god of meaning amidst the merely useful.

Wildflower witness

Monday, March 29, 2010 at 9:43am

Running through the woods. I leave the trail, turning left and going deeper. I highstep over fallen branches, brought low by last week's windstorm. Quick lateral movements across the face of brambles. They try to bring me down, their arm tackles break my skin, but not my momentum. My wet socks breathe in the cool mossy moisture.

And then I break through the line, but the unfiltered sunlight catches me short. Four steps to stillness. I crouch low to the ground and watch as the geese play in the canal. A bird is singing above me. My eyes catch up with my ears. She is a little robin, calling for spring. I move towards the water and sit on the slope. To my left, a tangle of thorny vines form an imperfect cage. To my right, a burst of wild flowers strut their yellow to defy the chill in the air.

I have seen such cages and such defiance before. I live between them. But there is something important about the relationship between the two in this place. I think about how much time I spend planning and strategizing and researching the cages in my world. I want theories and understanding. I want to figure out which vine to cut first. But these flowers just grow in their midst.

The Tortoise and the Hare.

Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:12pm

His polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I crunched along on the sidewalk, gears straining to pull the rusty chain through its cycles. He breathed steadily as I strained and puffed, dragging my jeans and sweatshirt through the unusually dense wind. I swerved to the right and cut through the seminary campus, over the grass, past nodding friends.

On the other side, his polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I cruised down the hill, avoiding pedestrians on the footpath, leaning back in the sun, passing him as he waited at the red light. I smile through my aviators.

Further down the hill, his polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I began to enjoy this. I came to see myself as the tortoise. Not so much slow and steady, but eccentric and free. Not dressed for a race, not equipped for a competition, not stopping at red lights; just going home. I ride to get somewhere, and I enjoy it. I wonder why he rides. He can have no destination in those tights.

I passed him one last time before turning onto the canal trail, where my tires kicked mud all over my jeans. I smile as a little splashes on my face.

The Evolution of Isolation.

Throughout human history, our species has evolved a series of dependences on external items. We developed the use of weapons and became more efficient hunters with them. But without our weapons, we have become less efficient hunters than our ancestors who hunted bare-handed. We developed clothes and became more hardy with them. We developed vehicles and became more mobile. I believe that as these technologies and dependencies developed, it has become the “natural” state of humankind to be clothed, equipped, and mounted. And I know no one who laments the loss of our old efficiency at bare-handed hunting, our old hairy-backed hardiness, or our old ability to migrate on foot over great distances.

Most recently, we have developed digital technology and become more efficient communicators, researchers, and consumers. A student with wikipedia at his fingertips is more knowledgeable than any single human being living before 1985. When stripped of this tool, he may not be able to use a dictionary, or have the attention span required to read a book, but with it he can produce instantly any information he needs on almost any subject. However, in a way unlike the developments of his ancestors, we lament the loss of his old faculties. We do not want to say that it has become the “natural” state of humanity to be plugged in. Why is this?

It may be that our objections to his loss of the old capacities of learning and discipline are merely because the loss is so new, and because we ourselves have invested a lot of time and effort into developing these capacities. I am quite sure the first homo erectus whose younger brother used a flint knife criticized him for missing out on something important by not tearing flesh with his incisors. But I sense in this latest loss a danger of an entirely different type than the shortening of teeth.

Our latest tool is a machine so vast and shallow, that it cannot be grasped or kept by any one person, family, or society. It is a series of connections so open-ended that it cannot be tied to any thing solid. It requires of its users no investment of personhood; no commitment of identity or accountability. It is fueled only by marketability. It is the first tool that is larger than humanity.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 8:37pm

Its creators dreamed of the connections it could forge between communities - of the communications it could facilitate between feuding peoples. And it has facilitated these things. It has opened up to its users the opportunity for reconciliation and connection. But it has not born these fruits. This vision was based upon a kind of utopian optimism which proposed that, given unlimited resources, human beings would share freely and live in peace. But this is not the case.

