Philemon's Problem

Many years ago, I was assigned to read James Tunstead Burtchaell’s book, Philemon’s Problem:  The Daily Dilemma of the Christian, for my high school senior religion class.  Recently, I found my copy of the slim volume with my name and phone number on the front cover buried at the back of a shelf.  Sadly, that name and number were the only marks in the text.  I never read the book most likely, or if I did, I found little to take note of or highlight.  This does not surprise me; in those days, the way to make sure I did not read a particular book was to make it a class assignment.  I wanted to read what I wanted to read, not what some teacher demanded of me to read.  And like many of my assigned readings from that time in my life, I usually discovered their importance when I had to teach them to a new crop of students in my own classroom years later.  Since I am writing a paper about Paul’s letter to Philemon, one of the shortest letters from that section of the New Testament and one that most biblical scholars refer to as a postcard from Paul rather than a full blown letter, I decided it was time to complete my homework thirty-three years after it was assigned.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the author to see what had transpired in his life since he published the book.  In a copyrighted article from the National Catholic Reporter datelined December 6, 1991, Burtchaell, a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross (C.S.C.) and a tenured faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, was said to be facing disciplinary action after “he had engaged in sexual misconduct while counseling male students.”  A second article from BishopAccountability.org from 2003 stated that “Burtchaell has lived for the past several years in a Holy Cross priests' residence in Phoenix.  Burtchaell does not have priestly faculties to celebrate Mass or otherwise perform priestly duties in the Diocese of Phoenix, according to a spokesman for that diocese.”  He has also had his priestly duties revoked in the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana as well.

This cast a shadow, most definitely, over his scholarship, but I decided to examine the book for its theological importance rather than considering the author who remains a priest today at 81 and who, in 2010, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination.  It is tragic that he chose to engage in conduct so disgraceful that it ended his academic career, but he is definitely not the first such case to come to light in recent years.

The other important piece of news regarding the book is that Burtchaell updated and expanded his study in an edition published in 1998 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan entitled Philemon’s Problem:  A Theology of Grace.  This time, I read the new edition in its 334-page entirety.  Burtchaell makes a number of key points that seem relevant today, especially in light of the racial tension in this country over police shootings of people of color and the need for human rights for all people since at its heart, the story of Philemon and his slave, Onesimus, is about how we treat people and how we address the issue of slavery’s corrupt assault on the sanctity of the human being.

First, some background:  Paul writes the letter from prison in Rome sometime around 63 CE.  Onesimus, whose name means “useful” or “beneficial,” has run away from his master, Philemon, after possibly committing a theft and has sought out Paul to assist him with his ministry while he is in prison.  Paul had converted the former slave to Christianity, and now he wishes to send Onesimus back to Philemon not to be a slave but as a Christian brother and equal to the former master.  Paul calls him “a brother, beloved especially to me.”  If indeed Onesimus is guilty of the theft, Paul asks that the debt be charged to Paul, himself, and that the slate be wiped clean for the former slave within the Christian community.  This is a bold and unusual request for the time.

Burtchaell’s book examines the case as presented in the letter and develops the lessons learned there into his theology of grace.  His theme “to which this book speaks is our ability—our calling—to be as outright in love of Lord and neighbor as Jesus has shown himself outright in becoming our Neighbor.  This means we must be able to sustain the language of endless obligation, an imaginative idiom in which we are only awkwardly fluent.”  What this means without the muddy language is that the change necessary to set Onesimus free is not a change in the slave, himself.  Burtchaell argues that the one who must change is Philemon, not Onesimus.  It is he who must see his slave as a Christian brother created in the image and likeness of God, the Imago Dei.  To change the mind of the oppressor, the slave owner, is far more challenging and necessary if the slave is ever to gain true freedom from his captivity.  It is a potent and logical argument.  One can issue words in a proclamation, but changing hearts and minds is much more difficult, especially when attitudes and behaviors have been entrenched in the culture for decades or even centuries.  Added to this challenge is the fact that Onesimus is charged with theft.  Truly, Philemon must not only reconsider how he views him, but he also must forgive him his transgression.

