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Repaso: December 7, 2012

December 7, 2012 — Leave a comment

1. The enduring significance of Augustine
My friend Jeremy Chen tweeted a link to an exchange in Comment between David Naugle and James K.A. Smith on Augustine’s impact. Here’s Naugle:

As one of the Church’s great classics, Augustine no doubt wrote his Confessions to acknowledge his own faith in God as his chief good, and out of a need to confess his sins before Him. But I think he had other purposes in mind for this work as well. Since he believed there was something about himself as a human being and his own journey that was typical of most everyone, everywhere, he also wrote this book to assist us in our journeys toward God and genuine happiness—hopefully saving us considerable agony and disappointment—by the example of his own life. His loves and his life were disordered without God; his loves and his life were reordered in God. His example consists of an education of the heart in God, in love, and in authentic happiness. You, me, Augustine—indeed, we are here and all in this together.

2. Comment’s new editor
Speaking of James K.A. Smith and Comment, this week he was named editor of the magazine — wonderful news for readers of Smith and readers of Comment alike. In his announcement, he writes:

[C]ontinue to expect Comment to be a place where professors rub shoulders with policy makers; where scholars listen to practitioners; where Christian theology goes public. We are the magazine for those practitioners who appreciate the importance of reflection. This is a journal of ideas meant to hit the ground in policy and find expression in institutions. Above all, I want Comment to be a life-giving resource for those leaders, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and creators who are convinced of the importance of Christian cultural engagement but are now looking for in-depth guidance and direction.

3. The way of discernment
Mark Buchanan (whose book on Sabbath comes highly recommended by me) reflects in Leadership Journal on the process of discerning his call to become a pastor. That’s not what most of us are called to be and do, but his “four essentials” apply to us all:

I learned virtually everything on the job—preaching, counseling, team-building, strategizing, budgeting, vision-casting, peace-making. There was no trial run for any of this. I had to acquire every skill needed for pastoring as I went, in real time, in the public eye. Nothing was rehearsal. What’s been the one thing needed? What’s been the sine qua non, the irreplaceable necessity without which all the other skills, traits, and gifts add up to zilch? Discernment. Figuring out what to do and how to do it in any given situation.

4. Gondor needs a King
Thomas McKenzie, an Anglican man of the cloth whose pithy and entertaining One Minute Reviews are my go-to source for opinions on all the latest movies, appeals to those of us awaiting both the birth of our Savior and the release of The Hobbit (one more than the other, I hope) by connecting Gondor with Advent in this post:

Boromir didn’t want a king because he had never known a good one. He had only known self-serving rulers. But as he got to know Aragorn he came to respect him, trust him, and even love him. Perhaps we are like Boromir. Perhaps we would rather take care of ourselves because we don’t know a better alternative. But what if there is a better alternative? What if Jesus Christ is a good and loving and merciful king? That could be a king worth following, even a king worth turning over charge of our life to.

5. Phoenix street art
In an installment of Repaso about two months ago, I included a video about street art in Phoenix. Here in our neighborhood, murals are really starting to bring a lot of color to otherwise drab buildings, and it’s really cool to see. Here’s a slideshow of some of the more striking new murals around town.

6. Justice and gospel in the city
Rapper and spoken word artist Propaganda (whose record is available for free here) isn’t one to mince words. This clip from the Verge Conference might make you a bit squeamish, but it’s worth considering, especially for those of “us” drawn to serve “them” in cities.

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!

[Image credit: St. Augustine via georgetown.edu]

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Oscar Romero on the church as a people for the common good

July 19, 2012 — 1 Comment

I just finished reading Oscar Romero: Reflections on His Life and Writings (Orbis) by Marie Dennis, Renny Golden, and Scott Wright, a short biography about someone too few in North America really know.

Romero was the archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980, and was killed in a hospital chapel during mass just before breaking the bread and sharing the wine. He was assassinated for opposing unspeakable government brutality against El Salvador’s poor during the country’s civil war. He never advocated violence, and refused to demonize his opponents; he even proactively forgave his assassins.

In this book, the authors tell the story of how this reserved, quiet, respectful man became archbishop, how his words and actions became bolder along the way, and how he lives on in the hearts of the Salvadoran people.

He has become a bit of a hero among Catholics across Latin America, but I think he has much to teach all of us, Catholic and Protestant, Latin American or otherwise.

Two or three times over the years I’ve read through a collection of his sayings and prayers called The Violence of Love (available as a free ebook here). One passage in particular has really stood out to me, and I think its applicability for largely comfortable and consumeristic church-goers (which is all too many of us, all too often, if we’re honest) will be clear:

God wants to save us in a people. He does not want to save us in isolation. And so today’s church more than ever is accentuating the idea of being a people.

