"I owe you..."

(Photo by Nils Geylen via Flickr)

I've had debt on the brain lately. Our only car died last week and we had to rush out and get another, financed by a loan. We just signed papers yesterday for a home loan to finance some renovations on our old house. I look regularly at our outstanding student loans from grad school, which we've been paying on for just over a year, and will be for years and years to come.

Everywhere I look, financial debt constitutes a great bit of what we have to worry about in conducting the "business" of our household. We always attempt to be wise with our use of debt; we've never gotten in over our head, we've always been able to make payments on time, even paying a number of loans off early and aggressively. My wife and I both have jobs that pay, relative to the local economy, pretty well. Lenders in the past year have commented that our credit score is quite good; it is therefore quite easy for us to obtain loans.

That it is so easy is not simply a testament to the fact that we've played by the rules, though we indeed have. But as this provocative essay by Pamela Brown argues, the rules are surreptitiously geared to privilege well-off white folks like me. Lending and tax laws have changed over the past few decades, and combined with other socioeconomic and political shifts, consumer debt (credit card and mortgage, primarily) has disproportionately and negatively affected non-whites, particularly African Americans. Sub-prime mortgages, for instance, have not only affected poor blacks but also those solidly in the middle and upper-middle class. The impact of this racially-defined collective loss of wealth could take, by one estimate cited in the essay, take two generations to recover.

Similar to the New Jim Crow, then, a kind of "debtor's prison" has enclosed a large portion of the African American populace in the U.S., under a system that is purportedly "colorblind." That notion of colorblindness is, however, a smokescreen.

Upon these innumerable bones: Historical harms and ethics

A mass grave in post-genocide Rwanda
(Photo copyright AP)

This is post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, & Brian Gumm. This post kicks off our reflections on ch. 2.

This chapter takes the form of a letter which Coles wrote to Hauerwas in July, 2006, from his mother-in-law's house in northern California. After telling Stanley a bit about the surroundings, Coles leads off his response to the essay found in the previous chapter with a rather striking image:

Have you ever read Annie Dillard's For the Time Being? She writes there in a way that repeatedly evokes the unfathomable numbers of dead humans and nonhumans in the earth underneath our feet... I'm frequently overtaken by this sensibility. By a sense of the dead everywhere around me... by a sense that responsibility travels backwards, first toward the dead - their works, their unfulfilled dreams, their memories. (31, emphasis added)

Technology and the impossibility of a "just" war

"War is hell"; Sherman torches Atlanta; painting by Mort Künstler

In his book, God and Gadgets: Following Jesus in a Technological Age, Brad Kallenberg argues that we live in an age where we (Americans) have become "Bewitched by Technopoly" (the title of his first chapter). This technopoly, or technological monopoly, on our social imagination can be seen gaining its early footholds in 19th century American history.

As a nation born out of revolutionary violence and struggling to assert itself as a sovereign nation on the world stage, military leadership of this young nation saw that things were not well with the U.S. military. Kallenberg cites military brass of the day "(p)ointing to insufficient supplies, tactical errors, and faulty arms" following the War of 1812, and their desire "to draw up a system of regulations for the uniformity of manufacturers of all arms ordnance, ordnance stores, implements, and apparatus" (quoting Merritt Roe Smith).

Philosophy, history, and the quest for understanding

In the introduction to his book, Why Study the Past?; The Quest for the Historical Church, former Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, a trained historian/historical theologian, has this to say about history and its driving impulse: "(H)istory is a set of stories we tell in order to understand better who we are and the world we're in."

For the past month I've been taking an Intro to Philosophy course in the MOOC format, run by the University of Edinburgh. In the first week, professor Dave Ward surveyed a few answers to the question, "What is philosophy?" and offered this as his own: "Philosophy is is the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things that matter most to us." He emphasized the active nature of the discipline, namely its being argumentative and dialogical, requiring the practices of listening and "the things that matter most to us" having to do with a desire for better understanding.

While these two noble scholastic traditions have developed their own sets of methodologies, starting points, and internally coherent thought systems, what seems to unite them is a search for better understanding, both of ourselves as human beings and our place in the world we inhabit and are a part of. The results of which are sets of theories about the way things are and, if there's a moral dimension to the theories, the way things ought to go.


