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Borderline: Reflections on War, Sex, and Church
What if the sanctification of war and contempt for women are both grounded in a fear that breeds hostility, and a hostility that rationalizes conquest?
The anti-Gospel Christian history of war-loving and women-hating are not merely similar but two aspects of the same dynamic, argues Stan Goff, in an "autobiography" that spans millennia. Borderline is the historical and conceptual autobiography of a former career army veteran transformed by Jesus into a passionate advocate for nonviolence, written by a man who narrates his conversion to Christianity through feminism.
"Stan Goff is a remarkable human being, so we should not be surprised at this equally remarkable book. Drawing on feminist theory, Goff helps us see war as an expression of a perverse masculinity. His philosophical and theological insights throughout this book are stunning. Borderline is a must-read for anyone concerned with war and its effect on our lives."
--Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law, Duke University
"War is a powerful aphrodisiac, Stan Goff writes, because it helps men feel like real men and some women feel like real women protected by real men. But that is not what Christianity is about. Warrior myths are not true, nor war beautiful. Borderline offers an antidote to delusion and an account of real hope."
--From the foreword by Amy Laura Hall
"I've long wondered why so few male theologians made the obvious connections between sex and war. Stan Goff stands in this gap with striking candor, insisting the rest of the intellectual world join him. He makes a compelling case for recognizing that perhaps the most profound product of the last century has been gender theory, that until the church wrestles with its theological credibility, we cannot possibly be in full communion with God or our (female) neighbors."
--Logan Mehl-Laituri, author of Reborn on the Fourth of July
"I often think I am manly because I have a beard and I like beer, but Stan Goff reminds me that this way of viewing myself is not shaped by the story of Jesus, but the story of a masculinity hell-bent on war and domination. That is the beauty (not a very masculine word) of this book--it declares that the only thing that Jesus was, and is, interested in conquering is death."
--Justin Bronson Barringer, co-editor of A Faith Not Worth Fighting For
Stan Goff spent most of the final three decades of the twentieth century as a soldier--most of that in what is euphemistically called "special operations." Sometimes a writer, sometimes an "activist," sometimes a husband, dad, and granddad, and sometimes a gardener, he lives in southeast Michigan and is a member of the St. Mary of Good Counsel parish of the Roman Catholic Church.
The anti-Gospel Christian history of war-loving and women-hating are not merely similar but two aspects of the same dynamic, argues Stan Goff, in an "autobiography" that spans millennia. Borderline is the historical and conceptual autobiography of a former career army veteran transformed by Jesus into a passionate advocate for nonviolence, written by a man who narrates his conversion to Christianity through feminism.
"Stan Goff is a remarkable human being, so we should not be surprised at this equally remarkable book. Drawing on feminist theory, Goff helps us see war as an expression of a perverse masculinity. His philosophical and theological insights throughout this book are stunning. Borderline is a must-read for anyone concerned with war and its effect on our lives."
--Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law, Duke University
"War is a powerful aphrodisiac, Stan Goff writes, because it helps men feel like real men and some women feel like real women protected by real men. But that is not what Christianity is about. Warrior myths are not true, nor war beautiful. Borderline offers an antidote to delusion and an account of real hope."
--From the foreword by Amy Laura Hall
"I've long wondered why so few male theologians made the obvious connections between sex and war. Stan Goff stands in this gap with striking candor, insisting the rest of the intellectual world join him. He makes a compelling case for recognizing that perhaps the most profound product of the last century has been gender theory, that until the church wrestles with its theological credibility, we cannot possibly be in full communion with God or our (female) neighbors."
--Logan Mehl-Laituri, author of Reborn on the Fourth of July
"I often think I am manly because I have a beard and I like beer, but Stan Goff reminds me that this way of viewing myself is not shaped by the story of Jesus, but the story of a masculinity hell-bent on war and domination. That is the beauty (not a very masculine word) of this book--it declares that the only thing that Jesus was, and is, interested in conquering is death."
--Justin Bronson Barringer, co-editor of A Faith Not Worth Fighting For
Stan Goff spent most of the final three decades of the twentieth century as a soldier--most of that in what is euphemistically called "special operations." Sometimes a writer, sometimes an "activist," sometimes a husband, dad, and granddad, and sometimes a gardener, he lives in southeast Michigan and is a member of the St. Mary of Good Counsel parish of the Roman Catholic Church.
