Jesus is Magic
(I really don’t know anything about the movie, I just saw its poster
in the window store and the title looks barely OK for what I want to
write about.)
It is about magical thinking. One of the most interesting people I met
in the last couple of months was Mario Bergner, episcopal priest whos
ministry is in the inner healing. He had a talk to us about magical
thinking and about persistence and staying in pain of unresolved
suffering. He explained his thoughts on Romans 5:
3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that
suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us,
because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy
Spirit which has been given to us.
The point of this is, how do we live with present suffering. And I am
not talking about high-level stuff, like being in the concentration camp
or things like that. No, he was talking about everyday suffering caused
by unfulfilled desires and hopes—what is the God’s calling for my life,
how to finish my PhD thesis, and so forth. We have two major bad ways
how to deal with this issue. One is obvious and well known—just ignore
or try to persuade the problem that it doesn’t exist. When it is
possible, great! But most of the time, it is not possible. Or variant of
the same, we can decide, that acutally we don’t care about the
resolution of this problem that much—“whatever”. Unfortunately, the
problem is real and so we cannot just avoid the resolution.
The other possible solution could be, what he calls “magical thinking”.
The problem is very well known, but the pain of being in the unresolved
situation is mitigated by the unfounded hope, that the solution will
somehow “resolv itself”. A boy looking for accquintance with a girl, may
just hope that somehow a girl will find him without any of his effort
(and just to emphasize, I do not mean effort to find a girl by his own
means; just an effort to live in the place, where God can bless him with
her). Mario Bergner mentioned that he has a number of friends who are in
their fourties coming through a mid-life crisis and dreaming about being
a priests themselves. His answer is simple—“just go and apply for the
study in seminary.” But that is for most people not enough. They want
solution now and hopefully without any of their effort. So they
don’t do anything and they get nothing.
However, this need to act on the basis of God’s calling for something,
doesn’t mean legalism and dependency on our own effort. There is a third
pitfall to avoid (mentioned by other of my pastor-friends). He called it
“Christian unbelief in God”. The problem is that although most of the
full and healthy solutions for these problems is in the God’s power
only, and it cannot be replaced by our efforts, it looks plausible, that
we could at least make our pain more bearable. Unfortuantely, it doesn’t
work this way. Once we decide to resolve the pain and suffering on our
own and “as if God was not alive”, we shut-down his ability to heal us.
Moreover, practically, our own solution where we ourselves found today
is absolutely from the situation we will find ourselves couple of
months, or maybe a year or two. Therefore, the solutions we create
today, may not be applicable or may be outright misleading us from the
way the God has prepared for us in some time in the future.
You ask, my dear reader, why is this rant in the category research
and not faith? I believe that this problem on the personal level
can be very well transformed to the similar problem which plagues most
of social sciences and political practice on the level of whole society.
There is something in our environment, which is not what we like it to
be—for example, people are killing each other and we want to persuade
them not to do it. Or they have other people as slaves.
There are in my opinion many bad reactions to these realities. The most
important problem with most of them is that we focus on this problem
(I am now using thoughts of Dorothy Sayers in “The Mind of the
Maker”). And instead of really understanding of what’s going on we
use any methods and tools to get rid of the presentation of the problem
as fast and as easily as possible. And the problem is not presenting
anymore in the appearance we defined as the problem, we claim that we
have managed to resolve the underlying causes of the problem. So, when
the fastest way how to eliminate slavery in the United States is to
raise a very blood Civil War with subsequent long history of racial
hatred and segregation, be it—Lincoln could claim that he had removed a
problem of slavery (accepting for a sake of this example, that removal
of slavery was among reasons for waging the war). And, to get finally to
the topic of my research, when the murder rate of the Boston youth (or
especially of the Boston youth) has decreased dramatically, everybody
congratulated themselves how much they removed the problem of the
crime wave.
My point is that all such “problems” are usually just very shallow
presentation of the real problems in the structure of human society (or
maybe they are not problems at all—if James Fox is right and crime rate
in Boston could be largely predicted by the changes in demographic
variables, then they are mostly natural events as hurricane waves;
“hurricane prevention” anyone?). And if we wanted to help black
Americans in slavery or another set of black Americans killing each
other in our times, we need to get much deeper and develop much
long-time oriented strategy and then persist to keep it running until
real problems in the society are resolved, even when it could take fifty
years of continuous effort (and spending of taxpayers money).
Real self v. false self & symbolic interactionism
To know that all SI is just a game, because in reality we are not just
who were made in the interactions. We don’t know any better how to
describe our personality, but we know that there is something more. And
we would love to know and we would …
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What if there is no Miracle at all?
The interview with Martella Wilson-Taylor (CEO of YWCA Boston) was
really inspiring for me. First of all her naked scepticism about any
Boston Miracle whatsoever was interesting.