Burtchaell begins the book with a statement of Philemon’s problem.  He gives a brief biography of the parties involved and sketches out the cultural context.  He also details what Paul hoped to accomplish with his missive.  The basic premise is that if we are to follow Paul’s advice as Philemon must, it means changing the way we view the Other, the one who is not like us in appearance and is certainly not part of our class in society.  It is here that the book has much to offer.  Ours is a world of classes clashing violently at great human cost.  The violent actors dehumanize those they lash out against, and they refuse to see them as human beings, brothers and sisters not just from a religious standpoint but as human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

The main text of the book is divided into three sections:  A Distinctive Doctrine, A Distinctive Morality, and A Distinctive Worship.  Each section continues to develop this theme of a complete change in the slave owner, or person in power, that he or she may act in the name of God to see those perceived as less to be equals in the eyes of the Lord.  This message, although seemingly religious in nature, can be applied equally without bringing God into the situation.  If we believe in the sanctity of human life, Paul’s plea in the letter to treat people with respect and dignity, even when they wrong us or are not equal to us in class or economy, means changing the way we see all human beings.  We start from a base position of the person as a human being, valuable and sacred because of his or her humanity.  It is a powerful position and important in this age of often violent discrimination and human misery.

Like most theology books, I find Burtchaell’s writing style to be needlessly complicated and obtuse at times.  In examination of his sentences and syntax, I wonder if there is not a clearer, more concise way to make the case in support of his thesis.  The book is not for a general audience, and one of the surprises to me is that it was assigned in a high school religion class, even one occurring three decades ago.  Having taught senior students for many years, and now college students, I think Burtchaell’s writing would be difficult to understand and internalize for most of them.

However, the message is important and must be considered in light of the violence and oppression that occurs in our supposedly enlightened world.  One cannot legislate against oppression with words on a page stating the rights and freedoms of the oppressed.  One must change the minds of the oppressors to truly free the oppressed.  It is a logical thesis that must be accepted, even if the author has ended his career in disgrace.  In this case, the message is more important than the messenger.

Lord Fear

The annals of addiction and the narrative of the dysfunctional family are the lifeblood of the memoir.  Lord Fear (Pantheon, 2015) by Lucas Mann is no different, although the author brings to the table the influence of Catcher In The Rye and the journalist’s skill of running down the story.  As we accompany him on his journey to understand the life of his brother, Josh, who died of a drug overdose, we see Salinger’s overtones in the teenage life of boys, the kind of nastiness that is second-nature to young men of this age.  They tease and bully one another; they display their gross habits, the usual masturbation and nose-picking and crass talk of sexual encounters that are often more bravado than actual experience.  And we learn that Josh was not a nice person, a dysfunctional screw-up who terrorized the people he met.  He is not a sympathetic character.