The church therefore experiences conflicts, because it does not want a mass, it wants a people. A mass is a heap of persons, the drowsier the better, the more compliant the better.

The church rejects communism’s slander that it is the opium of the people. It has no intention of being the people’s opium. Those that create drowsy masses are others.

The church wants to rouse men and women to the true meaning of being a people. What is a people? A people is a community of persons where all cooperate for the common good. (January 15, 1978)

Of course, there is a definite individual aspect to salvation, and before we can be reconciled to each other we must first be reconciled to God. But it seems to me that many of us who are highly concerned with being saved seldom consider what we’re saved into and what we’re saved for. I’m grateful for clues to these questions in Oscar Romero’s life and words.

A brief online biography of Oscar Romero is available here.

[About the photo: A tribute to Oscar Romero at Eliana's, a Salvadoran restaurant in our neighborhood in Phoenix where Katie and I had lunch yesterday]

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Four years in the life of NPR’s Latin America correspondent

April 3, 2012 — Leave a comment

There are a handful of podcasts I listen to, though one of my very favorites isn’t even a podcast per se. Rather, NPR allows you to subscribe to Latin America news stories — three to five minutes each,  more or less — and then listen to them without interruption. Because I don’t listen to them every day or even every week, they tend to add up, so sometimes while cleaning up the kitchen or doing something else around the apartment I’ll just listen to a string of them. Last year in Pennsylvania, when Katie and I lived 45 minutes apart, I’d often listen to these snippets on the drive back and forth between Reading and Lancaster.

And invariably I’d wonder what the life of an NPR Latin America correspondent must be like.

Then I came across Gerry Hadden’s Never The Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti (Harper), and I got my answer. Though he’s since moved to Europe and has switched over to PRI, Hadden was based in Mexico City from 2000 to 2004, covering stories for NPR in Mexico, Haiti and Central America.

First off, Hadden’s a great writer, so even if you’re not up on all the ins and outs of Latin American politics, economics and social issues, it’s lively and fast-paced and reads like a novel. Except, of course, unlike a novel it’s true. Well, most of it is anyway.

The “love” and “ghosts” in the subtitle refer to his personal life during that chapter of his life. There’s a love story woven throughout, and the house where Hadden lives — which doubles as NPR’s Mexico City bureau — is also apparently haunted by ghosts. These storylines add personal, humorous and at times downright odd aspects to the book, but that’s part of what keeps it so interesting and enjoyable.

The story begins when Hadden, who had been all set to go off and become a Buddhist monk, received a call from NPR and accepted this dream job. He arrived in Latin America the year before 9/11, and the story of how that fateful September day changed the course of events south of the border is fascinating in its own right, as it’s a story that has too seldom been told.

From covering Haiti’s tumultuous presidential elections, to interviewing some of the few coffee farmers who remain in El Salvador, to following others north, into Guatemala, through Mexico and on up across the Rio Grande, we learn that the life of an NPR correspondent is at times precarious, and certainly not nearly as glamorous as one might think while listening to the radio in the kitchen or on the freeway. But for Hadden, for a time at least, it was a dream job. And with this book, we’re given some great stories, as well as some difficult, frustrating, saddening ones. And, of course, we have the ghosts.

[Photo credit: Allianz.com]

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Miroslav Volf on public faith and the common good

March 1, 2012 — 2 Comments

The role of faith in the public square is a theme I’ve been considering a lot lately, thinking about the need for civility in place of the contentious rancor so prevalent on both sides of the aisle, even (or especially) in Christian circles. And not only civility as a sort of quiet, passive alternative to culture wars, but somehow redirecting those energies into something a little more worthwhile, like a commitment to humble service — not seeking just our own self-interest, but instead working together for the common good.

In early January I read Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Brazos), which is basically about all of those things. Byron Borger at Hearts & Minds Books named it the year’s “best book on Christian public witness,” so that alone should let you know it’s good. Its themes are so big, so timely and so well articulated, but somehow I didn’t get around to blogging about it right away. But after hearing Volf speak on Friday night in Portland, and after shaking his hand and thanking him for his talk (confession: despite immediate declarations to the contrary, I have since washed my hands), I decided it was time to say a little something about A Public Faith.

Volf introduces the book by describing the situation in which we find ourselves, religiously speaking: the world’s religions are growing, both numerically and in public impact. And unlike earlier days, religions aren’t geographically separated anymore; we’re literally each other’s neighbors. In other words, we’re living interspersed with each other, and we each have different visions of how the world should be.

In this context, we face two easy options: imposition or withdrawal. We could favor imposing one’s religion on others, or alternatively, we could settle for a thoroughly secular public square — but both would be malfunctions of faith. Volf, writing “as a Christian theologian to followers of Christ,” seeks to show us an alternative.