The internet has given people nearly unlimited intellectual and communicative resources. But it has done so without the kind of community or family-based accountability that has always regulated human nature. With a few exceptions, the internet is used to specialize, categorize, and isolate. Whatever your biases, whatever your fears, you can find them expressed with confidence on the internet. Whatever your hatred, whomever your enemy, you can find it portrayed poorly on the internet. And to do so is infinitely more gratifying to the fallen human soul than to challenge yourself and grow towards reconciliation.

Human beings work to come together not because it is in our nature to do so, but because we must. The internet has removed the must imposed upon us by our communities. We lament and fear the loss of our intellectual capacities when stripped of the internet because we have begun to see the terrible efficiency of our isolating activity when plugged in.

I am not against technology. I am aware of the irony of sharing this note on the internet. I do not even believe we can do anything to stop or regulate this trend. I just see that it is, and I lament it.

A lost balloon

Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 3:07pm

The sun shines through the lenses of my sunglasses, warming my eyes to sleep. I put down my book – Otto's The Idea of the Holy- and drift up through the branches, across a jet-stream-cloud representing someone's return home, and someone's leaving. A single red balloon rises from the distant trees. I wonder at the circumstances of its flight. Did an unexpected gust tug it from the grip of a tiny hand? Did she cry as it rose out of reach?

Or was it a wish? Did she, much older, much sadder, remember the lost balloon of her youth, and send this one up to meet it? As these questions form, I look across the cloud, a line through the blue. I drift back towards the red balloon, but it has slipped from my grip as well.

A Manifesto

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 4:34pm

It is the first real day of spring. I woke up before dawn and moved through the thick winter darkness. I am jet-lagged and sick. I email my professor my regrets, and return to hibernation. 10 am and there is a bird singing. I walk to my computer and turn on a sad song, but it plays differently. The sound waves move through the sunsoaked air with a certain sweetness, an appreciation for its warmth. I could write a manifesto with the hope in these dulcet tones.
It would begin “I claim the freedom to live without reference to your values; a life of quality not to be measured but to be felt. I will not specialize and systematize. I will create. Even... especially without a place for it, I will create.”
I went for a run. I could have gone forever. It is beautiful today. And part of that beauty is the darkness that preceded it. The context. I wonder if people in Southern California ever appreciate a day as fully as I appreciate this first day of spring? It is a cold drink after months of thirst. And it is the thirst that gives it meaning.

A Trail of Breadcrumbs (My Barcelona Journal)

3/7/10
Kent Hayden

Through the Sea
It is 2:11 AM and my mouth is dry. All around me, the people sleep. On the little screen in front of me, our plane is represented as a white shape in a field of blue. There is nothing solid on the map as we slice through the Atlantic. Our only connection to reality is the red line of where we have been – a path of past leading to the foot of this flying cross, suspended over the chaos of the dark and the deep. The thin red string is rooted in a place distorted, a place I sometimes have to try hard to recognize.
Two months ago, I was living a different life; isolated, hiding from loss. Last month, I didn't know Grant's name. Two days ago, he and I decided to take this trip to Barcelona on our final reading week of our Princeton Seminary careers. It is terrible to be so free, terrible to live between. It is terrible to look out and see the darkness of unregulated possibility broken only by the incision of your past. But terror can be exciting, and freedom sometimes leads to discovery. And there is green creeping onto the right of the screen.