Fellow NuDunker Josh Brockway, himself an historian-in-training, has started helping me see how my own approach to thinking about theology, history, politics, and ethics - may be influenced by another approach to working with history, that of the genealogy. "How things came to be..." is a popular refrain in the genre of genealogy. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre seems to do this in his landmark, After Virtue, where he starts with a lament on the present circumstances in moral philosophy and moral reasoning in Western societies, then proceeds to march back through history to narrate how we got here. Philosopher Charles Taylor seems to do this in his landmark tome, A Secular Age. Yet another example: Historian Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation.  (Gregory himself, in this lecture on YouTube, says his methodology is "heretical" to historians.)

To the historian, though, this approach has it backwards. Perhaps for the historian, if genealogy should be done at all (surely a point of contention), then it should be done with extreme caution and humility. Genealogy also seems to be somewhat of a boundary-crossing enterprise, which perhaps explains why other historians would label Gregory a "heretic" within his own discipline.

Perhaps because of my educational background in literature and being a life-long avid reader, I have to say that I find the genre of genealogy compelling. There is a hermeneutical dimension to it that appeals to me, in that the genealogist must take what materials they have available to them and craft a compelling narrative for how things got to be the way they are. This quest for understanding, it seems to me, puts it in league with the disciplines of history and philosophy proper.

And what of theology and its place in the work of history, philosophy, or genealogy? Given my limited theological training (yes, I have an Mdiv, and I would still say "limited"), I tend toward biblical and narrative theology, and I take those strands of theology to be derived from different disciplines than, say, systematic/doctrinal theology. The former tend to be more literary approaches to doing theology. I also gravitate toward political theology, which seems to have been derived from heavy engagement with political philosophy.  I've gravitated toward moral philosophy because I think the quest for a life well lived is a good one, and I do that as a Christian. Finally, throw in James K.A. Smith's influence on me and whatever he's shipped into my head from continental philosophers, phenomenology and all that. Oh and don't forget Hauerwas getting me turned on to Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.

So I guess what I'm saying is this: My intellectual influences are a murky, murky soup. I know just enough of any number of disciplines to be dangerous, but don't know enough about their methodologies to do any one of them legitimately. Had I gone on to PhD work in any one discipline, would I have had to renounce the legitimacy of all others?

Good thing I'm not in the academy; this stuff makes me cranky.


See also: Why Study History? on Chris Gehrz's The Pietist Schoolman blog.

Reforming Reformation: Non-coercive witness

Church ruins at Heptonstall;

photo by David Sykes via Flickr

In a review for what looks to be a fascinating book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad Gregory, reviewer Kathleen Crowther summarizes a segment of Gregory's argument:

[In the wake of "sola scriptura"], the only way Protestant groups (and Catholics) were able to command assent to their particular readings of scripture was to back them up with political force; the "magisterial" reformers and Catholics managed to do this while the "radical" reformers did not. This led to "the coercive, prosecutory, and violent actions of early modern confessional regimes" (p. 160). Where caritas had once reigned as the central virtue in European Christianity, it was replaced in the early modern period by "obedience" to both divine and secular authorities. (Inner quote is from Gregory's book.)

Looking at the index, I know that Gregory makes use of Alasdair MacIntyre's work on the loss of the virtue tradition in Western societies after the Enlightenment, so his reference to the loss of caritas caught my eye, but so did the reference to confessional coercion, even violence, by Protestants and Catholics. Radical reformers, especially the early Anabaptists, were often the target of such coercion.

Now check out this working definition of "evangelical" by John Howard Yoder from The Priestly Kingdom:

I take the term in its root meaning. One is functionally evangelical if one confesses oneself to have been commissioned by the grace of God with a message which others who have not heard it should hear. It is angellion ("news") because they will not know it unless they are told it by a message-bearer. It is good news because hearing it will be for them not alienation or compulsion, oppression or brainwashing, but liberation. Because this news is only such when received as good, it can never be communicated coercively; nor can the message-bearer ever positively be assured that it will be received. (p. 55, emphasis added in bold)

Individualism in the axial age?

