What's all this "Justice" stuff anyway?

"...with liberty and justice for all."

As a kid I recited the pledge of allegiance robotically every morning before school.  Prayer had already been removed from this daily ritual by the time I was in elementary school in the 1970s, so the pledge of allegiance was the only thing we said.  But even without the prayer, the daily repetition did its job and caused the ideas of liberty and justice, perhaps too abstract for a kid to fully understand, to slowly soak into my innermost parts.  To what ever extent I could understand them, I learned that liberty and justice were important and to be valued at the highest levels. 


As the years went by, I continued to hear about the importance of liberty (freedom) and how the United States was "the" global example of a free country. I was taught to be grateful for our freedoms.  Example after example reinforced this value: one of the most symbolic icons of the United States is the Statue of Liberty, the Emancipation Proclamation is heralded as a great milestone in our history, and there are countless others.  Furthermore, in church I was given at least two important theological bases for valuing freedom: the work of Jesus was, in part, to set us free from slavery to our own sins, and secondly, our free choice to love God was what made our love real and not robotic.  Free will, freedom, democracy, these are at the heart of Western culture and especially America.


But I heard less about justice than liberty.  Justice is harder to define. When one celebrates "justice" it's usually because there was first an "injustice" that has now been remedied.  "Justice has been served" and similar phrases tended to make me think that justice was primarily punitive. That is justice, in my limited view, was performed by law enforcement officers, vigilantes like Clint Eastwood, and lawyers (at least the good ones) but not by everyday people.  I didn't hear much about justice in church either. When I read the Bible I found many verses expressing the value of justice, but I didn't hear many (any?) sermons on it. My friends didn't talk about it. "Hey man, how 'bout that justice, eh?" We didn't sing songs about it on the fourth of July.


But then, later in life, I started hearing about "social justice".  I had no framework for understanding what this was, how was it connected to punitive justice or biblical justice?  I found that other evangelical Christians were uneasy talking about it. It raised questions of "rights" and whether or not those rights had been violated. It seemed to be too much about pointing fingers and laying blame to be the topic of polite conversation.  And though the Bible had much to say about justice, it didn't use the term "rights" or seem to speak about justice in the same way. What was I to make of this?


During this week, I plan to write several posts about my personal journey to understand biblical justice and why it matters a whole whole whole lot. I will give you my amateur thoughts about the history of the church's teaching on justice in the United States during 20th century.  I will share my struggles on whether or not I can be a Republican and like social justice. And I will share with you something special that my students and I are doing, an event called "Camp [In]justice" later this week.

U2 and Stravinsky: Kindred Spirits

Last night I read a fascinating article comparing U2 and Stravinsky. And Henry the cat thought it was the most interesting thing he ever saw in his whole life, ever.


Being on the faculty at Baylor University, I receive quarterly copies of a journal called Christian Scholar's Review. Each issue has half a dozen-ish articles from Christian scholars from all over the country.  Most of the time my cat and I can't even understand the titles of the articles; frequently they're high-level pieces on linguistics, or philosophy, or other topics outside my field of expertise. But once or twice a year an article captures my attention, reaches into my soul, and compels me to work past my unfamiliarity. The result is I do the reading-equivalent to sitting in the driveway, unable to stop listening to something on my car's radio.


For example, in 2003 I read an article called "Finding God in Prozac or Finding Prozac in God: Preserving a Christian View of the Person Amidst a Biopsychological Revolution" by Michael Boivin.  Are we still the same person if we alter our brain chemistry? Are we conformed less (or is it more?) to image of God when we use pharmacological assistance rather than when we languish in depression or anxiety?


Then in 2009 I read "International Development: Christian Reflections on Today's Competing Theories" by Roland Hoksbergen, Janel Curry, and Tracy Kuperus.  Are the prevailing theories about international development overly reductionist when they focus on culture, politics, economics, and geography?  ls their explanatory power limited by inadequate understanding of the whole person, an understanding of which the Christian worldview has much to say?

[My cat, Henry, helps me not take myself too seriously.]

Last night I read "U2 and Igor Stravinsky: Textures, Timbres, and the Devil" by Dan Pinkston.  It compared the Irish rock stars to the Russian composer and draws parallels in the way they favor texture over melody and harmony, both breaking tradition with the established norms of their times.  They even use similar musical "chords" that are not chords. The 0-2-5-7 pitches together, for example, defy the traditional naming nomenclature, being neither major nor minor, and are found in both their masterpieces,The Rite of Spring and Bullet the Blue Sky from the Joshua Tree recording. 


And at an even deeper level "...the way in which they respectively grapple with fame from the perspective of Christian faith is instructive. There is effectively a tension between fame and Christian humility that enlivens the music of both. Since neither U2 nor Stravinsky explicitly labeled themselves as 'Christian' artists, yet produced music that is at the forefront of their genres, they serve as models of how art of Christians can function outside the confines of the Christian establishment."


I agree. In fact, I would say that Bono (U2's singer) is a hero of mine because of the way he uses his gifts: influentially, outside the confines of the Christian establishment, and yet boldly fighting for that which is right as defined by orthodox Christianity. May I use my gifts half as well.


Near the end the article says "For both Stravinsky and the four members of U2, music was and continues to be a fundamental means of personal expression and inevitable vocation... Both U2 and Stravinsky have left us with a large body of work that is broadly influential, deeply human in meaning, an at times, exquisitely beautiful.  The spiritual substance of their output is also part of the lasting legacy. Works that artfully speak to the spiritual concerns such as joy, sadness, good, evil, longing, and praise will long outlive the musicians themselves."