Details
To begin to tell a story is to commit perjury. You cannot tell the whole truth. The circumstances and decisions which led to my presence on this plane are too large and mysterious to be interesting to you or known to me, so I will lie to you and say it began a few nights ago at the BT Bistro.
We were drinking, and so generating some great ideas. (This is not irresponsibility, but rather a deeply rooted and important aspect of the human tradition. Herodotus describes the ancient Persian practice of making community decisions when drunk, then confirming them when sober. In the cases when someone was uninhibited enough to think of a good idea sober, the leaders of the community would get drunk to confirm that the idea was good. So there.) The first of our great ideas was to take my El Camino to the Jersey shore and camp in the back of it. This soon evolved into a road trip to someplace a bit warmer, which in turn inspired the idea of booking a cheap flight somewhere tropical, which led to a mutual decision to explore last minute flight deals when we got home from the bar. Abra Cadabra: Barcelona.
I am somewhat ignorant of Spanish history and custom, and my knowledge of Barcelona itself is limited to a vague interest in La Sagrada Familia. But I do have some high school Spanish and a genuine interest in people and places that are different. I also have a need to explore my own person and his place in the world.
Shortly after boarding the train to NY, we hit some metallic debris, causing quite a bit of clanging from the belly of the steel beast and some shouting from the belly of its conductor. “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?” The brief surge of adrenaline served as reminder of the danger of leaving home. It felt good. The man in the Phillies hat summoned all of his powers of deduction to ask me “Was that not normal?” A few minutes' delay at the next station and we were off.
Check in around 8:40 for a 9:55flight. We were hungry but the only food to be had past security was at a refrigerated kiosk. I paid 21$ for a tuna salad sandwich, a muffin, and a drink. Fuck supply and demand.

Unlearning Time
3:14 AM Princeton time: I just cracked my window to trigger an explosion of light. Time travel. It is 9:15. I am no longer without a context. I am in a new place, where the Sun doesn't recognize my claims on its patterns.
A trip through space and time separates you from your world, which is so far imaginary that upon reentering it, something as fundamental as the rhythms of the Sun are destabilized. It is not we, who can explain the processes of planetary physics, who truly understand the Sun. It is our ancestors, who could explain that the Sun might not rise tomorrow, and who mourned its death each night and celebrated its birth each morning.
The insight here is not the rather mundane observation that we are ultimately ignorant, or that truth is contextual. It is that our life-long striving to hide from death is not only vain, it is misguided. Death is neither eternal nor purely destructive. It is also creative. Resurrection is a real possibility. Being without time and space, suspended on this flying cross, I have been forced to uncouple my experience from the temporal progression of my narrative. I have been forced to drive a wedge between time and life. But I have also been forced to reunite them. I have learned to see the seam where they almost touch. On the other side of such an experience, there is hope. The hope that I have a lot to unlearn.


Because we are Tourists
We arrived by cab at our little ho(s)tel yesterday around 4 and checked in. The room is tiny, has two beds, a broken tv, a wardrobe, and a tiny bathroom with a beday. It is not nice, but it was 33$ a night, so I am content. We unpacked our stuff, got showers, and went out around 5. We got tapas for dinner because we are tourists. We ordered two Estrella Damms and the waiter asked if we wanted larges because we are tourists. We said yes, and he brought us two 40oz mugs. We also ordered mussels in vinegarette, bread with tomato, churizzos, and mozzarella.
We then went out into the rain to try to find a nice bar. Paul the bedredlocked Canadian works at a little bar above an ice cream shop that we fled to for refuge. He had graduated high school and moved to Barcelona to find himself. He seemed happy. We ordered cava, the Spanish equivalent of Champagne, which was served with a strawberry on the rim because we are tourists. The ensuing Jagerbombs were served with a shot of rum. “Know what would make this shot better? A shot.” I was running on 2 hours of sleep. Not running; zombies can't run.
We ventured forth to a have a beer at few little bars before landing in a nice Irish pub because we are tourists. The British guy with the Ducati helmet owned a Disco in Barcelona and the other helped run it, but it was only open on the weekends, so we were unable to take them up on their offer to have us there as their guests. Too bad. We had the best Irish coffee I have ever tasted.
We then walked down to the waterfront looking for a disco because we are tourists. (Apparently a club here means a strip club. Thanks Paul.) But the combination of the early hour (10), the rain, and the day of week (Sunday) meant we were about the only ones in the area. Apparently night life here starts around 2. I was less than a zombie. We fled the rain and found a nice hole-in-the-wall on a side street somewhere. I drank Red Bull and Coffee. Zombie antidote. Today, we slept. It is snowing beautifully. I'm going to go walk.

