Stories and Histories

It often seems I find better insights on what I should be doing as a historian from non-historians than historians. Paul Chaat Smith is an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). I’ve recently read his collection of essays: Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Serendipity #1: I learned that his maternal grandfather was pastor of Comanche Reformed Church, Oklahoma. The RCA among Native Americans is a subject  about which I have a long-standing curiosity.

Serendipity #2 are his comments on history (p. 53):

All histories have a history, and one is incomplete without the other.

History promises to explain why things are and how they came to be this way, and it teases us by suggesting that if only we possessed the secret knowledge, the hidden insight, the relevant lessons drawn from yesterday’s events, we could perhaps master the present. A history is always about who is telling the stories and to whom the storyteller is speaking, and how both understand their present circumstances.

The Self-indulgence of Despair?

I was taken aback this morning by reading the phrases “a self-indulgent state of gloom” and “the self-indulgence of despair” in Robert Corin Morris’s “Hope Springs Eternal,” Weavings 27:2 (2012): 5. He is not claiming that all despair is self-indulgent. He is, however, wanting to argue that remaining in despair is “‘a sin against the virtue of hope.’”

So far as his argument goes, I have to acknowledge that my own proclivities to despair are self-indulgent. I am pondering Morris’s affirmation (p. 6):

At the very heart of Reality there is an ever-springing energy that faces down discouragement, an energy that translates into human terms as “hope.” The God of always-springing hope has our backs when we are tempted toward hopelessness, and is both the ground and goal of our deepest hopes.

N.T. Wright on Jesus’ Death

This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day brings to mind, among other things, suffering–of King himself, and of many others in history, and the present, who seek God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.

N.T. Wright’s new book, Simply Jesus, powerfully presents Wright’s understanding of what Jesus was about, in ways that remind us that Jesus was King’s Lord and Savior. Here’s a passage from Wright’s book, pp. 185-7:

Somehow, Jesus’s death was seen by Jesus himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven. It was the ultimate Exodus event through which the tyrant was defeated, God’s people were set free and given their fresh voaction, and God’s presence was established in their midst in a completely new way for which the Temple itself was just an advance pointer. That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God”–with all the echoes of the anticipated return of YHWH to Zion–is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross. …

… In Jesus’s own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome was not the real enemy. Rome provided the great gale, and the distorted amitions of Israel the high-pressure system, but the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. …

… What we see throughout Jesus’s public caeer is that he himself is being accused … Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself. That is the point of the story the way the evangelists tell it.

Minding Place Returns!

In case you’ve missed it, the old web site for Minding Place, the first Day of Learning in Community (DLC) in 2008 has returned! You can find the DLC archive here.

Mostly Links

I am not much of a blogger, I am afraid. What I am starting here is a nicer looking web page for people to find various links of things connected to my life as a history professor. See the pages listed above as well as the links below.