via Musings of an Emergent Postmodern Negro

Cornel West is an impressive guy, and I like a lot of what he says. I like the WAY he says this, but at the same time, not at all sure he has Hauerwas right:

like Hauerwas, he (Milbank) fails to appreciate the moral progress, political breathroughs, and spiritual freedoms forged by the heroic efforts of modern citizens of religious and secular traditions. It is just as dangerous to overlook the gains of modernity procured by prophetic religious and progressive secular citizens as it is to overlook the blindness of Constantinian Christians and imperial secularists. And these gains cannot be preserved and deepened by reverting to ecclesiastical refuges or sectarian orthodoxies. Instead they require candor about our religious identity and democratic identity that leads us to critique and resist Constantinian Christianity and imperial America

I’d like to hear Hauerwas respond to that, becuase I think he would have some “on the other hand” items, and I am simply fascinated with the issue of dialogue with culture, and how we can faithfully pull it off. I find myself wanting to (and do) defend Hauerwas, James K.A. Smith, Eric, Jim Wallis, and Cornel West, too. And all of us do share a common obsession: to live faithfully in contrast to empire and in contrast to the emptiness of much that is thrust upon us by culture.

I read something else from West the other day on Harbinger that for me highlights the absolute neccessity for and dependence upon an “enabling” body in which to grow, be, and flourish:

I do not think it possible to put forward rational defenses of one’s faith that verify its veracity or even persuade one’s critics. Yet it is possible to convey to others the sense of deep emptiness and pervasive meaninglessness one feels if one is not critically aligned with an enabling tradition. One risks not logical inconsistency, but actual insanity; the issue is not reason or irrationality, but life or death.

I resonate with that and know that for me, the church still is and must be yet again an incarnate, affirming, enabling community for me. It can be literally “maddening” and cause one’s “grip” to falter. I can feel it emotionally, the desire for an infusion of incarnate, tangible hope (if I might, even though that might seem contradictory)—but “tangible” in the sense of embodied and communally experienced.