Christ on a Bike

A mountaintop experience

I was down in Virginia and West Virginia this past weekend to visit my partner's family, which was gorgeous and relaxing and full of new friends, and all the things a weekend in the country should be.

I also got to see a little bit of the recent development in WV (mostly due to people who work in DC moving further and further out), which reminded me of a piece I wrote for a forthcoming book about anti-poverty work in Appalachia.

The Poverty Initiative here at Union is a group of students, teachers, poverty scholars, and friends working to end poverty. Yes, we set our sights pretty high—but we believe that's the only way we can ever truly end poverty. "Charity" and other ways of alleviating poverty are important, but in the long run only maintain the ideologies that divide people based on their income and perceived social class.

Anyway. We took an immersion trip in January '07 to the Appalachian region—mostly WV, some of Ohio, some of Tennessee. This was an incredibly powerful experience for me, particularly the opportunity to look at rural poverty from an analytical, anti-poverty perspective, when most of my previous anti-poverty activism had taken place in downtown Providence, RI, and some in New York.

This piece, called Gentrification—in Appalachia?, is my reflection on the connection between urban class/development structures and rural ones. We spend so much time feeling disconnected from one another—urban from rural, rich from poor, students from the "real world," white folks from everyone else—but these divisions are all in our minds. The only way we're ever going to make any progress towards anything is if we begin to recognize how very interconnected we all are across whatever psychological boundaries we've built up for ourselves.

NB: Mountaintop Removal is a coal-mining technique that has become common in the past few years and is widespread in WV. It consists of systematically blowing up chunks of mountain, sorting through the rubble for a small amount of coal, and then dumping the remainder into the valleys. The result is that mountains and valleys are leveled into a barren wasteland; it will take 3,000 years for these sites to rebuild enough topsoil for anything to grow on them.

academic hat

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite papers I've written through my first year of seminary. They're obviously a little more formal than things I might normally put on a blog, but I think they're pretty accessible, and they're great examples of some of the directions I'm exploring with this whole theology thing.

First: from Old Testament 101, an ecofeminist reading of the book of Job. I was frustrated at traditional interpretations that read God as ignoring Job's concerns, and Job as just giving up. Job is the only character in the Bible who really stands up for himself—his friends tell him he must have sinned, but he knows that doesn't fit with his experience, and he says so. In my opinion, it's a great book that gets ignored too often. For your reference, the text of Job (RSV).

Next up: from Intro to Systematic Theology (with James Cone, father of Black theology), a meditation on queer theory being (racially) segregated, and ways we can move past that, called "What Does a White Mestiza Look Like?" (borrowing from Gloria Anzaldúa's writings on mestizaje).

On to the spring semester: from New Testament 101, my interpretational theory. We were asked to first socially locate ourselves and then evaluate various methods of Biblical interpretation in light of our personal perspective, all leading to a (future) articulation of our interpretational method. This is (I think) a pretty interesting look at my personal politics/theology, as well.

Last, for now: from Christian History (part 1), my examination of the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis in 726–843 and the gendered nature of the scholarship around it, called Divine Flesh. I started looking at this period around the 7th ecumenical council because I was interested in the use of art and visual imagery in the church, but was really struck by the way most scholars supported the assumption that the iconophiles (those in favor of icons) were overwhelmingly female. I was suspicious, and found enough evidence that this might not necessarily be the case; so this paper is first a historical overview, and second an admonition that critical thinking skills are always necessary, especially where gender is concerned.