While reading the article I thought of the U2 concert I attended a while back. I shot this video of the fans singing "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". I used to not understand this song. It seemed to be expressing a dissatisfaction or incompleteness with the Christian faith, a dissatisfaction that apparently collided with the content of their other songs which embraced or defended it.  But finally I realized this song is about dissatisfaction with the world as it is today, full of problems and pains. He is singing about the longing for a better place. He is a sojourner in this world. He longs to live in heaven, in the Kingdom of God, where mercy and justice are not marred and polluted and his personal searching and striving can at last be satisfied.  Let it be, Lord.

We Tree Kings

The tree trimming company that works for our electric utility put a note on our door telling us they would soon be in our neighborhood. I called them and asked for a special favor. I had two trees that were all tangled up in the electric service lines that ran from the power pole to the back of my house.  (I have learned this is called your home's "service entrance" by the way.)  The owner of the company came to the house to take a look and agreed that we had a problem, and a few days later his entire entourage showed up at my house at 7:30 AM on December 23rd.  They had two chipper trucks and two cherry pickers lined up down my street, and all of the men started buzzing around my yard preparing to take down the trees.  I was half expecting more guys to rappel down out of a helicopter saying "hut hut hut", but that never happened.

(Some of you may be mourning my trees and mentally calculating the extra CO2 that will be in the atmosphere as a result of this, but these two were so tangled up in my power lines that it was causing a problem. If a big wind were to one day blow one of the trees down, and that actually happens here, it would yank all the electricity lines and meters off the back of my house, and my neighbor's too.  It could even start a fire.  And I was unable to trim the tree myself because of it being tangled up in the power lines.  This tree needed pros.)

[At one point there were 13 men in our backyard.]

Almost all of the dialog between these men was in Spanish. I could only make out a little bit of it, but I'm pretty sure they kept calling the guy up in the tree "Pokemon" for reasons known only to tree pros.  To me it sounded like "Spanish Spanish Spanish tree Spanish Spanish him Spanish Pokemon".

I was so happy to have this tree removed I decided to make them some coffee. It was cold and early, and they drank about three pots between them.  One of them noticed the bumper sticker on my car that says "Yo <3 Los Frijoles, Honduras" and asked me about it. I got to tell him (in Spanish) that I travel down there with students every summer to work on projects and eat beans.  I'm not really sure he understood my Spanish, but we all went away happy and caffeinated.

[Before]

[After]

Desk Job

My grandfather's name was Olan Cleo Thomas.  He preferred the initials "O.C." and perhaps I can't blame him.  When I was a kid I often overheard his friends call him "Tom".  This was short for his last name, "Thomas",  but I didn't realize this. I actually thought his name was Tom Thomas for a while.  I just called him Granddaddy.

My granddaddy was a farmer, a school principal, and for a season, the postmaster at the small-town post office in Ralls, Texas.  By the time I met him, however, he had retired from all of these careers except the farming, and that had downshifted into gardening, really.  He taught me how to drive a car, shoot a gun, and took me to play golf with him many times.

In his bedroom he had an old wooden desk. Years after his death in 1989 (I think) the desk eventually made it's way to my house, Orangehouse, where it sat in my back room cluttered with toys and the computer printer and miscellaneous back room stuff that polite people put in their back rooms so visitors get the impression they're more organized than they are.

Over the Christmas break The M and I decided to sand it down, clean it up, and move it into David's room for him to use to do his homework.  For this task I donned my new Christmas overalls and a little "mousey" sander - the overt manliness of the former being balanced by the toy-like quality of the later. 

 [A Mouse sander doesn't quite qualify as a "power tool" - it's more like an electric toothbrush with attitude.]

 [After sanding it down, I used a leaf blower to blow the sanding dust out of the cracks.  This worked remarkably well.  Maybe it was the overalls, or maybe it was the leaf blower, but I had the urge to play the Lynyrd Skynyrd CD I bought at Cracker Barrel in a celebration of my redneckedness.]

[Four generations later, the desk has returned to a bedroom, this time my son's.]  

Cycles of Success

Dear readers, I'm sorry I have not written in a couple of months; I have been locked in the basement by a small group of protesters who call themselves Occupy Orangehouse, or "oh-oh" for short. 

My last post was an essay by my 15 year-old son, David, in response to a book he read in school called "The Other Wes Moore" by Wes Moore.  The ninth graders at his school were assigned to read it and write an essay.  David's chosen theme was the relationship between education, poverty, and community.  His teacher liked it enough to enter it into a county-wide essay contest and, remarkably, he was one of six winners!  He was able to attend a steak dinner with the author of the book, which was his primary motivation: steak, the proverbial carrot.

His grandmother, full of pride and the desire to encourage his academic achievement, bought him his first real suit for the occasion. He looked handsome and professional. He was concerned, at first, that he would be overdressed, but after everyone arrived he relaxed and had a fun night. I was enormously proud of him.

[David outside the steakhouse wearing his new threads.]

[Author Wes Moore and David pretend to be conjoined twins.]

At this point in the post I was going to make some insightful observations about role models, and how they, like education and community, are important for all of us to have, but as I am way behind in blogging, I'll have to cut it short.