Click for an awesome book symposium
at The Immanent Frame blog

Two years ago, when I started reading more "hardcore" academy nerd literature (especially philosophical writing about secularity), I was gifted to find a wonderful online resource, perfect for an almost-digital-native such as myself: The Immanent Frame blog. One of the features of this blog is that they consistently have a significant work of scholarly literature being discussed in an interdisciplinary book symposium. In fact, that was how the blog was born in 2007, with the release of philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Most recently they have been posting responses, praises, and questions related to sociologist Robert Bellah's landmark book, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. I've been reading all these posts with great interest, since there is little chance I'll read the book itself, which sits at a hefty 784 pages.

The most recent post comes from historian of religions, Wendy Doniger: Axial axioms, where she brings her specialty on religious history in India to bear on Bellah's work. In an otherwise fascinating post, I was struck by her following statement:

The new religious movements of the axial age [sometime between 600 and 400 BCE; this includes biblical Israel, see below] located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud, too, located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic — “Look to your own house”... — rather than socially oriented... This in itself was a tremendous innovation. (Emphasis mine.)

What follows is my amateurish rejoinder...

On ancient ecclesial books, Indiana Jones-style

While at Meserete Kristos College this past month in Ethiopia, we stayed in the apartment of a missionary couple from the U.S. who had spent a significant period of time at the college, the husband teaching and the wife taking care of the college library. The husband's office in the apartment then became my office during our three-week stay. Shortly after we arrived, we found something very interesting in the filing cabinet...

Silver scrolls of the Priestly Benediction

Here's a quick presentation I threw together for a May term class on the book of Jeremiah at EMS. It talks about a fairly recent (1979) archaeological discovery in burial tombs in the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem. Amidst bones and shattered pottery in the tomb's repository were found two small silver amulets, rolled up like scrolls. Inscribed on each, nearly word for word, is what is known as the Priestly Benedition, found in the Psalms but also in Numbers 6:24-26, which you'll find on slide one of the presentation:

Meeting two great Canadian thinkers

Charles Taylor, bridge-builder

Last year, through my repeated academic encounters with philosopher James K.A. Smith, biblical scholar Kavin Rowe, and sociologist James Davison Hunter, I came to know a bit of the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. It was through his notion of the "social imaginary" that my most significant academic paper was glued together. His lectures have kept me awake and my mind alert on road trips back and forth between Virginia and Iowa. Taylor does a marvelous job of narrating intellectual history in the West, which is a very important task for any academic discipline.

Another Canadian who has contributed to my academic learning these past few years is David Cayley. In my first year of grad school, while studying restorative justice, I read his excellent book, The Expanding Prison. Caley's work in that book recently helped me piece together a paper on what I see as the Anabaptist influences on what came to be known as restorative justice.

Imagine my surprise then, when I came across this excellent series of interviews from the CBC, in which David Cayley interviews Charles Taylor about his life and work. I've only listened to the first episode and I'm hooked. It's an excellent summary not only of Taylor's life and significant work, but also Western intellectual history in general. It's like a "philosophy for dummies" course for those like me with no formal philosophical training, but who find philosophy tremendously helpful in their work. Check it out:

The Malaise of Modernity

Yes and No to restorative justice as "a Mennonite Thing"

Today I had the privilege to run up to the D.C. area and back to give a quick talk on "Restorative Justice: Revisiting Punitive Interpretations of the Bible" at a conference called "Student Learning and Global Justice" co-sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and the International Justice Mission (IJM). I shared a session with Dr. Ken Turner, a professor of the Bible at Bryan College, a Southern Baptist-affiliated school in Tennessee. Given that and the crowd was largely American Evangelical college students, it was a nice change of pace from the Anabaptist crowds I run in.

It was also fun to present the paper, because it's essentially making the case that the "creation story" of the restorative justice movement, which you can find in the paper embedded below, has some distinctly Mennonite-Anabaptist qualities to it. But I'm also careful not to say that restorative justice is "a Mennonite thing." The paper is a quick weaving of storytelling and history for restorative justice, the Western criminal justice system, and the Anabaptist movement as the back-story for RJ's "creation story."

The presentation followed Dr. Turner's discussion on slavery in the Bible and how we should work with it in our engagement with Scripture, as well as how we should think about issues of modern-day slavery, particularly sex trafficking. After my paper, we opened it up for another 20 minutes to discussion and Ken and I had a great time fielding questions together. Also, to the doctoral student with whom I talked afterward, I hope you check out some of the materials in my footnotes and bibliography!