- GenresNonfictionTheology
474 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 11, 2015
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June 22, 2015
from National Catholic Reporter, June 19-July 2, 2015
Pacifism, feminism - and Catholicism
Former soldier's essays reveal a truth-seeker
Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church
by Stan Goff
Published by Cascade Books
In his pre-Christian past, which is most of his life, Stan Goff was a career soldier who stoutly carried out American foreign policy by obeying orders to inflict violence on human beings in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, and other combat zones. In two Army tours between 1970 and 1996, the San Diego native was a paratrooper who leapt from planes more than 400 times, a sniper; and a member of Airborne Ranger and Special forces groups.
In Borderline, he reports that he "terrorized and brutalized people who were weak and poor: I had burned houses, killed poor farmers' livestock, and lied on command to family, journalists, and the public... I had exploited prostituted women, who exist on the periphery of every military activity."
In his personal life, he had a failed marriage that he called "psychotic," was an alcoholic and "an irresponsible parent."
Whether by grace, or self-disgust, remorse or self-education, or a combination of these forces, he chose on Easter Sunday of 2008 to be baptized as a Christian. He was 56. Four years later, he received confirmation as a Roman Catholic. He had embraced pacifism and feminism.
Remarried, he now lives in Southeast Michigan, gardens with the Adrian Dominican Sisters on a long-term permaculture land-use project, and belongs to St. Mary of Good Counsel Parish in the Lansing diocese.
In 34 chapters and 446 pages, the essays in Borderline blend commentary, ruminations, autobiography and history - all of it scented with the humility of a truth-seeker who knows that asking questions is far easier than questioning the answers. What's in these literate pages extends Goff's thoughts found in his earlier efforts: Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (2000), Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (2004), and Sex & War (2006).
Goff offers few details on the moment of his conversion, except to acknowledge appreciatively that it was a gradual awakening induced by absorbing the ideas of Stanley Hauerwas, Ivan Illich, Amy Laura Hall, Catharine MacKinnon, John Howard Yoder, and others.
"Studying feminism," he writes, "is not easy for men because all our unexamined privilege is exposed in the process. Our little hideaways are exposed... Not only did feminism disabuse me of some of my blind spots when I was professing secular leftism after the army - a response to my shame and rage about the military - but feminism exposed me to (what for me were) new philosophical insights."
It is puzzling, even baffling, that Goff chose Catholicism as his church, one that has no firm pacifist commitment and assuredly discriminates against women. Absent an explanation, readers are left to guess why he went with Rome and not one of the Christian peace churches: Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren.
It's not as if he is blinkered to the historical and current defects of organized Catholicism. He asks, "Why has the church been consistently pulled away from the teachings and example of Christ by the world (a world constituted by male power and war)?"
Further: "What the record shows is that the church has consistently adapted its practices and pronouncements to worldly power with an eye to preserving the church's political influence and church men's prerogative. ... Whether we are looking at the Constantinian compromise or the Crusades or the witch trials or the Reformation or the wars of modernity, we will see again and again how the church has been pulled away from the Gospels by the material and cultural potency of the principalities and powers."
By chance, Borderline appeared at the same moment that American Sniper, as both book and film, was on a roll. In that story, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle simplistically equates manliness with violence, saying, "The first time you shoot someone, you get a little nervous. You think, can I really shoot this guy? Is it really okay? But after you kill your enemy, you see it's okay. You say, Great. You do it again. And again."
Well-removed from such macho mindlessness, Goff writes: "My experience of war is that war, as a practice, does not inculcate honor as often as hatred, cruelty, and the fragmentation of the soldier's personality. Bad soldiers do mot make war a bad thing. War invariably makes soldiers do bad things, and we become what we do."
Goff's prose is mostly laced with clarity, with the pages running deep with theological, political, and sociological allusions sure to reward the reader.
Why the qualifier "mostly"? At full throttle, he throws these words at us, ones sure to make us duck. Instatiation. Historicizing. Adrogynization. Technostrategic. Psychotherapeutic. Totalization. Transhistorically. Consequentialism. Fetishization.
Hard to tell where Goff learned that lingo. Not from his boot camp drill instructor, I suspect.
