Hooper emailed him, asking: “On record, I’d ask you to go through the list of comments you have written/ Tweeted/ blogged/ Facebooked and repudiate any/all that you now see were objectionable.” Marinelli’s response is below. (Links are mine, and I have numbered the recantations for easy reference, and just for the sheer pleasure of doing so.) He writes:

1. I quoted from the research of Paul Cameron when I said that homosexuals have a shorter life-span. I must say that when I quoted this man I was not aware of his history and here and now do not wish to comment on the legitimacy or irrelevance of the man’s work as I am neither a psychologist nor does psychology interest me.

What I said, referring to the life-spans of homosexuals, I continue to believe in the following context: Any group of people that contract any viral disease more than the general public due to the nature of their lifestyle, logically, will have a life-expectancy lower than that of the general populace.

However, that kind of rhetoric, implying that gay men are unworthy of civil marriage due to any particular health issues surrounding their sexual activity was both inappropriate and offensive. It is for those reasons, that I retract this statement.

2. I once wrote or implied that all homosexuals are single, even if they had at some point or another, been legally married by the state. While in the eyes of the Catholic faith, these same-sex unions aren’t recognized as marriages insofar as holy matrimony is concerned, I retract this statement now that I have been able to see and distinguish and understand the differences between religious and civil marriage.

3. Any support or endorsement of what Peter LaBarbera does I retract. I have been reading via Twitter and his website what this guy has to say, and it is clear that he is just a hateful man and I would be embarrassed and ashamed to be associated with him.

Furthermore, the issues Peter takes on, even if they were true, are not in themselves valid reasons for denying same-sex couples access to civil marriage. I am aware how he was upset by my public support for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in December. His reasoning for such seemed to be something along the lines of “in order to protect marriage, you have to oppose everything homosexuals do”. If that were the case, Peter, how far should we go in restricting homosexuals’ lives?

4. As far as my comments about the hijacking of the civil rights movement, I would say that while the offenses the gay community endure from the public are similar, the issue as it pertains to the government are totally different. 



The gay community is not forced to attend different schools, drink from different water fountains, or give up their seats for heterosexuals on the bus. They are not, as black Americans are to this day, incarcerated at higher levels than heterosexuals and while I do not deny that there is violence directed towards gays and lesbians because of their sexual orientation, no one should be comparing that to the organized violence faced by the black community prior to the civil rights movement itself. 



That said, I agree that what the gay community are fighting for are their civil rights. So in that way, it is indeed a civil rights movement but not the civil rights movement. That is to say, a new civil rights movement, not an extension or continuation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

5. Any comments I made that attacked homosexuals on a personal level, I retract. This includes calling them an abomination. I personally do not agree with homosexuality and without any shame will continue to uphold my belief that homosexuality itself presents a public health concern due to the sexual diseases that are associated with it and that spread rapidly as a result of it.

I think a lot of work needs to be done for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, to change the culture of promiscuity in our country and we would be doing ourselves a favor to focus our energies on that instead of singling out and laying the blame on one of the many guilty parties. 

However, until the day comes that homosexual sex does not continue to spread HIV at alarming rates as it does today, I must stand by my comments that, from a public health stance, homosexuality is a harmful to society.

 Having said that, the health issues facing promiscuous homosexual men is irrelevant to the issue of same-sex marriage. I was guilty of and apologize for this insensitive and inappropriate rhetoric.

6. On multiple occasions I have said something to the effect of “homosexuality is wrong”. And in my opinion it is. My transition from an opponent of same-sex marriage to a supporter does not mean I suddenly think homosexuality is a good thing. 



I personally disagree with it. The same way I disagree with many other things other people do with their lives. That doesn’t give me or anyone else the right to prevent homosexuals from being homosexuals or to take away their constitutionally protected civil rights as American citizens.

7. As a supporter of civil marriage equality, any statements I’ve made in the past about not recognizing homosexual relationships for one reason or another, of course it goes without saying that I no longer stand by these comments and I apologize for the insensitivity. Same-sex couples, whether they are married, in civil unions or domestic partnerships, ought to be recognized for what they are.

8. I consider myself agnostic and while homosexual acts may very well be “immoral” in the eyes of Christian morality, I can no longer stand by any comments I’ve made in the past about the immorality of homosexuality. There are a variety of different sets and sources of morals and no one has the right to impose their set on the rest of society.

9. Once I wrote that homosexuals are deceitful people who care only about themselves or something to that effect. Honestly, aren’t we all? It was wrong for me to exclude everyone else from that description. We all lie and when it comes down to it, we will do what is best for ourselves. So throwing in a little levity, I stand by the comment but want to apologize for limiting its scope to the gay community.

10. My 3P’s video from YouTube was wrong. It may be true that at some point in time that the legalization of prostitution, the lowering of the age of consent and the legalization of polygamy may have been a part of the platform endorsed by homosexual activists in Chicago in the 1970s. However, there is no indication that any mainstream LGBT activist groups or organizations today advocate for these issues.


What’s further, from a technical standpoint alone the video was inaccurate. The platform called for the reduction of the age of consent, not the legalization of pedophilia, which is the sexual interest in pre-pubescent children. The reduction of the age of consent was about that and instead, to my knowledge, involved a reduction that would involve post-pubescent teenagers, which would not be pedophilia. 



I think this kind of rhetoric is harmful to our homosexual neighbors and I retract the statements. The entire YouTube account I used for this video, as well as others, was deleted sometime in late January, when I began to accept the fact that what I was doing was wrong.