An old Brethren take on Love winning

Pastor Rob Bell
(photo by feyip, CC lic.)

Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins, has caused quite a stir in the U.S. Christian blogo/tweetosphere for the past few weeks, the stink getting so bad that even mainstream media has taken note and sales for the book have already been wildly successful (as of this moment it's #5 on all of Amazon). When the uproar over whether or not Bell is now preaching age-old heresy of universalism started, I immediately thought of an old Brethren teaching of "universal restoration," which sometimes got labeled (usually pejoratively) "universalism."

Last summer when I was working on my Brethren studies, I read quite a bit out of The Complete Writings of Alexander Mack. Mack was the first Brethren leader in central Germany in the early 18th century. He had a Reformed upbringing and was later influenced by Radical Pietism and a warm engagement with the Anabaptist-Mennonites around them. The movement that started out of that eventually resulted in the stream that I now stand in 300 years later, the Church of the Brethren.

Mack's belief in "universal restoration" held that hell is real, but punishment would not continue for all time, ultimately all are restored to God's love, but there was a sense of levels and those who went through hell "would never attain the high state of bliss possible to those who chose to follow Christ in life" (4).

This notion of levels of bliss helped hedge against laziness, I suppose, but Mack still cautioned: "(I)t is much better to practice this simple truth that one should try to become worthy in the time of grace to escape the wrath of God and the torments of hell, rather than deliberate how or when it would be possible to escape from it again... Even though this is true, it should not be preached as a gospel to the godless" (98-9, emphasis mine).  It's worth noting that recent sociological research done by Brethren scholar, Carl Bowman, has shown this early Brethren belief to have been almost completely abandoned. Anecdotally, though, there are a few young [thx, Paula!] Brethren who probably think this is worth taking seriously...

Bonhoeffer the assassin?

The face of an assassin?

Check out my theology prof, Mark Thiessen Nation, who has been hard at work with a few colleagues, debunking the myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's involvement in the plots to assassinate Hitler in WWII.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging a Myth, Recovering Costly Grace by Mark Thiessen Nation

• contrary to the prevailing assumptions, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not arrested, imprisoned or executed because of involvement in plots to kill Hitler
• it is more accurate to say that he was arrested, imprisoned and executed because of the grace-filled, costly discipleship about which he wrote and which he consistently lived from 1932 to his death on April 9, 1945

Attendance at this university lecture last Wednesday was high, and the response has been pretty positive. I've heard and read Mark's thoughts on this in a few different places so it wasn't all news to me, but it's certainly worth listening to if you're interested in Christian pacifism, theology, and history.  Sadly, I didn't get to stick around for the whole thing, as I was running out the door to my grandfather's funeral proceedings in Iowa (at which I delivered a tweaked version of my last post, a eulogy for him).

Hinduism 101

Suraya Sadeed
photo by Jon Styer

[Note: The fifth and final post in the "Religions 101" series comes from Suraya Sadeed, who wrote our post on Islam. All four of us had to read this is a chapter from Prothero's God Is Not One, so this summary is much shorter than the others. As a closing editorial note, I'm very grateful to my fellow classmates in my small group, for allowing me to make public our "insider-only" reflections on this book. Thanks!  -bg]

Hinduism started from Indus Valley as early as 2500 to 1500 B.C.E., a civilization that may have stretched from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea.    It is the third largest religion in the world with over 900 million followers.  Hindus practice  their religion in various forms, but they all believe in Brahman as the supreme force.  According to Hindu scriptures, humans are trapped in the cycle of endless death and reincarnation “samsara” and their ultimate goal is to liberate “moksha” themselves from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Hindus believe that Shiva is the creator, maintainer, and destroyer of life and everything is a constant interaction between male and female, light and dark, and hot and cold. Hinduism is a way of life that includes family, politics, art, society, and health.  The practice of yoga (literally, "discipline") is a well-known aspect of Hinduism.

