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Repaso: October 5, 2012

October 5, 2012 — Leave a comment

1. Thinking as Christians in an election year
Stephanie Summers and Steve Monsma write this timely essay for Q Ideas:

Great are the dangers of dishonoring our Lord and being used by political operatives more worldly wise and cynical than we are. Instead, we must practice slow politics: renewing our minds and making every thought obedient to Christ by careful study and deliberate thinking about our aims before we act. In this essay we focus on two basic, underlying, biblically grounded truths and how they lead to what we term “principled pluralism.” Together, these truths lay what we are convinced is the foundation for a thoughtful, God-honoring approach to the political realm.

2. Creating places where people can flourish
The architect David Greusel was interviewed for the Faith & Leadership blog from the Duke Divinity School:

From ballparks to churches, architecture has a significant impact on people’s lives and should therefore be about the creation of places where people can flourish, said David Greusel, an architect who specializes in the design of public buildings. Unfortunately, much architecture today, both sacred and secular, has not been about human flourishing, Greusel said. Instead, architecture in general has been about originality at the expense of tradition, while church architecture has been marked by mediocrity born of pragmatism.

3. Discipleship for faithful service in the city
David Kim of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York explores how the church can best disciple her people for faithful service in the city:

One quickly discovers that there are, in the geographic space of this one city, two realities representing two very different loves—eloquently stated by Augustine as the “City of God” and the “City of Man.” There is common grace and antithesis in New York City, and it is critical for the church in fulfilling the great commission to prepare her people to engage this fearfully and wonderfully made city. Discipleship, rooted and flowing out of the gospel of Jesus Christ, must find its mature expression in the engagement of our world, taking seriously the sin and grace that pervades every inch of our world.

4. Monkey bars of the kingdom
Kyle Bennett invites us to spend more time at the park:

Parks force us to truly interact with others in and as a community. Those we meet at the park are created in the image of God. We were created and called to interact with them and live with them. Sin doesn’t change anything in this regard. We must learn to live with them as creatures of our God, even if they are morally bankrupt individuals, incompetent parents, obnoxious neighbors, unfaithful friends, or irresponsible citizens. This can be the space for us to practice what we preach. It can be the place for testing, implementing, and applying love of our neighbor or enemy.

5. FLW and PHX in the NYT
Off and on over the past couple months, Katie and I have been doing a Frank Lloyd Wright architecture tour, checking out the many homes and other buildings he created iaround Phoenix. It all began when we learned that one of the homes he designed was in danger of demolition, and we wanted to see it while it lasted. The story got picked up by the New York Times this week:

It’s hard to say which is more startling. That a developer in Phoenix could threaten — by Thursday, no less — to knock down a 1952 house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Or that the house has until now slipped under the radar, escaping the attention of most architectural historians, even though it is one of Wright’s great works, a spiral home for his son David.

6. Skateistan
This is a fascinating nine-minute short film called Skateistan: To Live And Skate Kabul, following the lives of young skateboarders in Kabul (thanks to @talaazar for the link).

SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: The David and Gladys Wright House in Phoenix, by Scott Jarson via nytimes.com]

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Repaso: August 10, 2012

August 10, 2012 — Leave a comment


1. Vocational and cultural discipleship
Gideon Strauss has a great post at the Redeemer City to City blog about re-envisioning the meaning of work, including a reflection on the first annual Gospel & Culture Conference held late last year in New York:

Listening to Chelsea Chen perform on the organ of beautiful St. Bart’s church, and to Tim Keller and Richard Mouw outline an inspiring theology of culture, redolent with the gospel; hearing Fiona Diefenbacher’s heart break for the fashion industry, and Max Anderson offering a vision of hope for MBA programs; I thought to myself: this is the stuff of a cultural reformation. This is not just another fad, soon to blow over. This is not some utopian vision of heaven dragged down to earth by human hands, no matter the price. These people are committed to the slow, hard, nuanced work of bearing hope into every corner of their world, by living their everyday work out of motives shaped by the gospel.

