Commencement Address from a Seminary
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:08 pm
Commencement 2008
I congratulate you. This is your day. Even with the little teaching I do, I know that degrees are not lightly bestowed, and that those who acquire them have gained something of which they may be proud. Some of you came straight from college and are now at the end of seven long years in school. Some gave up established careers to study here. Some of you from overseas have been parted from spouses, children, and parents. I acknowledge the sacrifices you have made. My hope, and here I speak for board, faculty, and administration, is that what you have gained in knowledge, skill, and friendship will be precious to you and will serve the church well.
Very many of you will enter or return to ministry in some form or other. I am well aware of the brittleness of human persons and of how volatile it can be to nurture someones spiritual growth. In this short address, I am trying to think about ministry and public space.
It is a familiar cliché today for an older personanyone over 35to deplore another personusually youngerwho retreats into the private space of noise-blocking earphones. There is the allegation that there is something selfish or indulgent about such a retreat. It is avoidance of the real world, even unhealthy.
However one is then forced to ask: What is the quality of the public space? And that will be another of my themes.
Who are our role models today? We are in an election year. As a resident alien in this country, though a taxpayer, I am not granted a vote, so I inhabit the disenfranchised public space occupied by some African-Americans prior to the removal of the literacy laws. I am deeply interested by Barack Obama. Like him, I want to see change. I am dismayed by the damage caused by out-of-context manipulation of select quotations from his pastor. This country still suffers from a segregated and racist past. I feel keenly for those still marginalized, and this country is neither invisible nor inconsequential on a world stage. The wider world looks on amazed by the conflict within the Democratic party. The wider world is not, I believe, spell-bound and entranced over who does and who does not claim the superior moral ground for or against Jeremiah Wright. The wider world is much more concerned by the nativism which tends to be a character of American culture as a whole.
That raises again the question of the quality of the public space.
Ministry, if it is truly in service to Jesus Christ, always challenges the edge of the public space, bringing, in the words of the formula I have just used so frequently, every thought into conformity to the work of Jesus Christ. That is, ministry always challenges the no-go areas; ministry always obliges us to look at our wider context; ministry always exposes our nativism. It is a cliché now for would-be sophisticates to have a go at the European Enlightenment. Yet there is much there that we lose at our peril. It is terribly trendy to be anti-globalization and to pour scorn upon Adam Smith and the invisible hand of the market. Yet that same Adam Smith, in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, reminded us that whenever we want to pass judgment on whether we have acted well or badly, we have to consult others, for, insofar as my judgment is not shaped by their view, it may be shaped instead, and therefore distorted, by self-love or self interest. To act truly as moral agents, Adam Smith argued that we need to have recourse to what he called the impartial spectator. We forget that at our peril, whether we are locked into an undignified presidential wrangle, whether we are invading Iraq, whether we are simply faculty resisting external assessment, or whether we are a graduate suffused with entitlement. These are all places on the same spectrum of a broader nativism.
I am still interested in the quality of public space. I have been intrigued by Rich Lings new book, published a month or two ago, entitled New Tech, New Ties. Rich Ling is a sociologist who specializes in the social effect of the mobile phone. He finds that new technology has disrupted the unspoken social rules that previously governed public space.
With mobile telecoms, we are now all nomads. It follows that in an effective organization today, there need be no insiders and outsiders, yet, as everyone knows, physical co-presence may always be trounced by those who are remote, but with whom one has a different kind of tie. For example, presidential-hopeful Rudy Giuliani, in the middle of a recent public speech to the National Rifle Association, took a call from his wife. One of our new life-skills is learning how to relate both to those who are co-present and to those who are remote while inhabiting the same public space.
This illustrates how complex single ownership of space has become.
In April the Center of Theological Inquiry celebrated its 30th anniversary. Various of us gave papers looking forward or backward. Francis Clooney, a Jesuit from Harvard and a specialist in the relation between Christianity and Hinduism, looked forward to the issue of how we may share public space. He maintained that in the future church we need to learn both how to be confessing of Jesus Christ and how to be hospitable of other faiths.
So here is a further complexity to public space, how to be both confessing and hospitable. It is partly a matter of faithfulness and partly a matter of willing to permit changed boundaries. I believe that this is precisely what the Apostle Paul did. I am all things to all people . Paul was providing a model for making complex the public space in a pluralist society.
