Steve Jobs, Theologian and Prophet

By Winfred Vergara

The globalized world mourns today the passing of Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple. He is considered an exceptional high tech guru, entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, visionary and probably the newest richest man in the cemetery.

Aside from being a father to at least four human beings, Jobs is also the father of iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. While I have only iNap, iSnore and iOwe to my credits, I quite resonate with his life, particularly his disadvantaged family origin; and although he was reportedly a Zen Buddhist, I consider him my new Christian theologian and prophet. I think his one Commencement Speech to Stanford University students in 2005 must have inspired more people (thanks to his high tech, high speed inventions) than any of my 1726 miserable sermons delivered during my 33 years of priesthood.

And so at the risk of making him my idol, I share three points why his life is worthy of emulation:

1. He Learned from Adversity
Given for adoption and learning that his adopted parents were not as rich and educated as his biological mother had expected, he made the most of what he had. “At Reed College, I did not have a dorm room so I slept on the floor of friends’ rooms. I returned coke bottle for 5 cents deposits to buy food and would walk seven miles across town on Sundays to get one good meal at a Hare Krishna temple.” He would later drop out of college, to save money for a self-directed learning, including a course on calligraphy, which he would later use in his design of Macintosh computer.

2. He Considered Love as Antidote for Failure
A positive thinking pastor, Robert Schuler once said, “success is never-ending and failure is never-final.” Jobs is a prime exemplar of this philosophy. He and Wozniak started Apple on his parents’ garage in Silicon Valley which grew into a 2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. But when it was settling down, they hired a new leadership who disagreed with him and he was fired from the very company he founded. He came back later after proving himself agile in founding NeXT and Pixar, two celebrated successes. He would later say “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love...Don’t settle.”*

3. He Believed Death Has a Renewing Purpose
I share with Steve Jobs the trait of being secretive about disease, a thing that most frustrate my own family. As a child, I endured a whole night suffering from food poisoning, because I did not want to wake my mother up. Jobs’ battle with pancreatic cancer, which ultimately claimed his life at age 56, was kept secret for a long time. St. Francis of Assisi called it “Sister Death” but for Jobs, death is life’s ultimate destiny. In his monologue on death, he said, “Death is the destination we all share…it is the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”*

It would be great to share with Jobs’ audience that his philosophy of life’s journey resembles that of our forefather Abraham who did not settle in villas and palaces but lived in tents because he was looking for a city with a strong foundation, “whose builder and maker is God.” It is also comforting to share that the Christian faith offers a view that death is not the final statement for we believe that God will raise us up on the last day.

(This blog first appeared in http://travelinasian.blogspot.com/)

*These quotations are taken from Steve Jobs’ Commencement address at Stanford University, California, October 10, 2005.

**The Rev. Dr. Winfred Vergara is missioner for Asiamerica Ministry in the Episcopal Church Center based in New York City. Ordained in the Philippine Independent Church, he served as missionary priest in the Anglican Church in Singapore (1980-86) and Canon Missioner of the Diocese of El Camino Real (1990-2004). Among his books are Milkfish in Brackish Water: Filipino-American Ministry (1990); Mainstreaming Asian Americans in the Episcopal Church (2006); Catholicity and Brief History of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines (2010). He can be contacted at wvergara@episcopalchurch.org.

Christian Explorations of Traveling

By Joerg Rieger

Travel takes many different forms. Some travel for pleasure, others for work, and many more travel in order to find work and a better life. Moreover, there are different travel movements under way in our time.

One is vagabonding, where mostly young people leave their homes to explore the world, seeking adventure and broader horizons. Another, very different travel movement is migration, where people leave their homelands for reasons of need and survival.

Pilgrimages constitute different kinds of travel movements—some tied up with deep religious quests and others indistinguishable from tourism, which constitutes one of the biggest travel movements of all times. These movements seem to have little in common at first sight. Yet as we explore different layers of travel, we will see what the various travelers can learn from each other and what even those staying at home can learn.

I wrote the book Traveling as someone who has learned a great deal on the road. Travel is woven into my life in many ways, combined with a lifelong wanderlust. I grew up in southern Germany, thousands of miles away from Dallas, Texas, where I live now. I have had the opportunity to travel to many countries, in both the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres. I also have had the opportunity to travel for very different reasons: for pleasure, for work, and out of sheer necessity.