Hindus belief that karma (the law of cause and effect by which each individual creates his own destiny by his/her thoughts, words and deeds) determines who that person is going to be in the next life.  Hindus are divided into four socioeconomic groups based on their occupations:  Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (nobles & warriors), Vaishyas (commoners) and Sudras (servants).   Veda (knowledge) is Hindus’ holy book.  There are four main denominations in Hinduism: Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism and Smartism.

Yoruba 101

Daryl Snider

[Note: Our fourth post in the "Religions 101" series comes from Daryl Snider. Daryl has lived in both Haiti and Brazil, where he has seen Yoruba-influenced traditions first-hand. Of reading this chapter of Prothero's book, God Is Not One, Daryl said, "I wish I had read [this chapter] 20 years ago, before I went to Haiti!" While studying at the CJP, Daryl has been blogging at singbiosis, which explores "music in peacebuilding as an agent of healing, storytelling, awareness and reconciliation." Because Daryl is not an adherent to any Yoruba tradition, he does more direct quoting of Prothero in this post, and less freestyling as an insider. He was the adventurous one. :) -bg]

Prothero asked his students to invent their own religions. One, called "Consectationism," has at its goal "to find and follow your own purpose, or 'Lex.' And its ethic is simplicity personified: pursue your own Lex, and don't hinder anyone else from pursuing theirs." This is "surprisingly close the heart of the religion of the Yoruba people," in which each of us has forgotten our destiny.

[Read on for more of Daryl's summarization of Prothero's chapter on Yoruba...]

Judaism 101

Barbie Fischer

[Note: Part three of our series - "Religions 101" - comes from Barbie Fischer. In addition to being in my small group for class, Barbie is the Development Coordinator for Global Impact, an NGO whose mission is "to assure help for the world’s most vulnerable people." Barbie is a Jewish Christian, which means she has ethnic and religious Jewish heritage in her family but is now a practicing Christian. Her Christian tradition stems from the Stone-Campbell/Restorationist movement of the 19th century. As I've stated in previous posts, this series is based on our group reading Stephen Prothero's God In Not One for class. -bg]


Story and Law
Judaism is a narrative religion focused a lot on memory. However, Judaism is not just story, but story and law. “Those who forget the law eventually forget to tell the story.” “To be a Jew is to tell and retell a story and to wrestle with its key symbols: the character of God, the people of Israel, and the vexed relationship between the two. It is a story of slavery and freedom, of exile and return.

Jews do function as an ethnicity of sorts bound together not so much by shared beliefs as by a shared community. Not all Jews believe in God as some claim Judaism merely by birth right, while others it is both by birth and belief in God, and a commitment to studying the Torah.

[Read on after the break for more on Judaism from Barbie...]

Islam 101

Suraya Sadeed
photo by Jon Styer

[Note: This second post in a "Religions 101" series appears courtesy of my gracious classmate, Suraya Sadeed, founder and executive director of Help the Afghan Children (HTAC). Suraya is an Afghan-American currently studying with me at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Read more about her work from the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Peacebuilder Magazine: Building Schools: Spreading Hope to 120,000 Afghan Children. This series of posts is inspired by our collective reading of Stephen Prothero's book, God Is Not One, so you'll find references to this sprinkled throughout. -bg]

Islam was founded by Prophet Mohammad in Arabia around AD 610.  Islam means submission to God “Allah” in Arabic.  It is a strictly monotheistic religion and the sacred scripture of Islam is the Quran (recitation).  The religious obligations of all Muslims are summed up in the Five Pillars of Islam.  The center pillar is called “Shahadah” (to believe without suspicion):  “I testify that there is no god but God, and Mohammad is the Messenger of God." Other four pillars of Islam include:

• Praying five times a day,
• Fasting for one month (Ramadan –the ninth month of the lunar calendar, observed by Muslims)
• Giving at least 2.5% of their wealth to the poor
• And, once in a lifetime, going on pilgrimage “Al-Hajj” to Mecca, the holiest city of Muslims, with the exception of poverty or physical incapacity.

[Read on after the break for more on Islam from my friend, Suraya...]

