Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

In this interview, Butler stressed a theme that is actually the starting point for the discussion of nonviolence in her recent book Frames of War: the co-implication of violence and nonviolence, where neither can quite escape the other. I pushed back a bit, and so did she.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors.?Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

Greif writes in the moment of a liberal president who has embraced the right’s narrative about abortion (i.e., that it is bad) and a LGBTQ movement that has succumbed to straight culture’s late-capitalist worship of marriage. Abortion is “tragic,” then, and marriage (even the sequence of “serial marriage” that we more likely practice today) is the imprimatur of sexual legitimacy and, worse, the all-in-one fixer of our unbearable anomie. Such compromise, Greif suggests, represents a betrayal of the promise that safe abortion and gay-rights stand to offer.

He prefers to phrase abortion as “freedom” rather than “choice”—the former being a rather more effulgent sensation that is self-justifying and infinitely entitling, as we learned from the last president’s use of the word in foreign affairs. Abortion is good, and we should have lots of it. He imagines public service announcements with children saying, “Thank God my Mom had me when she could afford to care for me.” It is a welcome reminder of how God has so abhorrently and so often been proclaimed an enemy of sensible family planning.

Gay marriage, in turn, “is a preparation for institutions beyond marriage.” Gay sexuality (excepting what he hideously terms “the brief shifting of gravity during the AIDS plague”) represents the future of sexuality writ-large, one not defined by the consequences of childbirth or the institutions of marriage but laid finally open to the vistas of positive probation.

You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies.

Doesn’t such economic logic just turn you on? Most of us have learned some way or another that sex has rather more to do with money than we might prefer to admit. Yet Greif, in his celebratory sexual economy, harbors hope that it actually could be otherwise.

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

The Kreutzer Sonata harbors a quite opposite sexual anthropology. Tolstoy, fresh from his discovery of “original” Christianity, deems sexual appetites and their consummation to be fundamentally base. The story tells of a man driven by lustful jealousy to murdering his wife. Tolstoy meant it as a condemnation of his aristocratic contemporaries, whose doctors prescribed intercourse and whose marriages seemed chronically lost to adultery.

In his reading of Jesus Christ (which meant overlooking a few key biblical texts) Tolstoy found a different kind of ethic, one that sought after a condition of ideally permanent abstinence, seeking “to replace sexual love by the pure relationship of brother and sister.” He cast himself as defender of women who, naturally pure and abhorring sex (or, as Doris Lessing suspects, “Tolstoy was no good in bed”), become lifelong victims to the endless sexual appetites licensed onto their husbands. Though the father of thirteen children himself, the writer preached the mortification of sexual relations in favor of cleaner, better, higher expressions of love for one’s neighbors.

Though more than a century apart, the two offer themselves as the opposing poles to which the sexual side of spiritual utopianisms have eternally rushed. In one, we become great by declaring conquest over our animal urges, sublimating those powers into Promethean accomplishments of progress and benevolence. History—as Tolstoy assumed—drives toward the perfection of chastity, first through the civilized strictures of marriage and then into true celibacy. If we’re to be on the right side of history, we’d best gird our loins for the journey. In the other corner, Greif preaches the gospel of liberation (“New forms, new forms,” as Tolstoy’s friend Chekhov would have a character exclaim), in which finally, now, we are free to touch each other at will and, in the process, even the economic crisis will duly dissolve in the gooey acid of free love.

Marriage, that irrepressible bogeyman which rears its head somehow in human societies across the world over and time immemorial, wins out in neither scenario. Still they venture quixotically in pursuit of it: the more omnipresent an enemy, the higher the ecstasy of its eradication. We unfortunately do live in a time in which marriage is celebrated with such idolatrous fervor that the truth can only be served by getting out our crowbars to smash it (I once found myself in an evangelical service in which all the married people were called to the front, blessed, and then asked to turn to the rest of us and pray that the rest of us might not tarry long before also entering their condition). Yet lowercase marriage is, at least, an arrangement of negotiation, of consolation, of sentimentality, of rest, of compromise, and of choice, things which neither of these mighty authors want to permit us.

I say this as so much an enemy of capitalized Marriage as the next guy: let folks marry, for goodness sake. Or let them live alone, or as brother and sister, or as tireless bachelors, as they must. Let them fuck if also, indeed, they must. And, if they must, let them repress. Let us repress. We can’t have everything, and we hardly have what we need. Clinging to what precious little we find, and being kind to it, may require us to place some limits on ourselves, whether they be on our Tolstoyan ideals or our Greifian liberation. If all other things be in service to our most abstract aesthetics, let our blessed relationships, at least, be as they must be, as they can be, whatever it takes.