Nevertheless, I write this book not merely as a traveler but also as a Christian theologian who is convinced that travel has significantly shaped our Judeo-Christian traditions and our varied experiences with the divine—a role that has for the most part been underappreciated.

Perhaps the most surprising insight of this book is that traveling is so deeply rooted in our traditions that many of them fail to make sense without it. Consider how much of the material of the Judeo-Christian traditions actually developed on the road. Abraham, regarded as one of the pillars of the faith, has nothing static about him. The people of Israel spent a good amount of time on the road. Their stories speak of slavery in the lands of a foreign empire called Egypt, of an exodus from Egypt, and of forty years of wandering in the wilderness. On this journey, they learned important theological lessons, which included profound challenges to outdated images of God.

In the New Testament, Jesus’ ministry takes place almost entirely on the road, as a person who has “no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). Perhaps one of the most important theological challenges that travel poses to the Christian life is summarized in the Letter to the Hebrews: “Here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14).

Christianity is what takes place on the road. Travel, it appears therefore, is more than a metaphor of the Christian faith. Location and constant relocation are central matters of the Christian life.

Traveling is, thus, a central topic for faith and life. Those who travel to live and who live to travel might be in a position to make important contributions in today’s world. These contributions include a habit of thinking on one’s feet, the broadening of horizons, a flexibility that is typical especially of travelers who have less control, various challenges to the status quo, and a much-needed awareness of our own limits and finitude.

Travelers who spend much time on the road experience in their very being what is at the heart of the logic of the Jewish-Christian traditions and what took philosophers thousands of years to understand: a new appreciation for small, particular experiences of life, out of which broader universal ideas grow. This appreciation is where theology and philosophy started when religion took place on the road, rather than with the big concepts and ideas proposed by the powers that be.

Finally, those who find themselves on the road without safety nets often develop special bonds and relationships. No travel ever occurs in a vacuum. Power, as well as the lack of power, plays an important role in our travels. Becoming aware of these things is part of the broadening of our horizons.

*Joerg Rieger is Wendland-Cook Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Among his most recent books are Globalization and Theology (Abingdon Press, 2010), No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics and the Future (Fortress Press, 2009), and Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Fortress Press, 2007). His website is http://www.joergrieger.com.

But Is That Theological?

By Mark Lewis Taylor

She reaches for the song that gets her through the day.

They break into a chant, and hold on tight as they are arrested together for protesting policies of torture in front of the U.S. White House.

He captures on video the faces of wounded survivors and images of the dead, burned by U.S. white phosphorous bombings in Fallujah, Iraq - galvanizing international critique of U.S. war-making in Iraq.

The years drag on in the refugee camp, but seemingly futureless youth, take up paint and imagination to color the camp walls in murals of fight and freedom.

These gestures of song, chanting with clasped hands, the video image gone viral, refugee youth painting murals on walls – could these be theological?

One early reviewer of my new book, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World, found the book’s concepts tough-going, but helpful for answering his religious friends who dismiss his dearest language of devotion and struggle with the words: “But is that theological?”

It’s a question I often hear uttered by guardians of official guild Theology, about those who live under imposed suffering, and who find power for living in their arts – poetry, music, painting, and more - catalyzing their hope amid suffering. Is that theological?

Theologians, too, struggle with the question. What is the theological and theology, anyway? When theologians desire to write about what matters amid the unrepeatable tensions of our age, that desire often takes us to theories, arts and genres that are hardly the usual stuff of Theology.

We are led to reflect not simply on sites of suffering in general - anxiety, guilt, sickness, death. When the worlds of suffering are those of politically-sustained, social suffering, the discourses that matter most are often the popular arts. They often rival the seemingly intransigent forces that weigh heavily upon repressed peoples everywhere, who, nevertheless weigh-in with resilience against the everyday, callous mixes of colonialism, modernity and imperial power.

Go to the “Holy Land” to find the theological, I suggest. You won’t find it so much along the ways of the Jesus Inc. shrines and walkways. You’ll find it more among the Palestinian and Jewish artists yearning to end Israel’s illegal occupation and miles of imprisoning wall.

The land is afflicted by a most unholy occupation, dividing and confining Palestinians, cutting across their lands, ruining hopes for jobs, land, a contiguous state, and, often, threatening dignity itself. Achille Mbembe sees Israel’s apparatus of power in Palestine, backed by the U.S. as “the most accomplished form of . . . late-modern colonial occupation.” Jewish historian, Illan Pape, writes of “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Yet the theological thrives. Artful gestures of resistance can be seen in the murals of the Dheisheh refugee camp, which I was permitted to visit and photograph. One muralist depicts the overall history, displaying the dates of upheaval that sent Palestinians into the camps or diaspora.