Christianity 101

For a class assignment done in small groups, I've recently been reading bits and pieces of God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter by Stephen Prothero, a religious studies professor at Boston University. The book has a long title, but the subtitle is important. It's a clue as to why I actually like this book.  Prothero, a former Christian, does a fine job of synthesizing broad theological topics and history in his accounting of Christianity, past and present. I was skeptical going into this book, but after reading his approach in the introduction and then this chapter on Christianity, Prothero is definitely somebody I could hang with. He has shaken off the myths of the Enlightenment with its fool’s quest for unbiased objectivity and rational knowing, opting instead to get into the languages and thought worlds of ancient and ever-shifting religions. Here's my favorite quote from the introduction:

"The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink - call it Godthink - has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us worldwide... The ideal of religious tolerance has morphed into the straightjacket of religious agreement." (3-4)

The assignment has been interesting because in my small group for this class there are two North American men, one of whom is an Anabaptist-derived Christian (me), one North American, Jewish Christian woman from a Stone-Campbell/Restorationist background, and an Afghan-American woman. Very interesting conversations cropping up around our reading of this book and thankfully we're taking Prothero's lead and actually paying attention to the differences. So read on after the break for my quick review of Prothero's account of Christianity and a few distillations of what makes the Christian faith tick.

[Note: Part one of a "Religions 101" series. Also, check out reflections on the book by my classmate, Nathan: God Is Not One??]

On Brethren beliefs and practices

Last summer I embarked on a long, intense directed study at EMS on Brethren beliefs and practices with Jeff Bach, who is the director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, a school affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, the tradition which raised me and in which I'm currently a licensed minister. The study was marked with personal trials for both Jeff and I and ended up lasting quite a bit longer than both of us had intended. But through the personal and academic trials came tremendous learning of my tradition, and I wouldn't trade the experience of the directed study for anything.

So after the break you'll find the long (28 pg.) paper that came out of this class which explores four theological topics with respect to the Brethren:

• Christology
• Ecclesiology (both a critique and a constructive argument)
• (Non-)Sacramental theology
• Nonconformity to the world

New background: Ephrata chapel window

Click for high-res

Despite having been Brethren all my life, I had never been to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, what I've recently been affectionately referring to as the "Anabaptist motherland of the U.S." Well, this past weekend, I finally made it up there with my family.

One of the places we stopped was the Ephrata Cloister, an 18th century monastic community that was started by Conrad Beissel, who I'll simply refer to as a Brethren mystic. He was much more than Brethren, but I'll go ahead and claim him. Just one tidbit I learned while there: We share the same birthday (March 1).

The excuse my family had for heading up to Lancaster was to finish some Brethren studies I'd been doing with Jeff Bach, the director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (and also my childhood pastor). Jeff, as it turns out, literally wrote the book on the Ephrata Cloister! Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata was published by Penn. State Press in 2006 and sits in the gift shop at Ephrata, where one guy from the tour bought a copy and sheepishly asked "Dr. Bach" if he would sign it. This gave me a chuckle, but it was super-awesome to wander around the grounds with the guy who probably knows more about Ephrata than anyone else in the world at this point.

So the new background for the blog, which I've also linked to a high-res pic in this post, is from the building called the Saal (see map), which originally served the sisters of the community. It was taken on my little rinky-dink Kodak ZI8 videocamera, which does't typically take good stills, but this one came out pretty cool. The old stock photo of mountains was slick and all, but this new background has some personal and traditional meaning. Also, the high-res pic makes a great desktop wallpaper!

Believers Church Road Trip!

Earlier this month, Aaron, my friend from seminary, and I headed out to Richmond, Indiana to Bethany Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. Bethany was hosting an event called "When Strangers are Angels" and was pulling together people from the three so-called "historic peace churches": Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren. There were numerous motivations for me wanting to make this trip, chief of which was connecting and reconnecting with some folks from my flock of believers, the Brethren.  Being one of the few Brethren in a proudly Mennonite academic institution here in the Shenandoah Valley has been by and large a wonderful, spiritually transformative experience, but there are times when I long to commune with Brethren folks.

So when I heard about this event, I cooked up a way to connect it with a seminary class called "the believers church," taught by our wonderful church history professor, Nate Yoder. The seminary also graciously helped us, financially, to get out there and back. We made contact with three scholars, one in each tradition, and secured interviews with each one while we were at the event. The following 10-minute video is the fruit of this road trip, the interviews, and reflection in the context of this class. After the break, I'll offer some further commentary...


(YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Ugm8b4UC8)