As I write, my new phone has just arrived in the mail. Social life returned to me—no less than by the salvific promise of my first iPhone—I will put aside these questions again and, in the sea of anomie, take what buoyant driftwood I can get.

At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw a great burst of scholarship on images like these: the Great Mothers, the goddesses of wisdom and guile, the powerful matriarchs. These, the story goes, fell victim to the patriarchy of monotheistic religion (particularly Nicene Christianity) and were lost to the West, the lands of chivalrous knights, repressed popes, and femininity enslaved.

Through these figures, feminism found a prehistory. Its radical critique became more conservative than thou, a calling-back to those enigmatic epochs from which the stone and clay fragments came. The future no longer needed to be conjured out of thin air, for now feminism had a past to ground its future.

But who are these women? Do we know them, really? Are the psychohistorians correct? Scholarly whims can always change their tune—and in this case, often they did. Upon such rocks the future might be betrayed as well as built. Wouldn’t it be safer to make our revolutions ex nihilo, out of certainties in our hearts, rather than the vagaries of artifacts?

Eve ate of the apple and shared it with Adam, the apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil. Before you ask, Why Eve? (that important feminist question) ask, Why the apple? An apple isn’t some ancient flash drive upon which data might be stored. It contains no knowledge. Its contents download to the digestive system and only reach the brain when thoroughly rendered. Why, again, like the figurines, the object? Why are we so unable to conceive of new futures without entrusting ourselves to objects?

The objects, after all, have a life of their own.

Forgive me if one way or another I misread her paper—hearing a talk one time through without having the printed text makes it difficult to catch the details, which in this case, are very rich. I will invite Professor Nussbaum to read this and correct my memory as she likes.

Nussabaum’s starting point comes from the dean of popular ethology today, the author of several fascinating books on ape behavior, Frans de Waal. Among humans, he has proposed the concept of “anthropodenial” thusly: “a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” Nussbaum’s paper reflects on the consequences of such anthropodenial in human societies. She speaks of the ways in which the desire to purify the humanity in ourselves results in casting other people as animals. Certain habits of masculinity, for instance, perfect themselves by trying to transfer all the animality they sense in themselves onto women. In the process of striving to be fully and solely human, men make women into vessels of their vestigial animal, in particular through sexuality. The same strategies, she argues, apply to racial categories as well. Animalizing others makes it possible to abandon compassion for them. To make this point, Nussbaum skillfully analyzes some rather macabre examples from literature and recent genocidal history.

Her answer, then, is that to repair the brokenness of human compassion, which allows us to be unmoved by the suffering of others, we must embrace the animality in ourselves. When we abandon the project of purifying our own humanness at the expense of all resemblance to animal others, we cannot hide from compassion so easily. (Nussbaum didn’t address at all the work of Giorgio Agamben on human/animal distinctions or his concept of “bare life,” though the similarities were at times striking to me.)

Nussbaum’s point is a powerful one, and it raises challenging questions for the most well-meaning humanitarian ethics, not to mention the most ruthless tribalisms. But throughout, the paper continually appeared not quite able to follow its own call. While she explicitly rejects the traditional “ladder of nature” with animal at the bottom and human at the top, for instance, she cannot quite do away with it herself. In her discussion of what we share with animal emotions, she speaks of apes and mice as essentially less-developed versions of humans. Who can blame her? Whether you choose to adopt the hierarchical model explicitly or not, such comparisons will inevitably have hierarchical subtext, since, for humans, humanness will always be the paramount point of reference. Then, at the very end, Nussbaum describes her entire project in terms of “restraint”—the purpose is to restrain ourselves from doing evil. Yet, earlier, she implied that restraint would be an act unique to humans (since only we “have a robust conception of fault and no-fault” that would make restraint a possibility in the first place). Therefore, her conclusion appeared (at some level at least) to contradict the entire thrust of her talk: calling us to compassionate restraint amounts to a call to perfect our humanity at the expense of animality, the very thing that permits us lapses in compassion.

I do not point to this as an error in her reasoning so much as the arrival at an honest impossibility. We can no more welcome our animality fully than we can purify our humanity. Being human means inhabiting a circumstance that is different from other animals, just as being a bat would be also. One might even imagine, if humans are in fact fully animals, what better way to be an animal than to carry one’s humanness to its most uniquely human extremes?

I would, therefore, want to carry Nussbaum’s important point a bit further. Rejecting crass anthropodenial is only the first step of an ongoing habit. There are times, in fact, when a certain anthropodenial is just what we need. Compassion (which she rightly points out is related to but not exclusively bound to empathy), I argue, depends on an ongoing practice of dexterity with one’s own identity. There are a whole sequence of identities I can claim—carnally-born, animal, human, American, male, Catholic, Jewish, atheist, right-handed, leftist, Virginian, New Yorker, and so on. Living compassionately means wading among them all, arriving at none finally but all of them resolutely. Thankfully, each can represent a resource for compassion, for seeing others as bound up in myself. But each should also, at some level, be a brake on compassion, a place to draw the line where a degree of self-concern can be allowed to prevail.