Let me gather the strands together. Ministry is, at the very least, to do with speaking the words of God in public. Only naïve people are nativist, wrapped in their parochialism as if with a garment. You, our new graduates, are not such as these. St. Paul gives us one model for complexity. At one stage in his distinguished career, Stanley Hauerwas, the great moral theologian in Duke, gave us another model for occupation of the public space. That was the idea that the Christian is a resident alien. This was creative and evocative, but a profound simplification.
As you proceed in ministry, your professional life will complexify as much as the public space you occupy. Practice will enable you to grow beyond the narrow guilds into which education has so carefully placed you. All living professions today are in turmoil. The pluralism of skills today is eroding fossilized guilds and permitting interdisciplinary creativity.
This is well illustrated by James Neal, Vice President for Information Technology and University Librarian at Columbia University. In a recent article titled Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals Into the Academic Library James Neal shows how increasingly the best research libraries in America are populated not by professional guild librarians but by doctoral graduates in specialist subjects, specialists in data bases, specialists in fund-raising or publishing. He finds that new professional groups that have been raised in other environments bring to the academic library a feral set of values, outlooks, styles, and expectations. This creates a scenario of untamed versus domesticated professionals. The new professionals have a different hunger, and former library managers must commit to a more ferocious staff orientation and seek out creative opportunities for employees to pack together more routinely. These analogies stretch our imagination about ministry and public space.
Stanley Hauerwas dealt with pluralism with his famous metaphor of resident aliens. Building on this, I want to use the feral nature of the evolving professions, including ministry, and the negotiation for space between co-present and distant addressees to offer you a model of being co-present with wolves in place of resident aliens. Jesus said: I send you out as sheep among wolves. That is another model for pluralism. What I am trying to illustrate is the truly dynamic nature of Christian faith in the context of a rapidly changing world.
Be feral, and may God bless all of you.
Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals Into the Academic Library, Library Journal, volume 131, 15 February 2006, 4244.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/C ... =&q=raised by wolves (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/C ... =&q=raised by wolves), page 1 of 4.
Ibid, page 3 of 4.
Copyright 2007 Princeton Theological SeminaryP.O. Box 821
64 Mercer Street
Princeton, NJ 08542-0803 1(609)921-8300An Institution of the Presbyterian Church (USA)Send comments to webservices@ptsem.eduhttp://www.ptsem.edu/ (http://www.ptsem.edu/)
I congratulate you. This is your day. Even with the little teaching I do, I know that degrees are not lightly bestowed, and that those who acquire them have gained something of which they may be proud. Some of you came straight from college and are now at the end of seven long years in school. Some gave up established careers to study here. Some of you from overseas have been parted from spouses, children, and parents. I acknowledge the sacrifices you have made. My hope, and here I speak for board, faculty, and administration, is that what you have gained in knowledge, skill, and friendship will be precious to you and will serve the church well.
Very many of you will enter or return to ministry in some form or other. I am well aware of the brittleness of human persons and of how volatile it can be to nurture someones spiritual growth. In this short address, I am trying to think about ministry and public space.
It is a familiar cliché today for an older personanyone over 35to deplore another personusually youngerwho retreats into the private space of noise-blocking earphones. There is the allegation that there is something selfish or indulgent about such a retreat. It is avoidance of the real world, even unhealthy.
However one is then forced to ask: What is the quality of the public space? And that will be another of my themes.
Who are our role models today? We are in an election year. As a resident alien in this country, though a taxpayer, I am not granted a vote, so I inhabit the disenfranchised public space occupied by some African-Americans prior to the removal of the literacy laws. I am deeply interested by Barack Obama. Like him, I want to see change. I am dismayed by the damage caused by out-of-context manipulation of select quotations from his pastor. This country still suffers from a segregated and racist past. I feel keenly for those still marginalized, and this country is neither invisible nor inconsequential on a world stage. The wider world looks on amazed by the conflict within the Democratic party. The wider world is not, I believe, spell-bound and entranced over who does and who does not claim the superior moral ground for or against Jeremiah Wright. The wider world is much more concerned by the nativism which tends to be a character of American culture as a whole.
That raises again the question of the quality of the public space.