Mann brings us into Josh’s interior life through his journals and notebooks which the brother inherited after death.  He sectionalizes the memoir beginning with quotes from the volumes of written material Josh left behind, including poetry and song lyrics.  There is no doubt that Josh had many talents and many gifts, all of them squandered in his drug-fueled and often psychotic episodes.  But Mann does not sugar-coat his own foibles:  “I’m a writer now,” he tells us, “self-identified.  Really, I intern and sometimes freelance for bad pay.  I make a point of walking around with a reporter’s notebook in my back pocket, and I like to hit Play at random moments on the digital recorders I fill up, just to get the rush of hearing my voice asking a question, another’s answering me.”  This he shares with Josh, who also had the habit of making recordings of ramblings and nonsense, putting his friends and family on the spot with repetitive questioning about sex and sexual behavior, to the point of nausea for this reader.  Mann’s desire is to get at the truth, mainly because truth is illusive, even in the realm of fact.  What does something truly mean?  There are the facts of Josh’s life, but the nausea I felt in reading the story is a credit to Mann getting at the emotional truth of his brother’s psychosis and the impact it has on nearly every character’s life as he describes him or her.  These are not nice people in this book; they are flawed, but Josh is far ahead of all of them, a kind of frenetic nuisance who belittles and badgers until he provokes angry or even violent reactions in others.  Early on, Mann comes to the conclusion that “when an addict ceases to be the person that you loved or maybe is still that person somewhere, but on the outside, the part you have to interact with, nothing remains.”  However, this teaches him as a writer to “look for explanations in characters,” and so he embarks on a journey to interview the people who encountered Josh to rectify the fluidity of memory with the accounts of others.  Did they all remember the scenes as Mann does?  In the congruent moments and where they differ, the truth becomes apparent.  It is emotional truth over literal truth, the truth of recollection over the unsparing digital voices on a recording.  This is how Mann builds the life-story of his brother.

He integrates literature into the story, quoting at length from books like Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Philip Roth, as well as from films that the author remembers watching.  The title comes from a poem Josh, himself, wrote:  “Behind an iron gate with a steel fence in an iron compound there lives Lord Fear.  In his eyes is his cold, white stare.  His gun and his shield by his side, a metal sheet protecting his heart—Lord Fear is frightened of what has never been.”

We get it.  As with all memoirs of addiction that end in tragedy, Josh’s death is a waste.  In fact, he moved through his life leaving a swath of destruction in his wake.  People who encountered him were not just forced to endure his obnoxious behavior, they were scarred by it, and those scars remained open wounds for long after he left the earth with a needle in his arm.  But Lucas Mann’s story of his brother is not unique, and I think there may be others who have done the job better in both fiction and nonfiction.  I could not help thinking of the recently departed and dearly missed David Carr’s memoir/journalism, The Night of the Gun:  A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life.  His Own. (Simon & Schuster, 2009).  He, too, went back to confirm the facts of his life story, lived while strung out on a variety of drugs resulting in many surprises and insights that felt more real and profound than Mann’s work here.

Sad to say, addiction and early death are not profound, especially when they end a reign of terror.  The book is called Lord Fear for a reason, and it is not just because of some poem scribbled in a journal.  As many witnesses to his brother’s destruction recounted on the pages of this book, his psychotic behavior was so extreme and out of control that the story could only end one way.  And quite possibly, this might have been a relief to everyone who knew him.

Is Wikipedia Dying? (With Parenthetical Annotations)

I hear teachers telling classes this all the time.  I, myself have told students the same thing.  Wikipedia, the online “free encyclopedia” is not a good source for research writing and should never appear in any self-respecting researcher’s bibliography.  The site is good for a quick overview or to cannibalize the entry’s references list to look up sources, but woe to the student who dares to identify information taken from the site and placed in a paper, or worse, one who plagiarizes from the text of an article without attribution.

(The latter is like murdering someone and then punching the corpse in the nose in the eyes of most educators.)

Now all that may be changing.  Wikipedia has managed to get itself a whiff of legitimacy.  But it may be too late.  According to Andrew Lih in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Wikipedia may be facing an uncertain future.

The site students know as Wikipedia began life in 2001.  Today, it boasts more than 70,000 volunteer editors and is published in 100 languages.  Lih calls it the “world’s most popular reference site.”

(Hyperbole, not.)

So why is it suffering what Lih fears might be “a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy, and usefulness…?”

Wikipedia is being undone by the rise of the smartphone.  Lih cites a recent Pew Research study that found that “39 of the top 50 news sites received more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop and laptop computers, sales of which have declined for years.”  But one can access Wikipedia on a smartphone just as easily as he or she once did on the that dinosaur laptop.