Unlike the five idealized Christian stances toward culture articulated by H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic Christ and Culture in 1956, the real world is simply too complicated to neatly reduce faithful Christian engagement to any one of the five. Whereas Niebuhr listed them as Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ Transforming Culture, Volf points to the real-world complexity we face:

Faith stands in opposition to some elements of culture and is detached from others. In some aspects, faith is identical with elements of culture, and it seeks to transform in diverse ways yet many more. Moreover, faith’s stance toward culture changes over time as culture changes.

See the complexity of it all?

Volf goes on to say that faith shouldn’t be idle, but active in all spheres of life, though it must not be coercive either. As Christians, he says that we can bring a unique vision of human flourishing and the common good to the public square, along with the resources to realize it. Even so, we must grant to other religious and political groups whatever rights we claim for ourselves.

“Most malfunctions of faith,” Volf says, “are rooted in a failure to love the God of love or a failure to love the neighbor.” So what does an engaged faith look like? He suggests that we must show how Christian belief actually leads to human flourishing and the common good, and that it springs from loving God and loving our neighbor. It’s not just stating our belief — that God exists, that he loves the world, that he is our hope, that he offers abundant life — but actually meaning it; that is, living what we believe, and doing what we do precisely because of what we believe:

That, I think, is today’s most fundamental challenge for theologians, priests and ministers, and Christian laypeople: to really mean that the presence and activity of the God of love, who can make us love our neighbors as ourselves, is our hope and the hope of the world — that this God is the secret of our flourishing as persons, cultures, and interdependent inhabitants of a single globe.

I know a lot of Christians who really are seeking to embody an engaged faith in the public square, and by God’s grace I really want to be one of them. But if Christians are still so widely known for being culture warriors or killjoys, I see a couple of possibilities that I think warrant honest and prayerful consideration.

Could it be that we are indeed busy seeking the common good, but doing so without bothering to mention the uniquely Christian basis for human flourishing that underpins our hope? Or could it be that for all our grand articulations about doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with our God, we’ve neglected to actually do it?

[Photo credit: BCTGM Local 167G]

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The Meaning of Marriage

January 18, 2012 — Leave a comment

On October 31, marriage was in the news: Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphreys were getting divorced. It was a sad spectacle, and though celebrity marriages aren’t exactly known for their longevity, at 72 days this one’s brevity got people talking. “I hope everyone understands this was not an easy decision,” Kardashian said in a statement. “I had hoped this marriage was forever, but sometimes things don’t work out as planned. We remain friends and wish each other the best.”

Less than a week later, surrounded by our families and many of our closest friends at a little garden oasis in North Phoenix, Katie and I made audacious promises to each other: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”

Today is day 73, and by God’s grace, we’re just getting started.

In that week between October 31 and November 6, as it happens, Timothy and Kathy Keller published their book The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Dutton). My good friend and groomsman Barnabas gave us the book as a gift.

The book is remarkable in all the ways that books on relationships and marriage so often fall flat. Tim and Kathy have no patience for clichés, but instead share their wisdom rooted in three significant things: 37 years of marriage; more than 20 years of ministry in a city (NYC) and a church (Redeemer) largely made up of single people; and last but not least, the Bible’s teachings on the meaning of marriage, and what it has to do with all of us. In the introduction, they write:

It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience. If you came from an unusually stable home, where your parents had a great marriage, that may have “made it look easy” to you, and so when you get to your own marriage you may be shocked by how much it takes to forge a lasting relationship. On the other hand, if you have experienced a bad marriage of a divorce, either as a child or an adult, your view of marriage may be overly wary and pessimistic. You may be too expectant of relationship problems and, when they appear, be too ready to say, “Yup, here it goes,” and to give up. In other words, any kind of background experience of marriage may make you ill equipped for it yourself.

That may seem like a bit of a downer, but really I think it emphasizes that none of us can assume that a good marriage just happens automatically, and neither can any of us assume that a great marriage is out of the realm of possibility. Throughout the book they show how marriage is designed to be, and indeed can be, great. As a marriage newbie, I didn’t read the book to critique it so much as to soak it in and learn from it, so I won’t dissect it point by point here. Instead, I’ll simply recommend it as what seems to me to be an honest, encouraging, well-informed and well-rounded book for all of us, single or married, old or young.

I particularly appreciated Keller’s interview about the book on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in November.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I love how he re-frames some predictable (and, yes, leading) questions from the panel, refusing to play the culture wars blame game while also challenging the nearly universal assumption that marriage is designed primarily for our own self-fulfillment. As he writes in the book, marriage is “difficult and painful — yet rewarding and wondrous.”

I’m glad I read the book so early on in marriage, and I plan to return to it again and again.

For more, check out this one-hour conversation with Tim and Kathy, as they discuss the themes of the book and tell stories from their own experience.

[Photo credit: TimothyKeller.com]

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