Ministry, if it is truly in service to Jesus Christ, always challenges the edge of the public space, bringing, in the words of the formula I have just used so frequently, every thought into conformity to the work of Jesus Christ. That is, ministry always challenges the no-go areas; ministry always obliges us to look at our wider context; ministry always exposes our nativism. It is a cliché now for would-be sophisticates to have a go at the European Enlightenment. Yet there is much there that we lose at our peril. It is terribly trendy to be anti-globalization and to pour scorn upon Adam Smith and the invisible hand of the market. Yet that same Adam Smith, in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, reminded us that whenever we want to pass judgment on whether we have acted well or badly, we have to consult others, for, insofar as my judgment is not shaped by their view, it may be shaped instead, and therefore distorted, by self-love or self interest. To act truly as moral agents, Adam Smith argued that we need to have recourse to what he called the impartial spectator. We forget that at our peril, whether we are locked into an undignified presidential wrangle, whether we are invading Iraq, whether we are simply faculty resisting external assessment, or whether we are a graduate suffused with entitlement. These are all places on the same spectrum of a broader nativism.
I am still interested in the quality of public space. I have been intrigued by Rich Lings new book, published a month or two ago, entitled New Tech, New Ties. Rich Ling is a sociologist who specializes in the social effect of the mobile phone. He finds that new technology has disrupted the unspoken social rules that previously governed public space.
With mobile telecoms, we are now all nomads. It follows that in an effective organization today, there need be no insiders and outsiders, yet, as everyone knows, physical co-presence may always be trounced by those who are remote, but with whom one has a different kind of tie. For example, presidential-hopeful Rudy Giuliani, in the middle of a recent public speech to the National Rifle Association, took a call from his wife. One of our new life-skills is learning how to relate both to those who are co-present and to those who are remote while inhabiting the same public space.
This illustrates how complex single ownership of space has become.
In April the Center of Theological Inquiry celebrated its 30th anniversary. Various of us gave papers looking forward or backward. Francis Clooney, a Jesuit from Harvard and a specialist in the relation between Christianity and Hinduism, looked forward to the issue of how we may share public space. He maintained that in the future church we need to learn both how to be confessing of Jesus Christ and how to be hospitable of other faiths.
So here is a further complexity to public space, how to be both confessing and hospitable. It is partly a matter of faithfulness and partly a matter of willing to permit changed boundaries. I believe that this is precisely what the Apostle Paul did. I am all things to all people . Paul was providing a model for making complex the public space in a pluralist society.
Let me gather the strands together. Ministry is, at the very least, to do with speaking the words of God in public. Only naïve people are nativist, wrapped in their parochialism as if with a garment. You, our new graduates, are not such as these. St. Paul gives us one model for complexity. At one stage in his distinguished career, Stanley Hauerwas, the great moral theologian in Duke, gave us another model for occupation of the public space. That was the idea that the Christian is a resident alien. This was creative and evocative, but a profound simplification.
As you proceed in ministry, your professional life will complexify as much as the public space you occupy. Practice will enable you to grow beyond the narrow guilds into which education has so carefully placed you. All living professions today are in turmoil. The pluralism of skills today is eroding fossilized guilds and permitting interdisciplinary creativity.
This is well illustrated by James Neal, Vice President for Information Technology and University Librarian at Columbia University. In a recent article titled Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals Into the Academic Library James Neal shows how increasingly the best research libraries in America are populated not by professional guild librarians but by doctoral graduates in specialist subjects, specialists in data bases, specialists in fund-raising or publishing. He finds that new professional groups that have been raised in other environments bring to the academic library a feral set of values, outlooks, styles, and expectations. This creates a scenario of untamed versus domesticated professionals. The new professionals have a different hunger, and former library managers must commit to a more ferocious staff orientation and seek out creative opportunities for employees to pack together more routinely. These analogies stretch our imagination about ministry and public space.
Stanley Hauerwas dealt with pluralism with his famous metaphor of resident aliens. Building on this, I want to use the feral nature of the evolving professions, including ministry, and the negotiation for space between co-present and distant addressees to offer you a model of being co-present with wolves in place of resident aliens. Jesus said: I send you out as sheep among wolves. That is another model for pluralism. What I am trying to illustrate is the truly dynamic nature of Christian faith in the context of a rapidly changing world.
Be feral, and may God bless all of you.
Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals Into the Academic Library, Library Journal, volume 131, 15 February 2006, 4244.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/C ... =&q=raised by wolves (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/C ... =&q=raised by wolves), page 1 of 4.
Ibid, page 3 of 4.
Copyright 2007 Princeton Theological SeminaryP.O. Box 821
64 Mercer Street
Princeton, NJ 08542-0803 1(609)921-8300An Institution of the Presbyterian Church (USA)Send comments to webservices@ptsem.eduhttp://www.ptsem.edu/ (http://www.ptsem.edu/)