Tracking that elusive Spirit

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8; photo by byronv2/Flickr)

This Friday the NuDunker folks are hosting our second public conversation on the topic of pneumatology, which is the fancy seminary word for "talking about the Holy Spirit." You'll be able to watch the discussion live on YouTube and participate in live conversation over Twitter with the hashtag: #nudunker. If you've never done a Twitter live chat, let me know and I'll give you some direction there.

You can RSVP on Google+ if you're in that sandbox...
NuDunker discussion: Pneumatology
Friday, Feb. 8th 10am-11am CST

That event page will carry the live YouTube feed and we'll also use it in the days leading up to the discussion to post each of our preliminary blog posts. We'll also be posting those links on Twitter and Facebook all week (though Dana and I are fasting from Facebook this month, so you'll find us on our blogs, Twitter, or e-mail). If you can't make the live event, don't worry! It will be recorded on YouTube for posterity and (better) further discussion. It's our intention with these events to use social media to engage in good theologizing for the health whole church, Brethren or otherwise.

Okay, with that bit of business out of the way, the rest of my post consists of my thoughts around the Holy Spirit and how those thoughts relate to my ministerial calling, and how that messy journey has unfolded over the years...

What's a MOOC? Why philosophy?

Here we go!

This week I am starting one of those MOOCs that higher ed people have been hearing so much about over the past year - Introduction to Philosophy from The University of Edinburgh (via Coursera). For the uninitiated, MOOC stands for "Massively Open Online Course." (I pronounce it with a long "o" and a hard "c.") In the paradigm which they've been most discussed, they are free online courses offered by prestigious universities who have partnered with for-profit companies who provide the software platform through which the course is delivered. (Smaller, non-profit - and more creative - MOOCs like DS106 have been around longer.)

Enrollments run in the tens of thousands, though actual participation through the entire course usually ends up about a tenth (at best) of the initial sign-up count. These courses are college level, though they don't come with any academic credit at the end, though this could conceivably change - and already has in this case.

MOOCs have been hailed as "game changers" and "disrupters" and all sorts of other high praises and/or epithets, depending on how you feel about the state of higher education in the U.S. (existential and financial crisis) and what to do about it. Probably the most reasoned critique I've read comes from Ian Bogost, a game designer, theorist, and professor, in this piece at The Atlantic: Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online. I'm very sympathetic to Bogost's critique, but I also wanted to see what all the fuss is about. A few at EMU have expressed interest in the MOOC wave, wondering if we could somehow ride it. So as the ed-tech guy for EMU it's part of my job to figure that out. Call it R&D. But why philosophy?

Lay visitation as post-Christendom ministry

Ty Grigg, a co-pastor of Life on the Vine in suburban Chicago, has a great post up at David Fitch's blog. He asks: Do We Still Need "Home Visitations" in Post-Christendom?

He lists the following challenges to the tried and true pastoral ministry practice:

• The “parish” is more geographically unbounded
• Home is a private space
• The pastor has lost privilege of access
• In a co-pastor model, who visits who?
• We are busy
• People are shepherded through house groups and by caregivers in the church
• We pastor through Facebook

Some of these challenges are unique to their own congregation and their suburban locale, but others (busy-ness) are more generally true for Christians in the U.S., even here in rural Iowa where the pace is a bit slower and the parish is still fairly geographically bounded.

Ty says that despite these challenges, home visitations can still be a vital ministry in a post-Christendom context, and I agree. He says that a house visit...

• Is vital for paying attention to people’s lives (Acts 20:28)
• Is vital for the work of prayer
• Is vital for the work of preaching
• Is vital for leading a community
• Lays the relational groundwork helpful for future crises and celebrations
• Is vital for blessing lives in their everyday context
• Is vital for caring for lost and straying sheep

Restorative justice in a murder case

Conor McBride
(Photo by Ryan Pfluger/NYTimes)

There is an amazing story about restorative justice in a Florida murder case by Paul Tullis over at the NY Times. Read it. All of it. It's long but worthwhile:

Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?

(See also an interview w/ the family on USA Today: Parents who forgave their daughter's killer: It 'frees us')

This story was all over my peacebuilding friends' Facebook timelines this morning because of the involvement of Sujatha Baliga, a restorative justice practitioner and advocate based in California, who has some connections to EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and my RJ mentor there, Howard Zehr.

The title of the article is somewhat of a misnomer to RJ practitioners, who are always quick to point out that restorative justice does not necessarily entail the practice of forgiveness. A better title for the RJ practitioner would have replaced "forgiveness" with "restorative justice." Even still, forgiveness - including Christian forgiveness on the part of the victim's parents - does play a crucial role in this story, so let me point out a few things I noticed about that, as well as some non-theological observations about this case.

Scripture, women in ministry, and correcting problems

New Testament scholar, Ben Witherington III, has two short videos that very quickly address some scriptural interpretation issues around women in ministry, and how those "problem texts" in the New Testament have been appropriated by subsequent Christian traditions to, for instance, rule out women from ministry. Check 'em out...

Postscript to media catastrophism: Nationalism

Playing in my thinking about the media but not making it into my last post is this thesis: The U.S. media is inherently nationalistic. As such, the bounds of "we" and "they" split along the borders of this nation-state. When tragedies within these social-imaginary borders occur, it is "us" that are collectively shocked, angered, and grieved. But what of tragedies outside these borders?

Amongst American journalists, I find Glenn Greenwald to be the most fearlessly critical of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the drone warfare program that has been greatly expanded by the Obama administration. His latest piece in The Guardian is powerful...

Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?

It is powerful in not only its critique, but also its sensitivity. He rightly names the real differences between the tragedies of Newtown and the drone war. These are qualitatively different phenomenon, but our national responses (or non-responses) to them are illustrative. He particularly calls out the dehumanization of predominantly Muslim people throughout the global war on terror of the past decade, and how the dehumanization that war necessarily calls for has sedimented into the public psyche. We can now call children killed in foreign countries by U.S. ordinance "bug splat" and no one bats an eye.

Newtown and Draco: Catastrophism in the media

For the media, it's called "profit."
(Image by Dooitasheimashte via deviantART)

Last Friday when I discovered the news via Facebook status updates from friends that 20 children had been murdered in Connecticut, my blood turned to ice. I made the atypical trip to Yahoo! News and read a few AP stories about the tragedy, and checked back a few times throughout the day. That was it, and I haven't watched, listened, or read the news since.

Why? Because I knew what the news media was going to do with it: Make it into a week-long fiasco. And that's exactly what happened and indeed is still happening.

Let me reiterate: I was devastated by the news. It's truly horrible and incomprehensibly sad. All around. Full stop. But I want to suggest that "catastrophism" in the media - that is, making horrible events into massive media events - is not good for us. Like, personally and societally not good for us.

At Trojan Inn this morning in Toledo, I listened to the nice lady who gets me coffee whenever I come in (and even heats up the cold coffee mug that I carry in with me) - talk to her co-workers about  listening to the radio yesterday while preparing dinner. Whatever station she was listening to had prepared audio snippets of media interviews with the children at Sandy Hook while "Silent Night" played in the background. She confessed to breaking down in tears. I confess here that I'm sickened by such behavior in the media.