The guy, who later said his name was Arturo, got out his Bible, made sure that I believe the Bible in the first place (knowing a qualifying discourse on Higher Criticism could prove a hang-up, I assured that I did), and took me on a whirlwind tour of the passages he had underlined in red. First, of course, Genesis 1:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The bolded portions were Arturo’s favorites. These elusive first-person-plural passages in the Word, he insisted, prove that there are two images of God—when people were created in God’s image, they were made male and female. Therefore so must be God, male and female, Father and Mother. (I mentioned the ideas of Zechariah Sitchin, who believes that the plural-ish construction Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, refers to the race of aliens who seeded the human race. My interlocutor was not amused.)

Next we went to the end of the Book, to Revelation.

And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.
And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God
…
And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

So he asked me, Who can give eternal life? Can people give eternal life? No. Who gives eternal life? God. And here the bride is talking about the water of life. Well the bride is usually interpreted as the Church, I said. But a community of people can’t give eternal life he replied. Only God can, so the bride must refer to God. Jerusalem as well, one way or another.

There were more Bible passages sandwiched between those. A pretty nice piece of exegesis, if you ask me. Someone should hold an annual contest for the most creative, pretty consistent, and wholly original reading one can get out of the Bible. There’d be billions of entries.

Over the course of my lesson, I kept asking what the consequences of this belief were. Does the Mother God change the way one acts? Toward women, perhaps? He all but said no. This is justification by faith alone, apparently, and not works. To these questions he started speaking of the second coming, even suggesting that Christ may have already arrived on earth. Like most prophetic talk, I couldn’t follow what he was getting at.

As Arturo led me through, questions came in a hurry, with no time to consider a reply. Like a Jehovah’s Witness study service, there is only one answer to every question, and it is what’s written in the book in front of you. No opportunity to think—not that I have such great hope for what thinking can accomplish. Sometimes there are better things than thinking. It is a striking performance, that’s all.

When I mentioned that I write about religion, which I often do to get reactions, he said, as do many Biblical literalists, This is not religion, this is truth.

When my friend came and I had to go, Arturo invited me to a Bible study at their “Elohim Academy.” I asked if they had any pamphlets (I keep a collection of those). No. A website? It’s under construction. I got the sense he didn’t want me trolling after them on the web. He gave me his email address and I shook his hand. The Asian woman with him, who said not a word, left me hanging.

Of course, this morning, I jumped out of bed and onto Google. Here’s what I’ve learned, in interesting-fun-fact form:

• The World Mission Society Church of God was founded 1964 in Korea.
• The founder, Ahn Sang-Hong, was believed to be Christ’s second coming, but he died in 1985 and was succeeded by Zang Gil-Jah, “the heavenly Mother.”
• Ahn sang-hong was previously a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his new church retains Adventist beliefs about the Saturday Sabbath and not celebrating Christmas.
• When they say “Holy Land,” what they mean is the Republic of Korea.
• Not surprisingly, edgy Christians call the World Mission Society Church of God a “cult.” (I insist on the less judgmental formula “new religious movement.”)
• The church received an award from the Korean government.

Anyhow, there is so much more to learn, as always.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of impassioned feminist arguments against the maleness of the Christian God. Even at the most permissive orthodox formulation, only the Holy Spirit gets to be female, and she is only 1/3 and the least anthropomorphic part of the Godhead (a dove, for goodness sake). Here is an opportunity to change that: a biblically-certified Mother God, no Erich Neumann necessary.

It is fascinating that this exegetical move comes to us from Korea. The West (by which I also mean the Near East), after tiring itself out in the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century, seems to have closed the door on any more dividing up God. But first-generation-Christian Koreans may see things more liberally. Maybe, after stretching to comprehend for the first time one God in three persons, one of whom has two natures, adding on an extra female image doesn’t seem like such a stretch. The West solved the “problem” of femininity in the forth century by proclaiming the theotokos—Mary, the Mother of God. But Koreans, evangelized mainly by Protestants weary of the divinization of Mary, might have had to fend for themselves a bit more creatively.

(Exception: the Shakers, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America, believed that their leader Ann Lee was the female manifestation of Christ. What I don’t know is whether they used any of the biblical explanations that the World Mission Society employs.)

Arturo, one way another, was positively thrilled about the Mother God; there is no doubt about that. If anybody in the New York area would like to learn more, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you emailing him. I just might.