11. When it comes to the issue of my statements about homosexuality being a mental disorder, I have one thing to say. And that is that I apologize for the insensitivity and accept the fact that this has nothing to do with civil marriage. So what if it’s a mental disorder? It wouldn’t and shouldn’t disqualify gay men and women from civil marriage.

While it may seem surreal to celebrate a man who says, “I’m not ruling out the possibility that homosexuality is a mental disorder, but that shouldn’t affect access to civil marriage,” these kinds of judgments are exactly what we need more of. To put the shoe on the other foot: every LGBTQ person who says, “I’m not ruling out the possibility that religious people are mass-delusional idol-worshipers with a weak hold on rationality – but that shouldn’t prevent me from engaging with them respectfully in public debate,” should likewise be celebrated. What we have a lot of instead is, “Not only are you, my opponent, wrong, but you are wrong in such a total and utterly certain way that I am released from any obligation to courtesy and good listening that I would ordinarily consider binding.”

Hooper went on to ask Marinelli, “I wonder what has led to your change of heart. Was it… seeing the actual human beings hurt by NOM’s work?” His response, in part, follows. I bolded the bullet points in case you’re getting impatient, though I think the whole thing is worth reading:

Having spent the last five years putting all of my political will, interest and energy into fighting against the spread of same-sex marriage as if it were a contagious disease, I must admit that it is hard for me to put the following text into words let alone utter them with my own voice…

As you may already know, I was the one behind the 2010 Summer for Marriage Tour which the National Organization for Marriage sponsored and operated throughout July and August last year. It was my doing when, in March that year, I approached Brian Brown about sponsoring and participating in a series of traditional marriage rallies scattered around the Nation.

In fact, the tour route itself, while chosen largely by NOM itself, incorporated as many of the sites I had originally chosen and helped independently organize. Other locations were added due to strategic, political or simply logistical purposes.

Ironically, one of the last tour stops added to the itinerary was Atlanta and I bring this site up because it was in Atlanta that I can remember that I questioned what I was doing for the first time. The NOM showing in the heart of the Bible-belt was dismal and the hundreds of counter-protesters who showed up were nothing short of inspiring.

Even though I had been confronted by the counter-protesters throughout the marriage tour, the lesbian and gay people whom I made a profession out of opposing became real people for me almost instantly. For the first time I had empathy for them and remember asking myself what I was doing.

If my transition from opponent to supporter of same-sex civil marriage was a timeline, Atlanta would be indicated by the first point on the line. The next point on that timeline would be two months later.

After the marriage tour wrapped up and everyone went their separate ways, I transformed my marriage tour “Inside Look” blog to a more general blog about protecting marriage and opposing the homosexual agenda. Over the course of September and October I occupied my time writing up articles along these very lines. Some of the articles were fair, even if you disagree with them, but many of them I would now categorize as propaganda filled with strong and unnecessary rhetoric. This is especially true of the YouTube videos I made.

One article I wrote, towards the end of October, 2010 caught the attention of a blogger by the name of RJ, who writes on the blog AmIWorking He responded to my article about the homosexual agenda with an article addressed to personally to me regarding marriage equality. In short, his article had the miraculous effect of instantly putting things into prospective for me.

At that point, between what I had witnessed on the marriage tour and RJ’s post about marriage equality, I really came to understand that gays and lesbians were just real people who wanted to live real lives and be treated equally as opposed to, for example, wanting to destroy American culture. No, they didn’t want to destroy American culture, they wanted to openly participate in it. I was well on my way to becoming a supporter of civil marriage equality.

As a result of that I closed down my blog within a couple days…

I also removed the admins I had delegated my moderating duties to for my Facebook page.

Having done that, I had to pick up where they left off. I was largely taken aback by the fact that the page I created had become such a hateful place. My comments and rhetoric paled in comparison to what that place had turned into. I began to understand why the gay community was out there claiming opposition to same-sex civil marriage was all about hate.

I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun starting to question. This would be timeline point number three. I wanted to extend an olive branch in some way and started to reinstate those who had been banned by previous administrators of my page. I welcomed them to participate on the page and did what I could do erase the worst comments and even ban those who posted them.

Also, I started regularly conversing with same-sex marriage supporters in another Facebook group. This further solidified my new perception of gays and lesbians as real people, not some faceless political opponent. That could be considered the next point on the timeline.

Lastly, I came to understand the difference between civil marriage and holy marriage as in the sacrament of the Catholic Church. Let me rephrase. I understood that but either willingly chose not to accept it or just didn’t see it. Regardless, I see it now and the significance of that is as follows:

Once you understand the great difference between civil marriage and holy marriage, there is not one valid reason to forbid the former from same-sex couples, and all that is left to protect is the latter.

Indeed Christians and Catholics alike are well within their right to demand that holy matrimony, a sacrament and service performed by the Church, recognized by the Church, remains between a man and a woman as their faith would dictate. However, that has nothing to do with civil marriage, performed and recognized by the State in accordance with state law.

Sandra McCracken writes:

Conversation is a form of activism.
—Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies

Social action begins with conversation. Action comes out of the words we speak with our family.

Should I yell at my son to convince him to obey? Or could I appeal to him more creatively?
Should I make time to ask about the needs of my neighbour? Or just stay inside?
Who is my sister in Africa? Am I using my resources to bring awareness to her needs?

On a good day, I battle my ego. My constant inward gaze has caused spiritual cataracts that impair my ability to seek out love in action and conversation. It is easy to fight for my own rights. It’s not so easy to fight for somebody else’s.

My husband and I moved from the suburbs into the city in 2005, chasing down this idea of what it is to love your neighbour. One practical way I have found to combat self-protection is to get out there and mix up my “rights” with someone else’s. To care about sidewalks and housing codes for the poor is to live among the poor, so that those sidewalks and housing codes become mine.