Art and Worship
3/8/10 11:56. It is snowing in Barcelona. We left New Jersey behind with its inches and puddles evaporating into spring. Today it is in the 50s and sunny in Princeton. But it is snowing in Barcelona. The only thing that is different here is the dark journey that preceded it.
We passed the Universidad de Barcelona and stopped at a superlative tapas bar. We sat by the window watching a dense snowfall over the center of the city. We left when a few heavily drunk Germans stumbled in and began singing “Sweet Caroline.”
After getting Grant some new shoes to handle the wintery weather, we found ourselves moving towards the Cathedral to the South-East of our Hotel. It is 12th century, the oldest and probably most impressive cathedral I've seen. It felt right as I removed my hat. I walked around looking for interesting angles to photograph the architecture, wanting to save this place for my future, to claim it as part of my narrative. But the occasional echoes of a lenten service in a side chapel pulled me out of my analysis and into relationship with the space. Time was absorbed by the present. This is the function of worship at its highest, the function of art at its most basic. It communicates flashes of the ultimate.
Walking in the sacred space looking for “art” can yield nothing but images. Art is an experience of losing ones' self, not finding a shot. Art is stepping into lent and climbing onto the cross; not for an ism, not for beauty, not for truth, but simply for the view.
From Golgotha you can look up and see leviathan and Behemoth in all their chaotic glory, and hear God say “consider these... I am like these... You are like these...” From Golgotha you can look down and see your feet, broken and pierced, and remember all the places you planned to go someday. From Golgotha, you can look out and see the Temple, and hear the echoes of old women's voices, mourning the death of their God. But I wonder how the owners of those voices experienced them. And I mourn that for most of my life I will continue analyzing the angles and singing Sweet Caroline.

Truth in the Gaps
Back in a University. We sit in an ancient garden in the Antic Hospital de la Sta. Creu. We walked from a somewhat typical ethnic suburb, crammed with kabob and hair products. To the right, an arch opened upon a canopy of orange trees, dropping their children onto centuries of footprints. Princeton aspires to such graceful decay. Here it is almost unremarkable. But I will remark.
Late medieval bricks are crammed into the gaps where ancient stones have crumbled. The hands that hewed the stones and those that spread the mortar are joined in the gaps. The workers' efforts are absorbed into their shared purpose. The beauty of such a place is in the seams. There is something like truth in the unions that such a place generates; not eternal, but lasting.

Spanish insomnia.
I rose around 6 and walked through a dead city. The only others were characters from a graphic novel; laborers unloading trucks, bicycle mounted drug dealers, a group of youths clinging to last night. I walked on and came to the port. A sanitation worker dragged his broom as he passed another American tourist, dirtying his city. I sat in the cold and waited for dawn. Its arrival was a subtle thing, heralded only by the gulls. The horizon was all masts and hotels, but the moon glowed in the half-light.


2:22 am.
Last day in Barcelona. I cannot sleep with so many thoughts. I have begun to know this place. I have begun to form it into the background of my narrative. But In a few hours, I will be torn from the friendly bartender at Bar International, from the crumbling stone I touched outside the Cathedral, from the dealer on La Rambla whispering “hashishishish.” I will be launched from these things that have constituted my reality, and they will cease to be. My story will go on without them, and their images in my mind will fade. The more meaningful encounters I have had will remain with me for a while, but just a while. And the ripples of my presence here will widen out into calm. Barcelona will forget me, as it should. Another tourist, at best glancing up from his beer to see something of the life of this place.
My story is a thin line through the infinite. If it is worth telling, it is only as a parable; a case study of an instance so small and so common, that it constitutes one of the building blocks of being. And yet, it is everything there is. From where I sit, I can see clearly only the point of my present, moving through the void. Mathematically, a point occupies no space; it has no being. And so, I imagine my narrative, a line from an arbitrarily chosen beginning to an imagined end.
But sometimes truth sneaks into the gaps in my storytelling. Sometimes, my narrative is revealed to be merely a particle; so small that it has no mass, and so important that it constitutes all things. Sometimes a lenten dirge sung in a Romanesque cathedral forces me to look up and catch a glimpse of the sacred. Such an experience shakes my consciousness free from itself and allows it to see the whole. Truth ceases to be linear, and my story becomes unsettled. The red line of my narrative becomes a trail of breadcrumbs, blown by the wind and consumed by the beasts.
These encounters are terrifying. They force a simultaneous consciousness of the infinite smallness and infinite importance of my life. They encourage and disturb, leaving me absolutely free.

