Yesterday I was interviewed by a student from St Scholastica who had an assignment to interview a spiritual leader from a different faith than your own. She identified herself as pagan. SHe was pleasant and gracious and had some questions that ran deeper than outward expressions of my faith.
To my surprise we spent two and a half hours talking together. She was raised catholic and I would say her view of following Jesus was based on individualism, religion, and morality. As we talked and I shared my journey of faith from conservative evangelical to mennonite values, I think she was surprised to see christianity centered around love, Jesus, community, and reconciliation.
I wondered after this conversation if this was the first time I had ever practiced evangelism. Evangelism is after all sharing the good news of what Jesus' life, teachings, example, death and resurrection mean for the world. It was an invigorating conversation that was not about threats of hell, or arguing smaller points of theology. It was about the story that I believe to be true, the way we are living out that story now, and how my view of how the story ends. I realized that over the past 5 years, each of these has shifted in almost a directly opposite way.
I am hoping that I can develop the kinds of friendships with folks of other faiths, or no faith, that cen lead to more of these conversations!!
Friday, April 9, 2010
Monday, December 14, 2009
A History By The People Not The Books
Recently Jin Kim from Church of All Nations presented another story of the United States History at the Ultimate Compassion Conference that was thought provoking and insightful. Here is a video by Howard Zinn who wrote a People's History of the American Empire. It is an Excellent Book.
An Incredible Artist
Through some connections through Woodland Hills podcasting I met a very gifted artist and compassionate human being. His name is Daniel, known as the island artist, and here is one of his sites...
Seeker Insensitive
Beauty is the heart of goodness and the moral life. I learned that originally from Plato and later from Iris Murdoch. I do not write about "aesthetics," but rather I try to remind us of the beauty we no longer notice because we have lost the wonder to the everyday. I have recently written a piece for the Catholic Liturgical Society, "Suffering Beauty," in which I suggest that just to the extent beauty calls us beyond ourselves we "suffer."
The Catholics had asked me to speak about liturgy as moral formation, but I thought that very way of putting the matter was a mistake. Liturgy is not something done to provide moral motivation. The liturgy is how the church worships God and how from such worship we become a people capable of being an alternative to the world. That is why the language of the liturgy is so important. Nothing betrays the love of God more than the inelegance of the language Christians use in their worship. Some Christians seem to think we can attract people back to Christianity if we try to compete with TV, but when you do that you have already lost. The only result is that Christian worship becomes as banal and ugly as the rest of our lives.
I think it would be terrific if on entering a church people would think, "This is very frightening." God, after all, is frightening. Recently, I had a debate about the interpretation of the Bible at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest. One of my graduate students, a Roman Catholic, went with me. When we entered the church where the debate was to be held, she said, "Wow, is this someone's living room?" So "fundamentalists" want to make people feel at home--a home, moreover, that looks more like the living rooms of the 1950s. It is no wonder you are tempted to put an American flag in such "sanctuaries," because at least the flag adds some color. Unfortunately, the colors, at least when they are part of the same piece of cloth, are not liturgically appropriate.
Stanley Hauerwas
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)