As a follower of Jesus, social justice is something I am called to do perfectly. I fail. But Jesus has accomplished social justice on my behalf. This reality, like a new birth, liberates me to engage with my neighbours in mercy and humility. In the words of John Bunyan,

Run and work, the law demands,
but gives me neither feet nor hands.
A better song the Gospel sings:
it bids me fly, and gives me wings.

In word, song, and deed, may the Gospel elevate our conversation.

The first beginning of the story features dwarves, elves, vampires, elven vampires, gnomes and knights. It starts, in other words, with a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I had the good fortune to be invited into a group of gamers who’d been playing together for over ten years. They had a few constitutive rituals, one of which was a gathering in February at a rented house to devote an entire weekend to table-top gaming, what they called their “Winter Adventure.” I had been to a few winter adventures with the Brazen Warriors (as we called ourselves). Their previous preferred location was getting a little run-down and had lost some of its mojo for the group, and they were open to trying out a new location. One of the members of the group encouraged us to try this beautiful house up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, which was called the Phoenix.

The Phoenix belongs to this organization called The Grail. I call it an ‘organization’ but that’s a rather colorless word in comparison to what the Grail really is, and has been. At one time, there were 10 Grail centers across the U.S., each of which was a kind of node of a larger community. It’s sort of a religious order or sisterhood, sort of a political movement, at times it strongly resembles an arts or farming collective. A little like a church, it’s both a vision that gives rise to communities and itself a community on a pilgrimage towards a vision that is still evolving.

Now how did we come to be at that particular house, rolling 20-sided die and battling monsters?

The second beginning of the story is located, as are many more momentous beginnings and endings, for good and ill, in the fall of 2001. When the whole world was shaken by terror, and many huge things were set into motion, there was this one tiny pebble that was also shaken loose, namely my own spiritual growth. I had stalled, stopped short of taking my next obvious step, which was to add actual interaction with real live Christians to the rudimentary Christian belief and practices I already engaged in. With the encouragement of my wife, Marlene, who did not share those beliefs but did believe in the integrity of my path, I found a small group in our Brooklyn neighborhood. It was a fellowship group (or, if you like, a cell group, or a growth group, or a community group as our church now calls it) associated with the church I had been attending, as anonymously as possible, for many months. The group was hosted by a highly aimiable and hilarious individual named Ross. I felt instantly at home in this group, and Ross and I became friends. He was an original Brazen Warrior from the days of the first adventures, when many of the members were students together. It was he who invited me to join them at my first Winter Adventure.

In 2009, when Ross recommended to the group that we try holding our next Winter Adventure at the Phoenix, he based his recommendation on a somewhat cool experience we had had at the same house when that same small group went on a retreat there.

The third beginning of the story revolves around a woman named Jane O’Donnell.

She was a member of the Grail, and one who was instrumental in sustaining the vitality of that particular Grail center.

The Grail in New York had a few sites at that time. The site in Cornwall-on-Hudson had been used in a variety of ways; during the 1970s it functioned somewhat like a commune, with a small number of women living there and worshipping and working in concert. This particular house at that site almost burned down in 1978. Right around the same time, Jane O’Donnell died of cancer. In honor of some of her passions, the remaining Grail members refurbished the house and used it as a center for leadership training, anti-racism education and ecumenical spiritual formation for women. It’s still used for similar programs, but also serves as a source of income for the Grail there (in Cornwall) by being rented out to outside groups. Beauty from ashes: hence, the Phoenix.

The fourth beginning of the story features Susan, a young woman working with children in the Bronx sometime in the 1990s. She learned about the Grail through a Catholic volunteer service guide while she was working at Fordham Bedford Children’s Services. “I thought it sounded great,” as she remembers it, “with a focus on women’s development around the world, social justice, the environment, the arts – it melded many of my interests and has shaped my life.”

Susan had a good friend named Valerie. About how they met, Valerie wrote,

In 1993 I moved to the Bronx as a volunteer for the Ursuline Companions in Mission. I taught music at a school and ran an afterschool program for a homeless shelter. For this work, I was given a $100/month stipend and housing which was in a convent. That was an experience. You may or may not be aware that all the different Catholic orders have these lay programs. The Ursuline one was rather small – only 8 volunteers across the country and I was the only one in NYC. Susan was a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps which had something like 25 volunteers in NYC alone. She and I worked our service at the same homeless shelter. I am so grateful to have met her because I ended up making friends with the other Jesuit volunteers and finding a community in NYC. We were all making a $100/month stipend so we learned how to party in NYC on a tight budget…

By the late 1990s, Valerie was living in the ground floor of the same building Marlene and I happened to move into when we first started living together. We had some really cool neighbors in that building. (One of them, Gerald Menke, reappeared in our lives a few years ago when he started playing pedal steel guitar for the worship band at our church.) Valerie was awesome in her own particular ways. She had the vibe of someone profoundly at ease with her self, comfortable in her body, not alienated from her own spirituality and creativity, matched with a very open orientation toward the world, game to contribute in any way she could. When I am trying to really make vivid to myself the theological concept of every human being being created in the image of God, and that there is incalculable beauty and power in humanity, entirely apart from my particular religious tradition, one of the people I think about is Valerie.

At some point Susan had lived at the Grail, managing their organic garden for them. Valerie learned about the Grail from Susan, and in turn did some work on their website for them.