The Israeli caterpillar tractors that raze Palestinian homes are re-imagined as skeletons dealing death, but they too are now dying; they are bony things, confined by their own wall-building addiction. Artists implant these death machines in a cemetery of flowers, portending the death of Israel’s abusive machinations of power.

As in camps and communities of suffering the world-over, it is mothers and children, often together with the aged and the infirm, who suffer most. Yet even they can be conjured by the refugee artist as agents of power. Grasping the uprooted olive trees marking the Nakba,“catastrophic destruction” of homes, lands, and peoples, the mothers shown in the mural draw strength from the land, grasp their children and pose a veritable specter of liberation dwarfing the soldiers who enforce destruction in the name of a gruesome Pax Americana/Israelica.

This art expresses and catalyzes quotidian practices of resistance, in part organized through its Ibda'a Cultural Center (“ibda’a” meaning “creativity”).

It is not the artful gesture alone that liberates. It is the art, intrinsic to a people, that sustains and catalyzes everyday resilience and challenges the powers that would reduce them to mere disposable peoples. That’s the theological.

* Mark Lewis Taylor is Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary. He took the photographs accompanying this text on a 2007 visit to Palestine and Jordan. His most recent book is The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Fortress Press, 2011).

Virtual Hypocrisy: Postcolonial Friendships and Facebook?

By Joseph F Duggan

The internet is revolutionizing academia.

People from around the world are becoming Facebook friends blurring historical divisional boundaries. Facebook friends are learning about each other’s different cultural, gender, racial and class experiences. There is potential for these Facebook friendships to become real friendships that produce social and ecclesiological changes in the way people live together in postcolonial societies.

Are you skeptical?

A 2010 Google survey of words showed that the term “postcolonial” did not even register sufficient statistical data to demonstrate patterns of interest. But Pramod Nayar is hopeful about “postcolonializing cyberculture” as “NGO’s, trans-governmental organizations and activists’ link across the globe through these technologies.”

Facebook predisposes more people to extend learning rapidly. The power dynamics of the delivery of and access to scholarship are rapidly changing.

Leela Gandhi in Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship and Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy tell stories of little known friendships between colonized and colonizer. Gandhi introduces and describes Edward Carpenter as, “the late nineteenth century socialist, animal rights activist, prison reformer, homosexual…(who) excoriates England for the dubious blessings of empire...Writing in passionate if somewhat purple register, he condemns unequivocally all acts of imperial exploitation.” How many people interested in postcolonialism know of Carpenter’s 1883 work, Towards Democracy unless they are scholars reading erudite books such as Gandhi’s? It is safe to say very few.

Nandy highlights the importance of “the numerically small but psychologically significant response of many who opted out of their colonizing society for the cause of India.” Gandhi reminds readers that “very rarely…did this enterprise register on the center stage of colonial encounter, its protestations scarcely observed on either side of the imperial divide.”

Gandhi and Nandy don’t give up hope, as there is a kernel of possibility for postcolonial friendships to emerge through Facebook even in the midst of annoying reordered profiles, silly pokes, arbitrary likes/unlikes, trite wall postings and mind numbing games like Farmville.

It will probably be a long time before Facebook is a postcolonial tool of decolonization that transforms racism into friendship. But these changes are transforming academia:

• Online peer review journals in less than a month draw readers in 60+ non-English speaking countries through Facebook publicity.
• Scholarly books that once were successful if they sold to 450 research libraries will be replaced by the success of online tools where a popular journal paper, by an otherwise unknown scholar is downloaded and read by1500 readers within 24 hours of being published. Unpopular papers receive as many readers as the “one run” published books.
• While prestigious publishers still make a difference in tenure applications, Amazon distributes books without regard to the power of prestigious named presses and enable little known presses to share the power of the same global distribution channel.

As marginalized scholars once excluded from scholarly discussions increasingly leverage online access to publish, more will hear of subversive thinkers like Edward Carpenter. Facebook will be transformed from a predominantly white privileged luxury of the elite few into an effective tool for postcolonial activism where colonizer-colonized become more friendly allies.

* Joseph F Duggan, MDiv’06 is founder of Postcolonial Networks and editor of Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology.