Even now my inner child cries out to sabotage the word.  Quick — garnish it with a sprig of irony!  Serve with a side of conspiring winks!

But I’m being straight up here.  I’m having a hard time with this.

Last week, when I started Tested Faith, I really wanted this to be a place where I’d write only about social and ecological justice, and how faith (my own) fit in.  And looking over my first two or three months of Idiot Dreams — in which I found myself writing very rarely about these issues — I decided I needed a new venue: one that not only made room for this kind of talk, but filtered out anything but.

So far, my own squeamishness about “serious” had kept me from addressing these issues in the mix of Idiot Dreams. I worry too much about “coming across” as a didactic, stuffy, preachy, pretentious, do-goody windbag.  I fear, in fact, that if I am not that little stuffy, didactic person outright, I at least have him deep down within me, somewhere near my spleen.  All I need do is to feed him, and he’ll swell out to my epidermis.  If I’m not careful he’ll become me, through and through.  The thought is paralyzing.

On the flipside, I’m being ridiculous.  People write about issues of pressing concern all the time, and do (if not always completely) find ways to share their views (and even toss in occasional gung-ho exhortations) without all the stuffiness, preachiness, etc.  So Nate: quit with the squeamishness already!

Plus, there’s this.  Writing never quits being a form of talking to oneself, and that’s a good thing.  Even a necessary thing.  In the words at least attributed to E.M. Forester, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”  And for me, writing does seems to help with the digestion of all this half-chewed “serious” I read & swallow.  Writing helps me figure out what I believe, and even the act of finding the right vocabulary has an — okay, almost irritating — way of reminding me how little I understand.  The task of writing, in other words, helps me hone and defend my various stands and headstands in this Great Big Ethical Muddle.  And within that muddle — never beyond it — such writing helps me define myself as a person of faith.

More importantly still, writing about Hard Truths winds up either compelling me to action, or hurting like an absolute bitch.

Or both.  Such writing, in other words, tends to crank itself out in the form of a thousand little vows, which prick and prod us into (less dis-)honest living.  When I write about our staggering income inequality, there’s a hidden confession of my own “abject wealth” in world standards.  I don’t get to play the “poor” card anymore because there’s no jacuzzi on our block.  Hidden even deeper is the promise to change, which ups the ante to do so in my daily life.  If I write about poverty here in the First Ward one day, I’m that much more a hypocrite for doing nothing the next.

Tested Faith, I guess, was going to be my mode of doing all these things, by escaping to a new, I don’t know, “user name.”  A place where I would start fresh and set a new tone.

I felt like I couldn’t do that on Idiot Dreams because, frankly, I’m a wimp when it comes to bending Language to my will.  And in Idiot Dreams, Language had already set up shop, practically from the get-go.  Unless I muster great courage and do things that come quite unnaturally to me, Language owns me.  Bullies me.  And I like that on Idiot Dreams.  On Idiot Dreams, that’s the whole point.  I don’t know how many times I’ve come on planning to write about some specific “truth” on faith or cruelty, and wound up letting the first sentence slap me into submission and take me somewhere else.  Usually somewhere better.

On that note, if I AM to keep both blogs running (I’m less sure now why I should) I need to give language a little more play over here in TF.  If I don’t have that co-author (language itself), I’m clearly going to keep writing things I don’t like over here.  For God’s sake, it only took me a couple of posts before I was waxing stuffy about Derrida.

Forgive me.

So… I’m considering things.  I may try to cram both blogs back into Idiot Dreams.  Lord knows I have a hard enough time trying to be One Real Human Being without coming up with new artificial divides, purely gratis.  I’d love anybody’s thoughts on this.

And, at least here in Columbia, scrapyards make a killing.

Bill, our bushy-bearded neighbor, just alerted me today that scrap metal — his livelihood — has dropped to $80 per ton in the last several weeks.  Just mid-summer, last time I went with him to the scrapyard, the rate was nearly twice that.