So, when I was leading a small group for my church and wanted to find a good spot for us to have a retreat, Valerie turned me on to the Grail. So my group and I stayed at the Phoenix for our one and only spring retreat, and for all the ups and downs of that weekend, one thing we can definitely say is that Ross loved the site. He had been looking for an opportunity to go back when the Brazen Warriors began to cast about for a new home for the Winter Adventure.

So, from the Grail to Jane and back to the Grail, from Susan to Valerie, from Valerie to me, from me to Ross to the Brazen Warriors and so back to me. That will have to do as a beginning to the story, to set some context as to why I care about this place.

Some of us are waiting for minor things
that only trouble the corners of our minds from time to time.
Some of us are consumed by waiting, unable to live fully
until our hopes and fears are resolved.

None of us knows how things will turn out…
…but we know that you do.
…but we know that you love.

How do we know how to be faithful, when we don’t know how things will work out?
How do we prepare?
What will we do in the meantime?
Will it make a difference to what happens?
Should we prepare for the best or the worst?
Can hope and faithfulness encompass both outcomes?

None of us knows how things will turn out…
…but we know that you do.
…but we know that you love.

How do we wait serenely, when our imaginations get in the way?
How do we wait for God to act, without cooking up strategies for self-defense?
How do we accept uncertainty?
How long should we be prepared to wait?
How do we fill in the time, without wasting it?

None of us knows how things will turn out…
…but we know that you do.
…but we know that you love.

How long does faith last when nothing happens?
Why do we expect answers within a certain time?
Why do we think the answer will be different, if it doesn’t come when we expect it?
Do we think that delay means something has gone wrong?
Can we think that delay means something is growing, like a flower,
or cooking, like a cake?

None of us knows how things will turn out…
…but we know that you do.
…but we know that you love.

We are all waiting, Lord
in hope and in fear,
but the difference is often in ourselves rather than in our prospects.

When heaven is silent and earth is noisy,
help us not to be distracted or misled.
Help us to be active shapers of the future we long to see.

Even if we cannot make the future,
we will prepare its place.
Even if we cannot cook the feast,
we will lay the table and invite the guests.
Even if we cannot sing the song,
we will make the silence in which it will be heard,
Even if we cannot see the dawn yet,
we will live by the light that we have.

We will remember the stories
of how you rewarded those who dared to wait.
We will wait in the knowledge
that waiting is not in vain if it is waiting for you.

You are the one who holds our future.
You are the one who was, and is, and will be.
Walk with us tonight, and for ever.

amen

[There is an original source, but I will always associate it with an Advent service conducted by parishioners from All Angels, December 2010, where we read it responsively.]

the view from my window
is cold and obscene
I want to touch
what my eyes haven’t seen

but they have packaged our virtue
in cellulose dreams
and sold us the remnants
til our pockets are clean

til our hopes fall ’round our feet
like the dust of dead leaves
and we end up looking
like what we believe

we are soot-covered urchins
running wild and unshod
we will always be remembered
as the orphans of God

like bees in a bottle
we are flying at fate
beating our wings
against the walls of this place

unaware that the struggle
is the blood of the proof
in choosing to believe
the unbelievable truth

but they have captured our siblings
they rendered them mute
disputed our lineage
and poisoned our roots

we have bought from the brokers
who have broken their oaths
and we’re out on the streets
with a lump in our throats

we are soot-covered urchins
running wild and unshod
we will always be remembered
as the orphans of God

they will dig up these ruins
and make flutes of our bones
and blow a hymn to the memory
of the orphans of God

- John Mark Heard (1951-1992)

Alas, I have completely forgotten how I came to take an interest in Stanley Hauerwas, who really helped me out when he wrote, “I am still mad as hell at Christians, which certainly includes myself, for making the practice of the Christian faith so uninteresting.” I can’t even be sure of the year. It was some moment before the children were born and after the Towers fell, a moment in my life when I was seeking to open myself to risky social intercourse with Christians and acknowledge that I too was a Christian, or finally become a Christian. Somehow I heard about Hauerwas. His humor, which often managed to be self-deprecating and abusive at the same time, succeeded in making the practice of the Christian faith more interesting. The first book of his I picked up at the library, A Better Hope, had an essay on homosexuality and marriage that was by far the best thing I’d ever read on the topic. It was angry, funny, ambivalent and humane. It was content to resolve nothing, and so could shed light on nearly everything.

Flashing forward to the spring of 2009, I’d learned from an activist and writer named Dan Oudshoorn, whose blog I was following, about a conference in Toronto where Stanley Hauerwas would be speaking. Squee! Marlene and I had a meeting of the minds about a weekend trip to Toronto, my folks took the kids, and somehow we made it there. The theme of the conference was “Amidst the Powers,” and the other two speakers were Walter Wink and Marva Dawn. I started doing some reading on Wink before the conference, and was fascinated by his story. I’ll say more about that in another post, but suffice it to say that he was powerfully influenced by some guy named William Stringfellow and his book, provocatively titled Free in Obedience. I was drawn deeper into this question of the “powers and principalities,” and soon found that other people writing interesting things about it (Yoder, for example, in The Politics of Jesus) also mentioned Stringfellow. Finally, I wised up and got an anthology of his writing out of the library. I then proceeded to read it, little by little, and some parts repeatedly, and renewed it 23 times. I didn’t even know the library allowed so many renewals! It was one of the few books of theology which I have been seriously tempted to read aloud to my wife (who either has an allergy to Christianity or is immune to it, depending on how you look at it).

