Riders for God
Remsberg, Rich & Garvey, Michael O.
ever he was doing, it was a memorable thing to encounter his ferocious and baffling conviction. "Harleys?" I thought, but didn't dare say aloud among the mostly hospitable...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Maybe I will...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Shalom certainly doesn't...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...I know you made your deal, but if you just make me one more deal, Lord, and let these withdrawals let up to where I can keep my coffee in me, where I could just get through the day, Lord, I'd read your book and I'd live for you the rest of my life...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Nevertheless, the combined stories of Sparky, Chico, Nancy, Shalom, Randy, Harley, Modo, and the other Unchained gangsters have been told and tested in roadhouse taverns, at biker rallies, and in whorehouses and prisons...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...REV...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...I'm not getting paid for this or getting profit for this in any other way other than I want God to be glorified...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...These are men and women in whom Christ has been seized, scourged, murdered, and raised up, and they want the world's attention...
...Marvin, S.D...
...A prophylactic sneer won't diminish the power of that story much...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Eagles, Hell's Angels, Dead Men, Nomads, or Barons are colloquially called...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...We're a church out of the Book of Acts...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Everything is extreme it seems like, but the Bible says, 'He'll spew out the lukewarm.' I don't think many of us need to worry too much about that...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...Whatever the authors of Dominus lesus might be inclined to say about its ecclesial status, this is clearly a community whose members believe and behave as if they surround Jesus who has recently and perceptibly rescued and forgiven them...
...It's because it's true and it's real and I can't explain it all, and I don't know how it is all done, but it is real...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...Retaining the picaresque swagger and aggressive instincts of their outlaw days, they now preach and live the gospel in a manner every bit as unsettling as the predations of the "one percenters," as the most savage Outlaws, Pagans, Bandidos, D.C...
...It was easy to accede...
...Rich Remsberg, a photographer who spent some time with a tribe of Christian bikers in southern Indiana, has amply documented several such confusing encounters in his incandescent and heartening book...
...An abandoned, despairing, incontinent heroin addict who in more vigorous days "could cut a guy open with a knife and not have no remorse from it," was inexorably drawn into an altar call...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...I've never been mediocre about anything in my whole life," says one of the Unchained, a former one percenter who now calls herself Shalom, "and I see that in the other Christian gang members...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...The House of Prayer is neither fundamentalist, nor full-Gospel, nor Pentecostal, nor Spirit-filled, nor evangelical, nor charismatic, he says...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...If it's for any other reason, then you're doing it for the wrong reason...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...The bikers Remsberg came to know and, apparently, to love, belong to the Monroe County chapter of the Unchained Gang and to the Ellettsville House of Prayer, a nondenominational Christian church near Bloomington, Indiana...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...Remsberg's documentary images of the white-trash antics at the annual Bean Blossom Boogie biker rally, the demonstrative communal prayer over the bikes, the altar calls, and the emotional outpourings of faith at the House of Prayer all illuminate the ardent accounts given by gang members of the clash to which 32 they have borne witness between divine grace and redneck nihilism...
...33 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...He admits at the outset that biker culture and Christianity are equally foreign terrain to him...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...But ignorance need not be a handicap for a perceptive explorer, and the interviews Remsberg has conducted, no less than the photographs he has taken, are wonderfully ingenuous, allowing these unruly men and women to give sincere and powerful testimony of the stirring of the Spirit in their lives...
...The only emotions I had was hate and lust," says one Unchained member named Sparky, describing the moment of his salvation...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...REV...
...I thought, but didn't dare say aloud among the mostly hospitable Harley-Davidson devotees with whom we'd been drinking that night, "That guy wanted to pick a fight about Harleys...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...The bikers of the Unchained Gang have renounced everything in their pasts—the felonious adventures, the random violence, the drug taking and selling, the sexual depravities—everything but their huge bikes and their outcast status...
...Who cares...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Concluding his own confession of faith, Sparky may as well be speaking for the entire gang: "The only reason I want this story out is so that it will glorify God...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...He "started feeling these tears come to my eyes," and prayed, "Lord, I don't know you very good...
...An alcoholic from the age of twelve, she was the property of a one-percenter gang for a dozen years and spent three years in prison for her role in a homicidal brawl in a rural bar...
...With many (perhaps most) Catholics, I share an instinctive distrust of and distaste for highly emotional religious autobigraphy...
...I can almost hear a reedy organ in the background as some histrionic preacher narrates Sparky's story in the twangy accent of the southern Midwest...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Pastor Larry's assertion is certainly credible...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...And if it's to glorify God, to let people hear the story of the gospel of hope and peace, that's why I want it out...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...It's not faking...
...God will hear you...
...That's all I got to say...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...Larry Mitchell, who is president of the gang, pastor of the church, and a renowned Harley mechanic, eschews conventional doctrinal labels...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