And then I gather myself, and I carefully drop another crumb.

The secularization of Sex

Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 2:40pm

Sex is a potentially sacred thing. The earliest religious expressions we have from the paleolithic era are fertility goddesses with emphasized reproductive organs. Sex is the ultimate form of coupling - life and death, male and female (or not,) self and other, lust and love. It is a dangerous thing. potentially life threatening to both parties and to the community. It has torn people apart and brought them together. It probably motivates human action more than any other force.

Naturally then, it has always needed to be regulated. the earliest and most primitive, and the latest and equally primitive societies may be understood as sexual systems. their primary purposes may be to regulate sexual behaviors.
This has largely been done through taboos...

However, the expression and exercise of sexuality has, until relatively modern times, been maintained as sacred and healthy outside of the established taboos. In our culture, the taboos have been threatened by a process of secularization and a rationalistic approach to sexuality which has denied its life-threatening and life-giving power. Sex has been made mundane, and so has come to be approached not with a reverence and awe appropriate to the Sacred, but with a flippancy which is destructive of the sexual force.

This secularization of sex has led to a kind of sexual fundamentalist reaction which has tried to make sex evil rather than sacred. It has led to sexual repression and bigotry which fuels a kind of fetishism when the sexual impulses are finally released. Sex is then approached as an act of secret weakness and perversion, motivating people to seek out correspondingly perverted sexual endeavors. (Like foot fetishes?)

The ironic thing is that this fetishism which is the legacy of fundamentalist sexual repression is the real source of sexual sin in our culture, and it in turn fuels the fundamentalist conviction that sex is evil.

Duchamp brought a urinal into the art gallery and someone brought feet into the bedroom. Neither are sacred. But both are expressions of the same phenomenon. The sacred has lost its force and become mundane so that no one can tell the difference between art and plumbing, or sex and fucking.

The reaction to these breakdowns has not been a search for the Sacred behind the empty forms of artistic and sexual porn, but a condemnation of and
distrust of art and sex.

Rough thoughts on the definition and secularization of art

Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 2:37pm

Is art essentially communicative?

If so, its value as art is based upon the communicative efficacy of it.
So, if the content of the communication is information, the highest form of art would be some kind of “Matrix” artificial experience - and prose would be better art than painting or music.

If the content of artistic communication is emotion, the most artistic action might be calling someone a name or giving them a kiss. Emotions are personal responses to stimuli, based upon our own psychology and most readily elicited through relationships.

If the content of artistic expression is an experience of the Sacred, then both problems are avoided, because an encounter with the Sacred is not an internal event (see Otto) nor can it be easily communicated through prose.

Other problems with defining art include the fact that it can only be defined with reference to what art exists (graham). In some sense then, art is subjective. But it is not entirely so. There is good and bad art. This must be related to aesthetic value. (why?)

Also, the issue of intention is important. It is largely held that there must be intention for there to be art. (demonstrate) however, this is problematized when the intention of the artist is missed or unknown or possibly absent. Thus, the intention may be attributed to the communicator of the Sacred. Or to God. This is all very mysterious, which seems appropriate here. Art without mystery is no art at all. Art under the complete control of the artist is no art at all. Art fully understood is no art at all.

So, we might define art as an aesthetic communication of the Sacred. Its value is dependent upon how effectively the Sacred is experienced by the observer, hearer, reader, ect. Natural phenomena may be understood as art if they are aesthetically communicative of the sacred. Non-aesthetic experiences of the sacred (do they exist -perhaps mysticism?) are not art. Hieroglyphic philosophy (aesthetic expression of information) is not art.

The origins of art -( Language and myth - Cassirer) the numinous experience (or the Sacred) is expressed or emulated through artifice. This expression of a primary experience then becomes a vehicle of such an experience. This is the shift from language to art. It is related to ritual/religion/coupling.