Then I realized that before I’d even learned about him from Wink, I’d actually already read about Stringfellow in a lovely memoir called Brother to a Dragonfly, by Will Campbell. Stringfellow plays a small but memorable role in one of that book’s many mesmerizing anecdotes:

1963 was a Kennedy year in America. It was a hundred years after Lincoln. Race was the prevailing issue and was still seen as a distinctively Southern problem. Government agencies, private organizations and philanthropic organizations with names like Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie were pouring millions of dollars into the South for what had become known as Human Relations. And the churches decided to involve themselves in the social scene of the nation in a way they had not done since Prohibition. It was still token – one major denomination gave more than two hundred times as much that year to enrolling converts in foreign lands as for all social ills at home – but there were those who were at least trying.

In January of that year a conference was convened by leaders of the major religious faiths. In the planning stages it was called the Centennial Conference on Religion and Race. Centennial because it was to be held on the very day the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed one hundred years earlier. But the name got changed along the way. Some on the planning committee didn’t want to be reminded of the national institution of slavery. Just the institution of segregation. So it was named the National Conference on Religion and Race.

It was intended to be a gathering of thousands of people who would make their voice heard so loudly that it would make any further conference unnecessary. Names like Dr. Abraham Heschel, later known for his leadership in opposing the Vietnam War, Sargent Shriver, then Director of the Peace Corps, but also brother-in-law to the President, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were prominent on the playbill…

The conference, held in Chicago, began harmoniously enough with Rabbi Heschel declaring in the keynote address that “at the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses, when Moses said to Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go.’ The exodus began, but it is far from being completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”

His words of humor and wisdom were enough to bring the enthusiastic delegates to their feet. Everyone knew where those university campuses were. A few minutes later the unity was disrupted when William Stringfellow, then a relatively unknown attorney and theologian from New York, and one of three people who had been asked to respond to the address, stood up and calmly stated, “The issue, the only issue at this conference is baptism.” The delegates came to their feet again. But not with applause. Boos, jeers, and catcalls from outraged Christians filled the hall in apology to the offended Jews who sat in stunned silence. The remainder of the session concerned itself far more with Mr. Stringfellow’s words than with the solution to the racial crisis. Nothing can be more hostile and boisterous than 657 liberals bent on solving someone else’s problem when the harmony and unanimity of the occasion is threatened. We were not, after all, in agreement as to why we were there.

I love that. Stringfellow is this enigmatic figure who comes into focus for just a moment, then fades into obscurity, leaving chaos in his wake.

The more I thought about that anecdote, in light of having read some of Stringfellow’s work, the more curious I was about just what it was that Stringfellow said that Monday in Chicago. Fortunately, he has a groupie, Bill Wylie-Kellerman who has commented on this incident in more detail. In a piece called “Not Vice Versa,” originally published in the Anglican Theological Review (Fall 1999), he quotes a transcript of Stringfellow’s complete response to Heschel:

From the point of view of either biblical religion, the monstrous American heresy is in thinking that the whole drama of history takes place between God and humanity. But the truth, biblically and theologically and empirically is quite otherwise: the drama of this history takes place amongst God and humanity and the principalities and powers, the great institutions and ideologies active in the world. It is the corruption and shallowness of humanism which beguiles Jew or Christian into believing that human beings are masters of institution or ideology. Or to put it differently, racism is not an evil in human hearts or minds, racism is a principality, a demonic power, a representative image, an embodiment of death, over which human beings have little or no control, but which works its awful influence in their lives.

…This [racism] is the power with which Jesus Christ was confronted and which, at great and sufficient cost, he overcame. In other words, the issue here is not equality among human beings. The issue is not some common spiritual values, nor natural law, nor middle axioms. The issue is baptism. The issue is the unity of all humankind wrought by God in the life and work of Christ. Baptism is the sacrament of that unity of all humanity in God.

This is a very illuminating, if brief, excerpt from the man’s thought. I’m going to focus on his theories about the “powers and principalities,” in a future post, but I’ll emphasize in advance they only represent an aspect of his theology, the beating heart of which was Jesus, and the enjoyable prospect of sacramentally participating in the life of Jesus Christ.

Anyway, keeping her on my radar really paid off the other night, when I visited the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for the first time, trudging through LES snow, to catch Tahani in the Tug of War Tour. This is one of those perverse undertakings that supposedly suffuse our miscegnating and cross-pollinating pop culture but, if you take the time to look, are actually pretty rare. In this case, a rap duo called Most Hated, made up of Mazzi (Iranian Persian) and Sneakas (Jewish Israeli), said, “Let’s find another cross-cultural pair of artists and take this show on the road!” They found Vanessa Hidary, aka “The Hebrew Mamita,” and Tahani Salah and the whole crew, with MC Serch as their promoter, took the stage at the Nuyorican this past Tuesday night.

I have to say a word about the opening act. The lights went out, and a drummer named Swiss Chris sat in a metal chair and drummed on a pad on his knee with drumsticks illuminated at their tips by shifting colors of glowing light. Within seconds I was thinking, “This is so simple, and so beautiful, I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone do this before.” Before long he was drumming on the floor, the chair and every available surface. Eventually he took a seat behind a full set of drums, and when the lights came up he was already fully invested in an extended and dazzling drum solo. When the light show ended, as fantastic as it had been, you didn’t even notice. When it was over, Swiss Chris threw his arms up in victory, then hilariously picked up his entire drum set at once and carried it downstage past the audience.

The rappers alternated with the slam poets throughout the rest of the evening, Ms. Salah and Ms. Hidary opening, and Mazzi and Sneakas closing. The rappers claimed all of the stage, moving restlessly from one end to the other, doing that oddly charming dance necessary in order to keep the mic cords from getting tangled, and all of our eardrums, with a sometimes painfully loud basebeat and sampling accompaniment by DJ Dash Speaks. The poets stood, sometimes side by side, sometimes back to back, and sometimes alone.

