How funky is your faith?

Just caught the Bill Moyer's Journal interview with Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorien on Faith and Social Justice. These three have been team teaching a course at Union Theological Seminary, one of the oldest non-denominational seminaries in the US, on Christianity and the U.S. Crisis. Moyers has interviewed a number of folks on this issue, and I've blogged a bit on the critique of oligarchy in the work of Simon Johnson in particular. In any case, in this interview Dorien puts his finger on the oligarchical roots of the financial crisis as well, but the discussion is much more broad than this.These are three bright intellectual lights speaking out on the philosophical, historical and most of all theological implications of the current economic crisis. As usual, Moyers brings out the best of their insights on the issue, and I highly recommend a listen to the vodcast.

I have to say I am always intrigued when theologians are given a public forum to speak today, and this is a fantastic example of the phenomenon. In particular, there is a point towards the end of the interview where Jones discusses the current moment in history as a possible new reformation. I have cited it at length below because she depicts this reformation as a "crisis of metaphysics." People, she says, "want something real that is an alternative," or, as Cornel West summed it up, "It's the funk. It's the funk. It's the funk of life...That's what black life is about. But, in the end, that's what human life is about. How funky is your faith." Here's Jones's closing remarks:

What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It's not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of "American Idol." Or they've been on a war ship outside of Iraq.

Or they've been stocking shelves in Texas. And they're coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They're doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It's actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we're seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don't want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They're critical of them. They're coming up with new forms of music. And they're very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it's a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, "Do you really believe that God exists?"

Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, "Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away." These students are saying, "I'm not going to get out there on the front line, and I'm not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things..." If this isn't real, they want something real that is an alternative.