So, it's Thursday night as I'm typing, but it will most likely be Friday morning as you read this invitation to share your weekend plans, take stock of the week that just went by, or vent, or put whatever you feel like putting into a comment.
I'll just type my comment below the fold, because, well, I can...
Today (again, I'm typing this on Thursday night), I went through two experiences that are pertinent to the Spiritual Organization of Unapologetic Liberals. First, dinner with dad and step-mom was pleasant enough, but conversation veered into religion. Along with politics, it's a topic I desperately try to avoid discussing with my dad and step-mom, but with a doctorate in theology behind me, there's only so much evasion I can accomplish in a lifetime.
It's funny how the dynamics play out. Despite having accomplished a doctoral degree, there's something about Dad that always makes me revert at some level to my five-year-old self. So, there's a strange way in which my thought patterns come out in distorted ways to begin with. My dad and step-mom have set ideas about what things are, and that includes "religion," "faith," and "belief." I've absorbed enough academic study of religion to find it impossible to hammer down unambiguous definitions for those terms, because I know how differently people have used those terms over the course of history, etc. etc. When they ask me questions, they're not really interested in what I think as much as trying to find a way to fit me into something they recognize. I have lamented this dynamic on Daily Kos before, but again, it's different when you're struggling to speak through the weird imbalances of parental relations.
I don't think my faith is really accountable to my parents - it's accountable to humanity in general, to God, to my conscience, and to my religious community. But it's weird to sit there with a doctorate in theology, and hear one's ideas fed back to me as "obviously you don't have belief." Strange, because of the three people sitting at the table, I was the only one who attends worship regularly, the point of which sort of eludes them. My Dad talked about how he wishes he could believe in Jesus, my step-mother described Catholicism as "bullshit," which she is also sure she will revert to as she gets older. Both of them see religion as something with psychological benefits, but not something they can grasp for themselves.
Although I wasn't entirely comfortable with the discussion, I'm used to getting by with a lot of evading with my Dad (he watches FOX religiously - have I made my case?). My plan of attack for the rest of the meal was to continue evading until the topic changed. Then I had to get up to blow my nose, and came back to profuse apologies about the conversation. They'd taken my need to blow my nose as a desperate attempt to change the topic. Of course, profuse apologies just kept us on the topic even longer. Oh well - communicating with my father has never been easy, but Dad is Dad.
After dinner, I went with my Mom to see a production of a play by one of the Coen brothers, Almost an Evening, an extended meditation on various theological themes, beginning with a Kafkaesque act about a guy who's being strung along by a bureaucracy as he's waiting to get approval to get into heaven, moving to strange interactions in hell as a steamroom with heavy homoerotic innuendo, ending with a final act that plays off the Judging God against the Loving God, and then loops around to reveal a play within a play. The speeches of the Loving God were more or less consistent with the way I think about things - down to gestures of inclusion toward the Judging God - the twists in the play prevented the audience from settling too comfortably into the theological affirmations of the Loving God, and I appreciated the way the plot opened a third path beyond the binary of Judging/Loving, into discussing and living.