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P1010540, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010415, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Notes from the Dale Martin Symposium last wek

The questions about what love is should change:

what is ethical love
is ethical love always situational
does xian identity construct itself around these ideas of ethical love
can harm be loving
when is harm love (ie how and when is it ethical for me to hurt someone, when does the hurting help)

Paul leaves out the first commandment and says only the second is vital.

the ethical requirement of the centrality of self

Christanity--who is xian and how it is defined, could be seen as a kind of ramily reseemblence, or poitns of family resemblece (cf wittgenstein)--in this way, the idea becomes that good scholars dont draw liens

the tension b/w religious work and theological work:
in theological work, the body of christ is a real, imperial thing in the world, encompassing not only everything in the world, but everyone who has ever been a xian

We all change, and where you end up changing cannot be seen from the beginning

Self deined as a William James style american Prgamistist
Religion becomes a question of what do people actually do. (which leads to a devolped common sense/habitus, and notes what makes this xian)

Hauwerwas:
He has railed against the sticky liberal ethics of love, seeking to replace it with McIntyre's ethics of virture, construct this ethic of love, but you cannot prescrbe virture either.

sometimes the loving thing to do is to move beyond justice.

train audience in hearing agape eros philos, but those terms are not that neat.

ie in the passage about Peter Do You Love Me, the switch b/w agape and philos--little difference there.

how do we make these dsciourses female, transgender, queer

Maureen Tilley

The erotics of male friendship in augustine

the idea of erotic and platonic love are less of two solitidues, texts that do not cross the stream, and more of a specturum.

calling a body ensouled meant it was alive

the homosocial nature of beranrd of clarvieuxs discussion of song of songs--accounts etc

i don't understand exactly how this works  but apparently manipulating milliseconds of time allowed someone to steal a huge amount of money from the federal reserve.

nice little radio peice on the 50th anniversary of Ruscha's 26 Gas Stations. (He talks about showing it to people who worked in gas stations versus art world conversation)

the best thing about this flickr collection of match books is how they are shot.

private currency  made in Weimar Germany.

Stan Bitters cermaics are kind of delightfully ugly, great vintage photos (they are also huge, and the colours just don't work, and thus work)


Sacred Harp Singers sing the Mercy Seat.

scan of evangelical document against D and D from the 80s.

this anthology of american religious writing, starting with whitman and ending with francine prose reading whitman, seems interesting.

the mountain goats  live at this years newport folk fest.

haunting essay on amy grant.

early industrial design possibilities for bell's telephone keypad designs.

chris piuam's poem  based on a text by me

text and photos  of Dom Hans Van Der Laan, modernist architecht of religious spaces in Holland.

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P1010387, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010291, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

So I went to the Dale Martin lecture (Sex and the Single Saviour, The Cornithan body; now at Yale time at Rose and Duke)

We've been sort of talking around this idea of celibacy and xian identity for a while, and i think that Martin really pushed the idea logically forward--and he worked pretty heavily in the bible as well. I have five or six thots below. (Spencer you can mock my spelling of the word thot)

1. The idea that the body in the two origin myths in Genesis did not suggest two complimentary selves, but an ideal androgynous body. Christ and Paul, in their discussions of the return of the flesh, was talking about this perfectible body. (see also Wayne Meeks The Myth of the Androgyne) 
2. That Paul, borrowing from the stoics, not only prioritized celibacy over marriage.But it is impt to remember the Stoic Philosophy suggested that people should be married, that the philosopher should fuck his wife, and that he should not have pleasure in fucking his wife. So, the Pauline ideal is not a love marriage that will provide a steam valve for stray erotic or romantic feelings but that a marriage should be emotionless and sexless. 
3. That the problem then with feelings of sexuality that burns (i,e if it is better to marry than burn, what are the implications of this burning....) If Paul is inheriting a levite concern about the connections between a geographic space and a personal space--that the defilement of the body is defiling of the people which is defiling of the land (cf the overlap b/w Romans and Leviticus)--you can see this esp. in 1 Cor 6, where xian men who penetrate a prostitute plunges the member of Christ into a polluted world--where Christs body is penetrated by the world, where fornication causes Christ to be penetrated. 
4. This continual discussion of the word penetrated, on the idea of the defiling of Christ, is thruout jewish and xian scripture--all of this suggests that the passages which forbid sexual acts discuss the degrading of bodies, which mirrors the failures of patriarchy. ..
5. in this sense, the reinforcement of patriarchy has a numbers of odd off shoots-for example, in Pseudo_Pauline texts, superiors are told to love there inferiors, but not vice versa, and in early  xian texts, that were way beyond even being deutrocannonical, the more a text encourages women the more it is aestetic, and vice versa. 
6. which  is slightly different then the holiness codes of the OT--(i mean the idea that same sex behavior disrupts hierarchy is still there)--so the sexual ethics where men having multiple wives and concubines has been placed aside for example, which suggests that even w/i the xian corpus the meaning of sexuality evolves and changes thru-out a text t hat is not supposed to. 

So I have questions: 

1. Do  men who have sex with women in the prioritized space of the marriage bed, deny themselves pleasure. If they commit explicit acts that Paul guides against--then are they not committing queer acts, and in this queerness, denying their marriage rites, and by queer acts i mean everything from sex for pleasure, women on top, to masturbation, to oral sex, to anal sex to etc etc. Does the possibility of sanctified christian blow job exist? 
2.  If the perfect body is an androgynous body, how does that complete against the idea of complimentary philosophy? How does it argue against the obsession with fecundity? 
3. If queer sex is marked not by act, but by profligacy, which is something Paul hints at, in his discussion of fouling Christ's body, then is non profligate msm possible? 
4. Is there a possibility for a female sexuality to emerge from the dialectical pattern found in the early tradition
5. If we think of the scripture has having a kind of fluidity within a tightly revealed social context, how far can this script move and stay within that tradition? 
6. The more and more I get out of radical queer attempts to push forward this agenda, is not an inclusion, but the idea that all kinds of sexuality that we hold post-enlightenment as morally good, and perhaps even healthy and necessary are profoundly different than the expectations that are given for our traditions and scripture... unless you look at the men of the old testament, which you know, doesn't leave women any place...
7. Which suggests a neo-liberal, heavily codified, state sanctioned gay sexuality, allows for a mainstreaming of queer sex, but will eventually abut the problem put forth by 1. 

it's a mess. 

even tho it was his birthday, owen pallet bought me champagne.

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P1010268, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010831, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010384, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010053, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

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P1010359, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.