*
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, is the author of the new book Teaching Peace: Students Exchange Letters With Their Teacher.
Pacifism, feminism - and Catholicism
Former soldier's essays reveal a truth-seeker
Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church
by Stan Goff
Published by Cascade Books
In his pre-Christian past, which is most of his life, Stan Goff was a career soldier who stoutly carried out American foreign policy by obeying orders to inflict violence on human beings in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, and other combat zones. In two Army tours between 1970 and 1996, the San Diego native was a paratrooper who leapt from planes more than 400 times, a sniper; and a member of Airborne Ranger and Special forces groups.
In Borderline, he reports that he "terrorized and brutalized people who were weak and poor: I had burned houses, killed poor farmers' livestock, and lied on command to family, journalists, and the public... I had exploited prostituted women, who exist on the periphery of every military activity."
In his personal life, he had a failed marriage that he called "psychotic," was an alcoholic and "an irresponsible parent."
Whether by grace, or self-disgust, remorse or self-education, or a combination of these forces, he chose on Easter Sunday of 2008 to be baptized as a Christian. He was 56. Four years later, he received confirmation as a Roman Catholic. He had embraced pacifism and feminism.
Remarried, he now lives in Southeast Michigan, gardens with the Adrian Dominican Sisters on a long-term permaculture land-use project, and belongs to St. Mary of Good Counsel Parish in the Lansing diocese.
In 34 chapters and 446 pages, the essays in Borderline blend commentary, ruminations, autobiography and history - all of it scented with the humility of a truth-seeker who knows that asking questions is far easier than questioning the answers. What's in these literate pages extends Goff's thoughts found in his earlier efforts: Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (2000), Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (2004), and Sex & War (2006).
Goff offers few details on the moment of his conversion, except to acknowledge appreciatively that it was a gradual awakening induced by absorbing the ideas of Stanley Hauerwas, Ivan Illich, Amy Laura Hall, Catharine MacKinnon, John Howard Yoder, and others.
"Studying feminism," he writes, "is not easy for men because all our unexamined privilege is exposed in the process. Our little hideaways are exposed... Not only did feminism disabuse me of some of my blind spots when I was professing secular leftism after the army - a response to my shame and rage about the military - but feminism exposed me to (what for me were) new philosophical insights."
It is puzzling, even baffling, that Goff chose Catholicism as his church, one that has no firm pacifist commitment and assuredly discriminates against women. Absent an explanation, readers are left to guess why he went with Rome and not one of the Christian peace churches: Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren.
It's not as if he is blinkered to the historical and current defects of organized Catholicism. He asks, "Why has the church been consistently pulled away from the teachings and example of Christ by the world (a world constituted by male power and war)?"
Further: "What the record shows is that the church has consistently adapted its practices and pronouncements to worldly power with an eye to preserving the church's political influence and church men's prerogative. ... Whether we are looking at the Constantinian compromise or the Crusades or the witch trials or the Reformation or the wars of modernity, we will see again and again how the church has been pulled away from the Gospels by the material and cultural potency of the principalities and powers."
By chance, Borderline appeared at the same moment that American Sniper, as both book and film, was on a roll. In that story, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle simplistically equates manliness with violence, saying, "The first time you shoot someone, you get a little nervous. You think, can I really shoot this guy? Is it really okay? But after you kill your enemy, you see it's okay. You say, Great. You do it again. And again."
Well-removed from such macho mindlessness, Goff writes: "My experience of war is that war, as a practice, does not inculcate honor as often as hatred, cruelty, and the fragmentation of the soldier's personality. Bad soldiers do mot make war a bad thing. War invariably makes soldiers do bad things, and we become what we do."
Goff's prose is mostly laced with clarity, with the pages running deep with theological, political, and sociological allusions sure to reward the reader.
Why the qualifier "mostly"? At full throttle, he throws these words at us, ones sure to make us duck. Instatiation. Historicizing. Adrogynization. Technostrategic. Psychotherapeutic. Totalization. Transhistorically. Consequentialism. Fetishization.
Hard to tell where Goff learned that lingo. Not from his boot camp drill instructor, I suspect.
*
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, is the author of the new book Teaching Peace: Students Exchange Letters With Their Teacher.
May 4, 2021
A thought-provoking book..
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews