The Case for wonder
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:date: 2005-04-25T07:54:00
:category: faith
:tags: dissertation, BostonMiracle, sociology

The three similar stimuli met me in the last days. First I have read in
`“Communication as Culture” (James W. Carey, 1989)`_ that a good
sociology is similar to an art in its orientation towards “making the
phenomenon strange”, because

    […] the social sciences can take the most obvious yet background
    facts of social life and force them into the foreground of
    wonderment. They can make us contemplate the particular miracles of
    social life that have become for us just there, plain and
    unproblematic for eye to see. […]

There is some beautiful naivety here at work — it is suddenly possible
to take seriously the good old Aristoteles notion, that basis of all
philosophy (i.e., all science, because it was contained in that time in
philosophy) is curiosity and wonder. Moreover, for me personally it is
calling back to the position where what really matters is something
really personal and internal (after all, we are talking here about a
qualitative research, not just data crunching).

And just immediately when I have begun to think about writing a blog
record like this one, I opened again “More ready than you realize”
(Brian McLaren, 2002) and found there this (p. 145):

    Modern Christianity has (inadvertently, I think) tended to reduce
    God to a being containable by human concepts or propositions or
    logic. It has too often acted as though it had God bottled, labeled,
    and hermetically sealed, a commodity we own and attribute at will,
    logically proven, and theologically defined. […] No wonder
    evangelism seems dreary under these circumstances. As Walker Percy
    once wrote, instead of “Jesus saves!” we could as well easily be
    shouting “Exxon! Exxon!” because God has become a product we are
    selling or promoting. […] Christianity has not always been like
    this. Gregory of Nysa of the fourth century once said, “Concepts
    create idols. Only wonder understands.” Martin Luther reputedly
    reflected this realization: “If I could understand one grain of
    wheat, I would die of wonder.”

And finally, when I was talking with a friend this afternoon, she told
me about her feelings of people having too big expectations from her.
After some further talking I suggested (because I begun to see the
pattern) that actually the only way (aside from knowing that God knows
as well and has neither too high expectations and in the same time he is
not full of depression and self-hate as we are) how to defend herself
against these feelings is to go deeper in knowledge of herself, and from
that position to be able to stand up against any unreasonable (or
misguided) expectations.

And of course, it is something which is of the utmost importance for me
as well. What I am writing about images in newspapers, should be
especially the most personal expression of myself — not stupid
graphomaniac diatribes which does not interest anybody, but that the
only measure of what I should write is what I honestly know about
myself, not what anybody expects from me.

This was an interesting experience.

.. _`“Communication as Culture” (James W. Carey, 1989)`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-04-445062-1