“It’s slipped another fifteen bucks a ton since Monday,” Bill muttered.

“God, why?” I asked, betraying my (lower-middle class) isolation from life below the poverty line.  A life that’s an increasingly likely possibility.

Bill looked at me as if I’d just woken from a three week nap.  “Wall Street,” Bill answered.  “Drive down Ash Street.  Drive down Sanford.  See how many junk cars are left.  See how much scrap metal.  It’s gone.  Gotta pay the bills.”

And because of this new glut of supply at the scrapyards, demand is quickly waning.  For Bill, it’s harder than ever to keep his family afloat.  His daily shouting fits in the yard are louder, start earlier, go later.

The scrap-yards, of course, are reveling in it.  Nervously.  For them, for now, it’s a buyer’s world.  Desperation up, prices down.

But then, their buyers are playing the same game with them.  And desperation trickles up.  All the way up to Wall Street.

Alan Greenspan and David Koresh are not the same guy.

That would be ludicrous.

And, lest you be prone to argue, here are are three easy ways to distinguish between them.

1.      David Koresh, famed cult leader, perished in 1993, consumed in flames of his own making. ||| Alan Greenspan, famed cult leader, helped kindle a fire for fifteen more years.  When it finally erupted last week, Greenspan got away without so much as singed eyebrows.

2.      When the gun-toting feds finally stormed Mount Carmel, David Koresh was there, a willing martyr. ||| When the feds finally stormed Wall Street, Greenspan was nowhere to be found. Having passed his high priest status on to Henry Paulson, Greenspan had since assumed the new role of neoliberal evangelist (via Greenspan Associates LLC).

3.      David Koresh believed he was a prophet and messiah-figure (hence the self-given name “Koresh”, Hebrew for Cyrus), and ultimately decided he was the Messiah himself. Through the sheer strength of his ardent faith and fervor, Koresh worked his way up to both high priest and “Big Papa” of the Branch Davidian sect. ||| Alan Greenspan believed he was a prophet, but certainly no messiah. If Koresh was a Jesus-figure, Greenspan was more like a tight-lipped Moses. The former was the Word of God. The latter merely transcribed the word of God – the holy writ of “free market” capitalism – to the unappreciative masses below.

One similarity, however, I will concede.  Both men, I am certain, did nothing to let the very flames themselves threaten their own looks of serene self-certainty.  Faiths unshaken by God Himself!  Or at least we have the pretense.

This, of course, was surely a more easy feat for Koresh. After all, Koresh knew he would die a martyr; he had predicted these flames would come. Greenspan, it appears, has imagined green fields and blue skies forever.  After all, aren’t such promises all there in God’s own writing, scrawled from head to arse upon the unregulated “financial markets in their [sacred] collective wisdom?”

Dwight N Hopkins (ed.), in Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, goes beyond claiming that religion and globalization are tightly intertwined. Hopkins insists, in fact, that globalization — we might say Greenspan’s globalization — is a religion. Which Hopkins so defines:

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices comprising a god (which is the object of one’s faith), a faith (which is a belief in a desired power greater than oneself), a religious leadership (which demonstrates the path of belief), religious institutions (which facilitate the ongoing organization of the religion), a theological anthropology (which defines what it means to be human), values (which set the standards to which the religion subscribes), a theology (which is the theoretical justification of the faith), and revelation (which is the diverse ways that the god manifests itself in and to the world). — “Globalization as a Religious System,” p.9, my emphasis.

In light of Hopkins’ essay, I stand corrected. Greenspan’s neoliberalism is not a cult – a branch off of something larger. It is, instead, its own full-fledged religion, and this is far more frightening still. Neoliberalism is that “something larger” itself; Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” is now God’s hand, plain and simple.

Something as deep-seated and expansive as this Old Time Religion will never go quietly into the night. It dies hard if it ever dies at all.  Are we as a nation ready to lose our religion? Are we ready for some serious regulation?  Ready for a new course of laws and enforcement based on better lives over bottom dollars?