But it has a half-life. As soon as the Sacred is contained in a from, it loses some of its potency. As the culture changes the form becomes more rigid. The extent to which the form is elevated and treated as inherently sacred is the extent to which it ceases to be an effective vehicle of the sacred. It becomes uncoupled. This uncoupling of aesthetic expression of the sacred from the sacred itself led to mere decoration and the conscious divorcing of “fine arts” from “craft.” But “fine art” itself lost touch with the sacred and became a culturally elite form of decoration. Duchamp exploded it with his fountain. But it has yet to be replaced.

Once everything was art, the situation was akin to what Weber observed as the protestant work ethic - all things are expressive of the sacred, and so none are. “the laity of all priests.”

Poems of loss

“We”

have cast a metaphor over me:

last week’s snow on a freshly cut tree.

domed,

crisp, cold, clean.

muffling the shivers of a dying evergreen.

-------------------------

The future is hard to see through the eyes of a broken past.

There is a ghost next to my plans, a conspicuous absence, bending the light.

My someday has become transparent. Like my excuses.

------------------------

Sometimes I have the energy to imagine myself a new man: proud and bright. But I resent his smirk.

--------------------------

The last new towel

from our wedding linens.

Two and a half years in a closet,

(folded so hopefully),

and brought out now - into this.

It is soft; smells like registry shopping-

like our jokes as we scanned the household goods that would constitute

our dreams.

Our finally.

Our home.

But its awkward newness won’t absorb.

I stay wet.

And it pushes the water around,

chilling my skin as I move through this emptiness.

--------------------------

Jesus.

Why would you choose this?

In my calloused and senseless soul I feel so acutely the loss inflicted by our cruelty. How much more, in your infinity, did you know of sorrow?

Do you know of sorrow?

Or was it for respite? Was the incarnation a chance to enter into our blindness? To shield your too-open eyes from the shame of our choices, to share in our comfortable ignorance?

I am sorry.

I am sorry for you.

-----------------------

The eloquence of loss is a blunt thwack. It is an efficiency of movement in downward strokes; achieving nothing, but symbolizing something primal.

----------------------

I cannot pierce the bubble in my own heart.

I am barely holding it together with all my might. If it pops, I will drown.

And I am afraid to build a boat.

Acknowledging the quantity of chaos which presses and thrashes against my ribcage might bring on the deluge I can’t outlast. Moses couldn’t send out a dove until he was floating. I can’t even plan my weekend.

-----------------------

I want to create meaning. I want to live artfully. I need to write or sculpt or make love. But I am unable to love.

Loving is an act of such dexterity; such steady balance, that it cannot be performed with shaky hands or singed taste buds. It requires senseperfection.

And what of art? how can one reflect the rhythms of truth from a crippled soul?

I suppose there is hope in the seasons. The deathgrip of winter leaves loam for the spring. But if you are unprepared, the pollen is an affliction.

What would you do without expectations? a silly question. I am accountable.

Can I stand up straight in this role? If not, can I break through it?

----------------------

In God's Name

In God's Name

Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 11:53am
I have heard a lot of people denouncing religion because of the violence done "in God's name." Millions have been tortured and killed over doctrinal disagreements and "heretical" ideas. These represent some of the darkest and most depressing patterns of human behavior, and they must be condemned. But there is nothing particular to religion that makes people act this way. It is human nature to identify with a system and defend that system to the death. People have been killed over every kind of belief - religious, political, cultural, even scientific. The fact that most of this has been done in the name of religion is a reflection of the centrality of religious systems in our history. The solution for this problem is not to scapegoat religion and pretend that by doing so, we have erased the dark streak in human nature which causes us to objectify those who are different than us. The solution is to acknowledge the problem, name it, and work to overcome it without abandoning those things which give us our identities. It is the easiest thing in the world to claim exclusive rights to the truth. But it is just as easy to sit on the sidelines, claim that there is no truth, and pretend that you have no commitments to the things which ultimately make us human. Easy religion, the systems that affirm our prejudices while dehumanizing the other, is evil. But apathy is not the only solution. If we are being honest, it is not even an option. We are all committed to this life (the unique narratives in which we participate, not the scientific phenomenon of life) in ways which require us to engage the questions of faith critically, flexibly, and honestly.