At the suggestion of my friend, Craig – underneath whose pastoral polos & churchly demeanor lies a decidedly eclectic and considered musical taste – I’ve been listening to the latest album, w h o k i l l, from tUnE yArDs, aka musician Merrill Garbus.

Aside from an undeniable physical resemblance, Merrill and I have little in common: she’s a hipster rock star scream-singing about violence, sex, lies and abuse, and I’m a mild-mannered, unemployed pastor who gets occasionally hot under the collar about, of all things, ecclesiastical polity debates.

But I like her. She’s fierce and unabashed, and on w h o k i l l, Garbus sings and screams and pulses beats through her throat, through her nose. “Sometimes I’ve got the jungle under my skin/drive up the rhythms, stick a fucking fork in,” she sings on Es So, and she doesn’t just mean the music. Merrill Garbus has some shit to say, and she’s here to say it. “The worst part about living a lie/is just wondering when they’ll find out” – that’s how the record begins, and Garbus proceeds to unravel at least a dozen lies, from the personal to the political all the way to the ultra-self-aware and cliché of current hipster culture (“I’m so hip/I cannot take it,” she screams at the finale).

Telling the truth would be enough to make the album memorable, but here’s why it’s especially so: Garbus encounters violence and humiliation head on, deep down, and still somehow manages to come out with a fiercely hopeful conclusion – are you listening, Church?

She screams her dangerous neighborhood’s gunshots on Gangsta and likens her lover’s abusive treatment to bombings on Powa. Wooly Woly Gang, a twisted lullabye, warns the sleeping baby that “they’ll try to arm you/that’s what they do” and asks, “how do you keep a bleeding heart wide open?” Riot Riot, a song about finding herself compellingly attracted to the cop who comes to arrest her brother, finally makes the album’s latent confession overt: “THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFORE.”

She sounds, at times, like Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk, some manly pugilist bent on muscling through the world like a prize fighter. In fact, on Doorstep (a doo-wop-y tune about watching her lover get shot by a policeman in their doorway), she laments: “oh I’ve tried so hard/to be a peaceful, loving woman…but how many gone before you listen to the cries?/with my dead heart, how do I find my way through the truth and all the lies?” The lyrics would lead you to believe she’d given up any tenderness, any compassion. But it’s just not true. She’s making room for something else, something feminine and fierce, physical and pretty at the same time. “I’m a new kinda woman I’m a new kinda woman, I’m a don’t take shit from you kinda woman,” she sings on the final track, “and all my violence is here in the sound, singin make room for the shit to go down.”

I wish my church-y circles could find something like Garbus seems to be offering: Instead of toothless, onlooker pacifism and wishy-washy progressivism sending us all to be condemned by Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace,” that we might find some honest, head-on encounter with the ugly realities of life. That, instead of avoiding the crap parts or piously standing neatly off to the side of conflict, we could confess that we actually kind of like all that violence and shit, and fight our way through to sing the violence out and find ourselves transformed into a new kind of woman, a new kind of man, a new kind of heaven and a new kind of earth.

What should members of our military study? What should they read? What should they think about? What is the relationship between their academic training and the duties that are to be expected of them?

These are the questions I’ve been pondering, thanks to a discussion on Facebook with an old (but not old) professor about Just War Theory (JWT) and the Principle of Double Effect (PDE). It all started because I sent him this link to an Utne post about cadets at West Point being taught philosophy – and specifically JWT – to help them become better decision-makers.

Now, I am all for these cadets – hell, anyone! – learning some philosophy. I think it makes one a better person. However, I’m not convinced that philosophy makes one a better soldier. There is a lot that is expected of a soldier, but the bottom line is that a soldier is trained to kill. And I don’t think philosophy helps in that regard. Military strategy, sure, but not killing.

You see, philosophy is a practice done in community. And, when two or three are gathered, the Bible may say God is there, but I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll get some disagreement. Well, when you disagree, you can fight about it or you can work through it. Philosophy chooses that latter.

And, yes, I know that many philosophers throughout history have championed wars and violence.

But, when it comes down to it, philosophy is about sitting down at the table (or walking around, peripatetically, if you’re a Stoic) and talking. It’s about disagreeing with my friends – and still being friends. It’s about learning that, if I don’t even agree with my friends about everything, then maybe there are some things on which I agree with my enemies. It’s about realizing that we are all human, that we sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, whether we’re friends or enemies.

And, if I figure out that my enemies aren’t all that different from my friends, that my enemies are in fact a lot like me, then I probably don’t want to kill them.

Now, I’m perfectly fine with that. I think it’s great, actually. That’s why I’m such an advocate for philosophy and dialogue. That’s why early Christians, who took that love your neighbor stuff pretty seriously, were seen as a threat.

But does the military really want its soldiers to think that way?

If they want to train killers, then they may want to reconsider their curriculum.

For those of you interested in semantic clusters in the Hebrew Bible, be sure to check out Roland Boer’s testicular tour de force over at the Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. Here are a couple of quick observations:

The article explores the usage and meanings of the various words used to describe gonads in the Hebrew Bible. To my knowledge, the euphemisms that Boer discusses are fairly accepted among scholars. Any student that leaves an intro to Hebrew Bible class thinking that God struck Jacob on the thigh either, had a professor with no balls, or a conservative nut-sack.  So while I was surprised by the extent of family jewel jargon in the Hebrew Bible, I don’t think Boer is proposing anything that is controversial among honest scholars.

Boer has made a conscious effort to use each English euphemism for testicles in his piece only once. This results in a beautiful manifestation of form following function.  The reader, knee deep in marbles,  is exposed to the low hanger ideology that is deeply imbedded in our own language and thinking.  It is a powerful presentation of what feminists have been arguing for years: our religious language and thought is highly gendered, with virile masculine strength representing a biblical ideal. We see this in the usage of  balls to signify courage in both the Hebrew Bible and our own context. This parallel is all the more striking in light of the effort of pious translators to suppress the testicular language of the Hebrew Bible.

I am going to read this again soon.  I hope you do to.

10. We sold our souls for a master’s degree, and we didn’t even get a lousy t-shirt.

9. The voice of white males is drowned out by those who claim to be at “the margins” of society.

8. Doing P90X would probably kill us.

7. The cyber-tower of Bable can always use fresh hands for building.

6. Surveying the blogosphere, there is no way to further sully the reputation of theologians.

5. Michelle Bachmann told us that God wants us to blog.

4. Food blogs are so 2010

3. Barthians, RO disciples, and psuedo-christian athiests shouldn’t have all the fun.

2. God is not a Republican, or a Democrat, but is pissed at both.

1. To proclaim the good news of Jesus, that whosoever accepts Christ as Lord and Savior will have eternal life.

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