Are enough of us ready to accept that charge of heresy?  Not me.  I’ve got bills to pay.

For now, forget even that vile right-wing piece of anti-Islamist propaganda itself.  We can always come back to it later.  It will still be there, I’m sorry to say, followed by another “nonpartisan” “documentary” (The Third Jihad), destined to hit electoral hot-spots nationwide on October 10th.

And last, forget too the ten major U.S. newspapers — those stalwart bastions of truth — that have slipped millions of copies of the film in their Wednesday editions in swing states all over the country, as part of a 28,000,000-home campaign to end — once and for all — the blight of thoughtful appreciation of the Other.

Okay.  Done all that forgetting?  Good.

Now just sit back, relax, and remember the fear.

Remember that nagging sense that you are under attack by screaming jihadists, hiding behind the swingset in your own backyard.  Plotting insane acts of violence against “Freedom” — come on, you know they hate it — while huddling around Sausage McMuffins in your very town.  You drive by them on misty mornings on your way to work.  They watch you and chant something terrible.

What was it, again, that gave you that craven urge to strike some foreigner in the jugular?  Forget about it.

Just don’t forget to get out there and vote for John McCain: P.O.W.  War Hero.  Guerilla leader of brave suburbanites.  Ready. To. Lead.

That said, PhD or otherwise, today I relish my escape from an old brand of Academia, even while tentatively applying for citizenship in another.

“Old” Academia was, for me, generally focused on universals — i.e., truths and abstractions that could conceivably be considered “timeless.”  For instance: Language is malleable and fraught with ambiguity.  Always.  So is theology, religious life, and human being.  Always, always, always. God exists and is good, or at least I’ve vowed to live that way.  Always.

At Regent College, Old Academia was my means of feeling out and then reinforcing these ideas, so I could move on with my life and quit worrying that I was a bad Christian for not believing in an actual place called “Hell” or a God who’d be willing to send someone there.

In that way, “Always” was the focus and mainstay of my graduate studies.  On that note, don’t get me wrong — I’m glad of that.  A little bit of “Always” is a good foundation.  I need some Always in my thinking to support and justify whatever I wind up doing.  But I’m sick of pursuing this Always as an end in itself.  Proving that God exists or that Jesus is worth following is necessary — or at least it has been for me — before moving on to life as a Christian.  But I’m sick of the proving now.  For now.

That’s why I was inspired today to read some of Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.  In it, Borradori distinguishes between two types of philosophers (and I think we could say, two types of academics in general).  One, like Bertrand Russel, focuses on making a contribution to society foremost through the exploration of timeless truths.  I think one could also fit in here folks like Plato and Hegel, Kant and Paul Ricoeur.  Timeless truth-folk.  Very good and necessary folk.  That was the kind of academia I found myself sucked into at Regent, when I was still trying to pull some sort of Always out of my own existential chaos. At the time, I needed that.

The other type of philosopher makes her contribution by addressing current — even fleeting — social ills by way of direct and thoughtful critique.  According to this mindset, philosophy (or to stretch things, all academia) is not secondarily but primarily focused on the social and political issues of the day.  Borradori puts Hannah Arendt in this second camp, as well as Habermas and Derrida.

This is the camp in which I’d like to find myself, as a fly in the proverbial soup.  No, God help me, not as a philosopher.  I’m not wired that way, and my brain is about four pounds too light.

What I mean, though, is that I’d love to be anything but timeless.  I’d love to know that whatever work I do will be irrelevant ten years later.  I’d love for whatever books I write — assuming they’d get published at all — to be practically meaningless and forgotten within a generation.  Or less.

We need Always thinkers.  Always has been a crucial chapter in my life; it has helped me to be less flaky, less paralyzed by my own deep seated wishy-washiness.  But I’m more interested in Now now: in addressing post-9/11 politics, World Bank sneakiness, climate change, and faith’s response to them.  Issues that, optimistically, will be discussed in the past tense by the time I’m old.