As shamelessly biased as I am, I will retain some credibility and not claim that Tahani stole the show. What she did bring to the show was a directness of moral earnestness and passion that could give you the shivers. Even at their most angry (with a remarkable duet called “Tug of War,” narrating the fatal pas de deux of a suicide bomber and an army guard), Most Hated was never less than entertaining. Sometimes Tahani would leave entertainment in the dust as she hurtled headlong to bring her heart as close as possible to your face. Her strongest poem, wisely made the penultimate act, was an extraordinary paean to her father that left me wistful: many fathers are as deeply loved by their daughters, but only a handful in all human history will ever hear that love expressed in so intense a form.

Vanessa Hidary’s great strength, thrown into particularly sharp relief by her juxtaposition against Tahani, was her sense of humor. Poking fun at her own struggles as someone, much like everyone else, for whom the daily stream of life contends with her desire to be well-informed and politically-conscious, she equally spoofed the superficiality of the majority of professions of ‘political consciousness,’ which arouse in people only the hollow affirmation of “That’s what’s up!” She succeeded in painting a complex picture of her own identity, while running the risk of creating a new stereotype (the Jewish-American Poetess?) to replace those she shatters. Greater still the risk, a hazard of identity politics, of political awareness collapsing into self-pity. Two pieces in particular – one about the various acts of harassment and cyber-abuse she has suffered, and another about an anti-Semitic remark, all the more obscene for its being an attempted compliment by an otherwise attractive guy in a flirtatious encounter – skirted this risk, not always smoothly.

If we had to make a rule, we could say: in a context where the Holocaust and the Intifadah cast heavy shadows, you can’t make anything more than trivia out of the comments made on YouTube by your haters, no matter how mean or personally hurtful they may have been to you. The personal may be political, but there’s an art to moving back and forth between the two.

Like Ms. Salah, Ms. Hidary has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and some of her poems in that venue (“Culture Bandit,” say, or “A PhD in Him” – which can both be seen on YouTube) are hilarious and poignant all at once. There was nothing quite like that here. However, like Tahani, she hit her peak with a tribute to a family member: her Aunt Esther, a Sephardic Jew from Syria. Any trace of narcissism was burned away in the purity of her love for this cherished ancestor-sister.

In this way, while the lyricists were all preoccupied (for excellent reasons) with hate, love carried the night. My one lament would have to be that love for God made no appearance whatsoever. Sneakas summed it up. “I’m not religious,” he quipped, “I’m Jew-ish.” What’s so interesting about the tension between Muslims and Jews if neither Allah nor God ever shows up?

At any rate, Most Hated really have a great thing going. The Muslim/Jew, Iranian/Israeli thing could degenerate into gimmickry, but the passion with which they vive la difference made it into more of a dialectic. The wordplay was fabulous. With “Shalom/Salaam” they played a game of tag, handing off the mic with the greeting “Salaam” (from the Jew to the Muslim) or “Shalom” (from the Muslim to the Jew). “Don’t bother us on on Ramadan or Chanukah,” said Sneakas, “I go off the head — like an old guy’s yarmulke. Salaam!” Mazzi ran with it: “Or a kufi loosely on a Sufi – some of our women look like ninjas in the movies. Shalom!” Mazzi’s delivery of his rhymes wasn’t so easy to follow, but he more than made up for that with the dynamism and sexiness of his onstage presence. As great as all the poetry was that night, the highlight may have been the interlude where Mazzi threw aside the mic and just danced. The man can really move – and in a rapper, that has to be considered pure bonus.

1. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

2. Most Hated on Myspace.

3. Swiss Chris.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Those imperatives at the beginning are plural, that is, addressed to the whole community at once. So what’s at stake is the great “we,” the church. How can the church best live out her calling as the body of Christ, when surrounded by (and often implicated in) a dominion of demons?

I’d learned about the conference from the activist Dan Oudshoorn, whose blog I’ve been following for the last few years. I got to the Meeting House early and had a chance to speak to him before the whole shindig got under way. He was giving a workshop, but graciously told me that he’d make the text of his presentation available on the blog and encouraged me to hear some of the other speakers. (He has indeed put it on the blog.) At midpoint in the day I sought out Dan to see if I could play groupie and tag along with him for lunch. He introduced me to his pastor, a guy named Don Cowie. Oudshoorn couldn’t stay, but Don and I ended up having a fantastic talk. In some ways it was the highlight of the day, so I’ll start with that.

Dan, Don and myself are all three married men with kids. Dan’s still a newlywed, and they have a young infant; my kids are a little older; Don’s children are older still. Eventually I realized that Don and I are both people firmly embedded in middle-class life who share a mutual and ambivalent admiration for Dan’s radical commitment to solidarity with the poor.

Don started out at a church in inner-city Vancouver that had gone from a membership of 800 down to 100. A new pastor started helping the church to reconnect with its surrounding neighborhood, which had been radically altered by the exodus to the suburbs. The death of a homeless man at the church in 1998 pushed them to figure out new ways to minister to the homeless. Don Cowie had been a youth pastor who found passing out sandwiches to foragers in the alley just off his office one of the most rewarding parts of his job. The church gave him a study sabbatical. He came back after steeping in Isaiah awhile to become an official minister of outreach and social justice. One of his projects was a very informal Saturday evening service called “the Mosaic,” which has now split off as a daughter church. They rent the second floor of a warehouse in Vancouver a few blocks from the “Olympic village,” under construction for 2010. The Mosaic has a kind of core of committed members who are themselves healthy and fully enfranchised, and is developing a regular crew of people who are in varying degrees of health and disenfranchisement. His main struggle now is that the church has grown a little, and that poses a difficulty because the street people do not feel safe in a crowd. When the attendance at the Mosaic gets much higher than 50, they start to stay away.