(I’m still marveling that I can carry my laptop around with me and jump on the old Wi-Fi network with the greatest of ease.  Now you tell me I need to put my machine into a museum somewhere as an example of how the old-timers used to do it?)

The problem is not with accessing information; the problem involves editing.  Right now, contributors to the site need keyboards and a “special markup code” to compile, edit and search articles.  This, it seems, cannot be done on tiny little screens and keyboards.

(Hell, my fat fingers cannot even text accurately on my smartphone.  In addition, my unit feels it needs to know where I am all the time and with whom I am interacting.  Even more creepy, it reminds me periodically that I really need no other remote control or telephonic device in my apartment.  With the greatest of ease, it can run my entire life.  All I have to do is breathe, although the update to handle that, too, is in the works.  Samsung and Apple will battle to replace God one day.)

In Lih’s research, (undoubtedly, some of it done on Wikipedia itself to research, you know, Wikipedia), 2005 was the peak year for the site.  It has been all downhill since—if by downhill, one means having “a budget of roughly $60 million.”  But the foundation behind the site, called, predictably, Wikimedia Foundation, suffers from tensions and in-fighting among board of trustee members and has had a number of exits of key people who have been pushed out by upstarts like the new executive director, Lila Tretikov, who, according to Lih, “has been hiring developers from the world of open-source technology” and who has a “lack of experience with Wikipedia content.”

(What does that mean?  She is the only one on earth who hasn’t looked up something on Wikipedia?)

Lih argues that the site may go the way of other once innovative online opportunities like electronic bulletin boards and, (gulp!), blogging, an activity once “celebrated a decade ago as pioneering an exciting new form of personal writing” which “has decreased significantly in the social-media age.”

(I’m only two posts away from my 400^th; I hope I can get there before Blogspot pulls the plug!)

For those who hold out hope that Wikipedia will rise again, or for those students who are too lazy to go beyond Googling a subject and taking the first result that pops up, (Wikipedia!), there was other startling but positive news for the newly crowned Grey Lady known as Wikipedia:

“For the last few years,” Lih writes, “the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and other world-class institutions, libraries and museums have collaborated with Wikipedia’s volunteers to improve accuracy, quality of references and depth of multimedia on article pages.  This movement dates from 2010, when the British Museum saw that Wikipedia’s visitor traffic to articles about its artifacts was five times greater than that of the museum’s own website.”

(Something is wrong with that picture.  They need a better website.)

Lih says that the museum realized “the power of Wikipedia to amplify its reach,” so they “invited a Wikipedia editor to work with its curatorial staff.  Since then, similar parternships [sic] have been set up with groups like the Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that focuses on evidence-based health care, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

(Of course, I’m familiar with the CDC, but the Cochrane Collaboration sounds like a ‘70s all-star rock band and the only evidence-based health care I’ve heard of is the one where you must show evidence of health insurance before getting treatment at ye old ER.)

Lih also says Wikipedia has a gender problem:  “in 2011, less than 15 percent” of editors were women.  He argues that this could actually be a good opportunity for the site to “tap external expertise and enlarge its base of editors,” some of whom, no doubt, would be women.  Then, he concludes (with a little more hyperbole):  “No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many…”

(Most of those “hands” were attached to students looking to finish that history paper at three in the morning only hours before it is due.  I would also argue that pornography has done a pretty good job of getting its message, and “informative” articles, into “hands” relatively cheaply.)

All joking (and parenthesis) aside, it would be nice if some of our last repositories of culture stayed around longer than fourteen years.

Probably the most startling thing about this topic came out of my conversation with my summer writing workshop.  “How long has Wikipedia been around?” I asked them.

“Forever!” they said in near unison.

Considering most of them were born in 1996 or 97, it has been around forever, at least for them.  To me, Wikipedia only just arrived as a source for those in need of quick info to write a paper, impress friends and seem intelligent on first dates.

(It turns out, my students and the allegedly dying Wikipedia are young; only I am old.)