In short, I’m keen on the idea of throwing a bucket or two of water on this season’s wildfires, instead of waxing eloquent on buckets.  It’s exciting to see that others have done so in the past.

Granted, I say “at home” reservedly: I did my share of kicking and screaming, clawing at the inner city walls to get out.  But like it or not, Academia was my home for several years. I couldn’t shake loose of it.  I often loathed it.  I secretly loved it.  I always feared it.

For a good while I resigned myself to a life there in the Ivory Tower.  Or rather, in its shadow. I came to expect — with grave (perhaps craven) solemnity — merely the occasional dull duty of winding up the Tower’s long staircase to pull one dusty bell or another.  No doubt my fascination with linguistics and speech-act theory had something to do with that pall of dust on all my imagery then.  I loved the stuff, gobbled it up (the theory — not the dust).  But after months of isolated study, I felt undernourished.  Dusty.

But then, several months after leaving graduate studies in Vancouver, I discovered with glee that I’d dislodged myself at last from Academia.  Direct work with the poor and homeless, while it lacked that abstract fascination I’d felt with Paul Ricoeur and the study of metaphor, gave me what I’d lacked and longed for: nourishment.  This was lived faith.  And with the added bonus of something else I’d been missing: a shared faith: there was real community here.  Real relationship.  The messiness of human interaction.  The contrast was stark: Who the hell wanted to hear about memes and phonemes, much less consume them three meals a day?  I didn’t myself.  Not anymore.

The next full year I spent in happy exile: flitting from one new possible vocation to another.  Free at last, I apparently longed for new shackles.  I found them: journalism, environmental law, social work came to the fore — all future “careers” involving “hands-on” work for social or ecological justice, joining some David or another against a host of beefy Goliaths.

In the end, none of these stuck.  Law and Journalism died the same slow death: the both fell victim to the same suspicion that there is no place for Davids in Big Media, nor in the American court of law.  I’m probably wrong on this, but I just kept seeing a gaggle Davids lining up to enter either profession, only to get crushed before they really got going.  Granted, I’ve googled “attorney-activist” as many times as the next guy.  I’ve seen the 3,790 hits, same as you.  They’re out there.  But when I looked at the list of available jobs in Missouri, 99% weren’t something I wanted to do.

Social work, meanwhile, died because I think I called my own bluff.  I spent a year as a case manager right after college, and didn’t much like it.  There’s not enough reading and writing involved, and too much of that messy, hands on interaction that I claim to love.  Plus, Jen (my wife) is training to become one as we speak, and that felt like too much of the same thing.  For crying out loud, I’m squeamish about our ordering the same eggs benedict at Cafe Berlin.

Over all this time, I put down theology books altogether.  Frankly, I quit going to church, though I don’t feel that my faith ever really flagged.  That same faith just made its way into world issues and events: poverty and preventable wars, ecological disaster (or … ecological hope?).

Finally, a some point I looked up, and here I am again.  Right back home, parallel parking my long caravan of vocational baggage and unfulfillable dreams, smack in the burbs of Academia.  Back to the world I had run from not so long before: Christian Theology.  Religious Studies.  Stretching like an Olympian for the hoop-jumping events to come: applications, PhD, tenure.

God, am I crazy?  Aren’t I just squandering a perfectly good exile?  And for what?

Let me get all stuffy here.  My goal over the coming months is to test a hypothesis.  Namely, that if one keeps the newspaper in hand and stays passionate about social activism, Religious Studies can indeed be a powerful mode of response to the life-sucking trends of globalization, earth-abuse, and social injustice.  One can join the academic establishment without becoming …. established …. oneself.

It took all I had not to end that with a question mark. So here is the perennial question: How thick are the walls of Academia? When is an flegling activist wise to step within them, and when to stand clear?