He related to me a service where one of the regulars, who is “really annoying” when he’s drunk, fell asleep on a couch near the front and slept all the way through worship and then started snoring (loudly) during Don’s sermon. Don put it to the congregation: “I could preach over the snoring, and you could try to listen to me. Or we could try to get Neil to move to the back of the room… but I don’t know what will happen if we try to wake him!” Everyone was ok with just letting him sleep. He finally woke up during the benediction or something. That’s just how they roll there. We all want church to be the one place where you don’t have to have it together to go, but what church really succeeds at being that? The Mosaic seems to taking a good shot at it.

Later in the afternoon, Dan O. spoke about a peculiar difficulty shared by those (like Don, talking to me) who try to narrate their experience in a true and helpful way:

Such stories are too alien, too easily romanticised and perverted by both the teller and the listener, to mean much to those who do not share in them. Indeed, I suspect that the listener only comes to know the compelling nature of such stories, when he or she chooses to move into those narratives and personally embody them.

Even in telling in such abbreviated form the story of the sleeping parishioner, I am risking the kind of voyeurism across the socioeconomic chasm that makes Dan so cautious. Or, to put it more simply: you had to be there. There was a spiritual transaction that took place in that community when the accompanist of snores was providing his counterpoint to the sermon. Don could tell me the story, graciously trying to help me imagine what his church was like, and I can pass it on to you, out of a similar desire, but not without acknowledging the huge difference between hearing a story and embodying it.

Before I continue writing about the conference, a moment of (blogospheric) silence is therefore appropriate.

Food stamps were the topic. For his last question, Lehrer asked Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, “Is one of the biggest hurdles… this stigma that won’t allow somebody to even allow themself to get on food stamps?”

Berg said, “Absolutely. New Yorkers are more willing to beg for help from their neighbors than to get help from their rich Uncle Sam, and that is absolutely the reverse of how it should be.”

I’m not trying to bust on Berg, who was told. “You’ve only got 20 seconds!” – it would be shocking if I could come up with anything intelligent to say about anything in 20 seconds – but it’s precisely the offhandedness of the comment that makes me marvel. How can it be that clear to him that a government safety net is not merely necessary (something I would not dispute) but preferable? I would just like to ask him: is it really better to rely on the government rather than your neighbors?

Meanwhile, even in the face of a national love affair with standardized testing, creative writing still has its defenders. Believing that young people will learn literate practices when those practices are in the service of their own purposes, these educators favor workshops over worksheets.

A handful of organizations squat at the intersection of these two cultural streams: they aim to cultivate youth literacy by initiating teenagers into the craft of slamming. Some of them simply run slams and invite young people to participate. Others want to midwife new poets into being, so their goal is to bring “free, safe and uncensored” writing workshops to young people.

“Free, safe and uncensored” turns out to be quite a trick. When a young writer seeks inspiration for a poem that can hold its own before judges, hecklers and rivals, she is like a patient with a needle probing her arm for the right vein. At a poetry workshop, then, teens will gravitate toward topics that draw blood: sex and sexuality, race and racism, violence and violent emotions… maybe even religion! If the workshop leader lets the kids go wherever this process takes them, and never censors their work or their interactions with each other, conflict is likely if not guaranteed.

So much for “safe and uncensored.” Meanwhile, to keep the workshops “free,” these organizations need volunteers to lead them. The task of training these volunteers is a daunting one. They may be experienced educators or published poets, but regardless, they are unlikely to have ever presided over a classroom or a writer’s circle quite like this.

In the corporate world, a traditional training features a binder full of pertinent information which the leader is obliged to funnel into the heads of the trainees, by means lively or stultifying. People with arts and education backgrounds come at the task completely differently. The critical questions tend to be open-ended. As there is no binder for helping young poets, the volunteers have to talk through their assignment together. Some of them have led workshops in the past and can share the benefit of their experience. The organization’s facilitator can try to steer the group toward particular insights. For the most part, the challenges, including the tension between “safe” and “uncensored,” get hashed out through dialogue.

That’s how it sounded to me, at any rate, when I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on a training session for volunteer workshop leaders at Urban Word NYC back in 2003. Challenges got “hashed” out, i.e. they got run through the grinder of dialogue in such a way that it was hard to tell what was meat and what was gristle. Two or three comments stuck out as particularly sore thumbs, exposing the profound difficulty of building learning communities out of a diverse group of teenagers when one is equipped solely with the presuppositions of our culture.

For instance, one volunteer advised the others, “You have to let them know what your boundaries are.” The meaning was clear enough in context. In former days, it would have been said in the form of “You have to show them who’s boss,” or “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”

In philosophical terms, the advice was to resolve the tension between “safe” and “uncensored” in favor of safety. An environment in which the adult is not setting any limits on free expression, so that the most vulnerable are continually at the mercy of the least sensitive or most aggressive, will become the dominion of silence.

In practical terms, we have to draw the line, clearly demarcate the limits of free speech. We can talk about race, but if you use the word “nigger,” you’re out of line. We can talk about sexuality, but if you use the word “faggot,” you’re out of line. We can talk about religion, but if this one over here talks about Allah in her poem, and this one over here talks about Jesus in his, and the atheist starts mocking both of them with colorful epithets, this will not be a safe space. It’s up to the workshop leader to draw the line and keep the youth on the right side of it.