2. The stewardship of transcendence
David Greusel is an architect specializing in places where people gather, including a couple of MLB stadiums. He’s also a theologically astute wordsmith. Here, he writes about architecture and art in a culture in which the church is “no longer the most important building in town”:

The big question for the church in the West is this: Can its stewardship of transcendence be recovered? To answer this question requires predictive skills that I lack. However, I can predict with confidence that the attitudes of the church toward art of the last 150 years will only drive it further from the mainstream and from the centre of cultural influence. To move back toward the centre of culture will require that we befriend (and become) museum curators, art history professors, critics, journalists, and publishers. This will require a generation of wise, spiritually grounded and theologically nimble missionaries.

3. Crossing borders within our own
In last week’s Repaso I included a post by David Kirkpatrick about seeing life through Latino eyes. Here’s a follow-up:

Few Christians would disagree with Samuel Escobar when he says, “The heart of ‘mission’ is the drive to share the good news with all, to cross every border with the gospel.” But when pressed with the need to cross ethnic borders within our own national borders, many are perplexed. They have a burden without a vision.

4. How fast is Usain Bolt?
Yes, Usain Bolt is fast. Really fast. But this video puts his speed in historical perspective, and it makes him seem even faster.

5. Guatemala wins its first Olympic medal
Guatemala won its first ever Olympic medal last Saturday, thanks to Erick Barrondo’s second place finish in the men’s 20 kilometer walk. As you can imagine, Guatemalans are pretty excited and proud. Honestly, though, I’m not sure which is bigger news — that this is Guatemala’s first medal, or that walking is an actual Olympic sport. Apparently, racewalking is quite popular in Latin America.

6. Comparing the continents
Some creative folks have created a series of infographics using the ubiquitous Olympic rings, which represent each of the world’s continents, to portray inequality of various kinds around the world. Here they are in video form:

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Andrew Rodriguez via nytimes.com]

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Repaso: “Conversionary Protestants” & democracy; Phoenix church design; giving & receiving gifts; reading dark literature; beauty in the garbage dump

July 6, 2012 — 2 Comments

1. “Conversionary Protestants” and democracy
Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom and several other books about religion in global and historical perspective, has a fascinating new blog post on the connections between missions and democracy, drawing on a scholarly article by Robert Woodberry, a sociologist at the University of Texas:

Woodberry shows a strong correlation between Protestant missionary efforts and present-day democracy, and he successfully tackles any counter-claims suggesting that other features might be at work. Democracy did not just result from (for instance) successful economic development, rich natural resources, favorable climate conditions, or the successful planting of Western legal models: missions mattered crucially. He makes a bold case, and he fully justifies it, combining historical and sociological evidence in a sophisticated way.

2. Phoenix church design
Phoenix Magazine’s July issue features an article with photos and the stories behind Phoenix’s “flotilla of funky churches and stunning sacred sites.” Katie and I stopped by one of them a few weeks ago, and I got snapped some Instagrams (here, here, and here). We also drove around the Capstone Cathedral, the first one in the article, and I can assure you it’s just as creepy in person as its history would suggest.

3. Giving and receiving gifts
John Donaghy is a lay volunteer with the Catholic diocese in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, and we recently got connected through our blogs. I’ve enjoyed reading his insights and reflections on life and ministry in Honduras, and have benefitted from his astute comments on some of my posts. This week he shared an important post about the question of well-meaning North Americans wanting to give stuff to people in communities characterized by poverty. He asks some often unasked questions and offers some solid principles based on his years of experience:

A number of people ask me what they can bring or send to help people here in Honduras? The obvious answer is money. But many people want to send something tangible. So people think of collecting stuff to send. And so the poor in Honduras are offered clothes, shoes, school supplies, hygiene products and much more. God knows how much material comes here, especially with more than 50,000 coming here on “mission” trips. But is there something wrong with this? Does this really help? Or is it just a band-aid or worse, something that has unforeseen negative consequences? Does this type of giving really keep the cycle of poverty going?