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The Discovery of Discourse; The Heroic Struggle of the Boston Minorities to belong among “Us” and not “Them”
{abstract prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Law & Society
Association}
The dramatic decrease in murder rate in the City of Boston in the late
1990s (so called “The Boston Miracle”) was explained by many researchers
in many different ways and therefore seen as a result of many different
actions …
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The community on the edge
There were again two shootings yesterday, one in Mattapan and other in
Jamaica Plain. I was thinking about the TV news report about that and
how does it shows the image of the community, and actually I found one
thing interesting—the phrase “a community on the edge”. Somehow it …
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Black Romeo
I was watching yesterday on WGBH on a documentary about black poor
kids from London playing “Romeo and Juliet”. It was really deep
experience for me. I was quite surprised by the fact that black kids
(mostly guys, but of course Juliet and her friend were ladies) could
play Shakespeare …
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How does it work (preparing for appointment with Len)?
Len asked me to explain him how should all these theories I quote in my
dissertation proposal work together and how I am not creating yet
another Great Sociological Theory.
Of course, that this question hits on the most complicated part of the
question. How does it all fits together …
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Don’t fall into “the ET trap”
There is a trap in thinking about the Boston miracle, and I think that
so far (to the best of my knowledge) all researchers trying to
understand what is (what was?) going on did fall in it. I would call it
“the ET trap” (ET as “The Entertainment Tonight” one …
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Continuing story?
While reading an excellent introduction to SI “Symbolic Interactionism:
An Introduction, An Interpretation, An Integration” by Joel Charon
I was thinking about my research (of course) and about the current craze
about rising murder rate in the City of Boston. Although I certainly do
not want to diminish the real …
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French class actions
USA Today reports about possible introduction of class action
lawsuits in France. That’s really interesting, because I was studying
a possibility of class-actions in the Czech law many years ago. The
conclusion we’ve came to with Martin Mainser was that class action is
not compatible with the legal …
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Concept of community?
First of all, this is what I’ve got from a member of my dissertation
committee:
What you propose so far is quite interesting, but I still do not get
a clear sense of how you propose to study the Boston Miracle. The
theories you review are there for explaining …
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So, what is the problem with The Ten Point Coallition?
Or actually is there any problem at all? Well, there seem to be
problems—Rivers fights with Hammond (and vice versa?), there are no
money for after-school activities, and it is not that important whether
the number of murders actually increases, or whether it was just return
to mean. Why …
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Conflict in TPC and payment for the Miracle
Reading an article from the Boston Globe (2001-11-02) “Friction among
clergy members seen in partnership” I begun to think again about some
totally non-scientific comments. First of them is the Honza Horálek’s
comment on difference between alliance and community—whereas in the
world, people organize into alliances given their …
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Two images and two hopes
This is probably the most obvious conclusion from reading of all the
materials about the Boston Black community (shouldn’t I use term
“neighborhood” as describing just geographical proximity of its
members?), but in the spirit of Len’s theorem that all sociology is
either common sense or non-sense, I …
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Boston Miracle as a religious experience
It was very interesting comment by Amy Farell—the important part of the
Boston Miracle is that it was described so much with the religious
subtone. City deeply immersed in the desperation, sin, and murder is
saved by the mission of pastors, who redeem poor black teenagers! It’s a …
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Guiliani’s farewell address
While reading Guiliani’s farewell address I was quite surprised how
much liberal it sounded—if I am not mistaken then the biggest
achievement he saw in his work as a mayor of the New York City was that
the situation of the poorest has visibly improved. I don’t …
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Process
The issue of analyzing for process (Strauss, Corbin, chap. 11) brings
another view on whole story of the Boston miracle. What kind of process
are we actually observing? What is routine, what is a reaction to
unexpected and what is emerging from the process?
How does the changing image (from …
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Incompatibility between paradigms
Two things. First of all, while reading (and marking up) newspaper
articles about The Ten Point Coalition, I have been again shocked how
much people could misunderstood world of Rev. Hammond (and tend to agree
with him on this point very much). Boston Globe from 2003-09-16
reported, that gay activists …
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Kant and Living Waters
While reading this morning next chapter of Carey (1989), I again hit
some of my familiar spirits. I was thinking yesterday about the symbolic
interactionism (the first chapter of Carey is actually a thorough
explanation of the background of ideas feeding into the symbolic
interactionism and similar constructivist sociological tradition …
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Mannheim’s Paradox
Reading Carey (1989), I met again the issue of the Mannheim’s Paradox
(the author’s name), which is fancy name for finding that social
scientists themselves are humans and thus subject of ideological
pressure and laws of human behavior, which could influence how they
perform as scientists. Or in …
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