What interested me was the original exhortation: let them know what your boundaries are. Why use the term “boundaries,” as opposed to saying “lay down the law” or better yet, “setting limits”? It seemed to me an example of how our culture dictates the terms by which we understand what we do. America as a whole is profoundly uncomfortable with authority. We have an uneasy fascination with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of political authority. For several generations now, the authority of parents over children and teachers over students has been increasingly fragile, particularly among the upper middle class. Within a roomful of urban intellectuals with liberal arts backgrounds, a phrase like “you got to lay down the law” is liable to get stuck somewhere long before the tongue.

The word “boundaries,” on the other hand, with its suggestion of property rights and personal space, puts everyone at ease. We need the comforting notion that each individual is born with a set of personal boundaries within which he has total autonomy, because the framework of traditional values that once served (however roughly) as a public ethos has unraveled. For the sake of daily sanity we fence ourselves off from the outer chaos, with individual “boundaries.” That being the case, the only objection I can raise to someone else’s offense is that it encroaches on my autonomy. Indeed, that’s our new shared framework: everyone gets it when you talk about respecting other people’s boundaries. Hence this volunteer’s advice to the other workshop leaders.

In effect, said another participant, you tell the young poets in your workshop to “just keep your bullshit out of my life, and I’ll keep my bullshit out of yours.”

The discussion continued. Eventually, the workshop participants grew dissatisfied with this truce between competing autonomies. Their objections differed based on the individual and his or her own commitments (a word that is perhaps a euphemism for “boundaries,” or vice versa), but they tended to draw on one of the two core principles at stake.

The more obvious objection was that to “let them know your boundaries” was to institute a kind of censorship. When the authoritarian approach seems to work best, when the leader has charisma or some kind of leverage on his side, there’s little censorship in view, but only because the kids censor themselves. To have a workshop that grants teenagers a legitimate ownership of their work, it won’t do to demarcate a narrow zone and say, “Censorship? There’s no censorship here… as long as you don’t cross this line.”

One could also object that safety is not in fact preserved by this approach! There is more to safety (the objection goes) than being shielded from uncomfortable topics or sentiments or even outright prejudice. Yes, kids need respect. The disrespect of their peers is an emotional hazard. If respect meant the mere absence of “disrespectful” utterances, then it might be appropriate to simply police the workshop’s airwaves. As it is, to be respectful is an achievement of the whole person. In a poetry workshop where respect is enforced from above, the leader is setting an agenda not merely for what people write, but who people are. Kids never get to be challenged by others’ perceptions, and they never get to express those parts of themselves that challenge others. When “disrespect” comes to mean any violent transgression of another person’s boundaries, that poses a significant problem for young artists who are trying with their work to stretch and cross their own boundaries, to begin with, and those of their audience as well.

If respect is what the kids need to feel safe, they can find it in the workshop, if they are free to take the kinds of risks that allow their peers to get to know them, as well as allow them to get to know their peers. When it comes to initiating young people into “culture making,” (to borrow an expression from Andy Crouch), we may be obliged to do some community-building as well. The cult of individualism that tends to dominate our thinking about art (and life in general, as we’ve seen) needs a little agnosticism.

Eventually, this theme began to emerge in the discussion. “It’s not just keeping everyone’s bullshit off the table,” one volunteer said, “but taking a good look at our bullshit together and deconstructing it.” While the word “deconstruction” sticks out as a postmodern artifact, I’d argue that the key word of the prescription is “together.” Similarly, someone else suggested the following as a good invitation for a workshop leader to extend to their poets: “Let’s agree to set boundaries together.”

What strikes me now about this transition was how it happened without the facilitators simply stepping in and saying, “Here’s how it can be done.” By talking through the issues for a little while, the group had managed to converse its way from “You stay on your side of your boundaries, and I’ll stay on my side of mine,” to “We can share some boundaries,” no small feat. Indeed, this instance of people actually making progress by sharing and refining insights was an illustration of the very insight in question.

What struck me at that time was the difficulties that now faced the group, as it came to terms with this idea of collective or corporate boundaries. When your ambition is to lead a poetry workshop into an experience of community, where mutual support makes safety possible and mutual challenge mitigates against censorship, you have named the problem more helpfully, but have not solved it. You have taken yourself out of the realm of technical solutions altogether. The success or failure of the workshop will depend partly on the particular strengths and weaknesses of the participants in their unique combination. There is no ultimate defense against insoluble problems. It’s not primarily about how hard the leader works, or how hard she can get her poets to work. A workshop turns out to be about more than work.

It occurred to me that ideally, at this point, someone would say, “So basically what we’re saying is that we need grace.”

No one said it. Perhaps I should have said it, but I was taking refuge in my role as observer. Even as a participant, I would have been daunted. At a training session filled with good postmodern citizens, the effects of a word like “grace” are hard to anticipate. Some people will take it as a neutral expression of something personally meaningful to the speaker, a faint echo of something that only makes sense past the event horizon, the boundary marking off the speaker’s private self from the rest of the world. Others will receive this private word as an interloper in a public forum, as an encroachment on their own boundaries. The very fact that I would make this kind of calculation illustrates the challenge of bringing a small diverse group of individuals into a room and asking them to accomplish some collective task, such as to help each other write great poems, or to figure out the best way to lead a poetry workshop.

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul reminds us that God has prepared “good works” for us to do, and encourages us to walk in those works. What is the basis for our encouragement? “We are God’s workmanship,” the Greek word being (as the songwriter Michael Card points out in his album of the same name) poiema, the seed of the English word “poem.” As Christians wrestling with community life, we have been participants in the biggest poetry workshop ever. I pray there are some workshop leaders out there putting that experience to good use as they get their young poets ready for the climactic slam.