4. A Christian case for reading disturbing, dark, and secular fiction
Alan Noble writes at the Christ and Pop Culture blog that Christians have good reason to read novels by authors like J.D. Salinger (one might add Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Marquez to the list as well). I think his argument applies to reading nonfiction that tells the truth about our world’s brokenness as well:

Sometimes we have to read hard, ugly, offensive, depressing things to understand our world, and thereby love our neighbor. I’m obviously not saying that Christians need to read The Catcher in the Rye but I do think that the novel’s censors illustrate how we sometimes cut ourselves off from hard truths — truths we would ultimately agree with if we wrestled with them — by avoiding dark, depressing, or ugly works of art. Reading is hard work. It takes time, effort, and reflection. And as Christians, we have a beautiful work of art filled with hard truths, ugly scenes, offensive claims, and moments of darkness at the very center of our faith! So, can cultivating good reading habits by reading unsettling novels help us become better Bible readers? I think so.

5. Love Light and Melody
Central America blogger Mike shared a video from Love Light and Melody (founded by Dispatch band member Brad Corrigan), a nonprofit that “uses music and the arts to rebuild, restore and bring healing to communities ravaged by extreme poverty.” The group has been involved in La Chureca, the garbage dump in Managua, Nicaragua. A local pastor showed me around La Chureca during my visit to Nicaragua a couple years ago, and introduced me to some of his church members. Before and after the visit I heard a lot about Corrigan and LLM’s work. I’d encourage you to learn more here.


Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Love Light and Melody]

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Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 3/3)

October 10, 2011 — Leave a comment

In the first part of this series, I introduced Wolterstorff’s ideas about world-formative Christianity and the vision of shalom. In part two, we looked at his ideas about how responding to poverty is a matter of rights not generosity, and how unchecked nationalism destroys shalom. Here now are some final thoughts from Until Justice and Peace Embrace.

Shalom in the city
Shalom is about having and enjoying right relationships, and nowhere is the need for this seen more clearly than in our cities. Wolterstorff writes that this extends beyond the considerations we might normally consider:

It is customary to view the city simply as a large collection of buildings in close proximity to one another, each more or less self-contained and possessed of its own degree of architectural distinction. I propose… to break away from that sort of atomistic way of thinking, however, and view the city instead as an integral entity in which the individual buildings are abstracted parts. Adopting the holistic perspective, we see the city as a unit orchestrating paths and partitions to establish gathering places for human beings on a given amount of the earth’s surface.

The city both expresses and shapes the lifestyles of its residents, for better or worse. Architecture and aesthetics, in other words, aren’t neutral — not if shalom has to do with delight. “Could it be,” he muses, “that living in a city devoid of sensory delight is itself a form of poverty?”

Justice and liturgy
“Amidst its intense activism,” Wolterstorff writes, “the Western world is starved for contemplation.” He continues:

I want to explore the possibility that a rhythmic alternation of work and worship, labor and liturgy is one of the significant distinguishing features of the Christian’s way of being-in-the-world.

Work and worship are connected, he says, and they both spring from grateful hearts, in step with the six-plus-one rhythm set into motion by our Creator:

This rhythm was given to be practiced as a remembrance, as a memorial of the pattern of God’s creative activity and of the pattern of Israel’s liberating experience: the very rhythm of everyday life was to be a liturgical practice.

Activists of all kinds would do well to practice this kind of liturgy.

Theory & praxis
Wolterstorff concludes, not surprisingly given his original audience, with a challenge to academics and scholars that applies just as well to each of us:

My call here is not for theorizing that emphasizes the theme of justice; it is for theorizing that places itself in the service of the cause of struggling for justice… The goal is not to describe the world but to change it.

Wolterstorff concludes with the book’s single most poignant sentence:

By listening to the cries of the oppressed and deprived we are enabled genuinely to hear the word of the prophets — and of him who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but took the form of a servant, walking the path of humble obedience to the point of accepting execution as a despised criminal: the Prince of Shalom.

Justice and peace, you might say, find their embrace in Jesus.

What do you think of Wolterstorff’s ideas of justice and shalom? Does his understanding resonate with yours? Where do you part ways?

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