Wedding - The Christian Century

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Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully.
Wedding
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by John M. Buchanan
Can we talk about Israel?
FOR SEVERAL YEARS
tion that’s viable in the long run. I have Jewish friends who
agree. They do not approve of the settlements and understand
that every expansion makes peace more difficult. I have Jewish
friends who profoundly hope that the Israeli government will
do what’s necessary to bring about a sovereign, viable, and
secure Palestinian state.
Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman observes
that two long-term trends make it extremely urgent to find a
peaceful solution. The first trend is the increasing influence of
extremist forces within Israel that initiate violence and that
refuse to consider an independent Palestine. An example of this
is a recent attack on an Israeli military outpost by renegade
Jewish settlers whom Friedman calls “terrorists.” Another example, in the middle of the faltering peace talks, is the plan by Israeli
housing minister Uri Ariel to build 700 new housing units in territory needed for a viable Palestinian state. Israeli justice minister Tzipi Livni commented, “Minister Ariel purposefully and
intentionally did what he did to torpedo [the peace talks].”
The second trend is discontent among Palestinian youth. As
Friedman says, the young generation of Palestinians “increasingly has no faith in their parents’ negotiation with the Jews,
[they] have no desire to recognize Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ and
would rather demand the right to vote in a one-state solution.”
American Christians and churches agonizing over the situation should consider reaching out to Jewish neighbors who are
equally eager to find common ground: the end of settlement
expansion, serious negotiation about compensation for
Palestinian territory appropriated by Israel, and the status of
Jerusalem as the capital of both states. Then together they could
speak to American Jewish political lobbies that have influence
with Israeli political leadership and to American Christian political lobbies that advocate for justice for the Palestinian people.
Friedman called John Kerry’s relentless efforts to make
peace “the Lord’s work.” Wouldn’t it be something if Christian
churches, hand-in-hand with Jewish neighbors, did the Lord’s
work of peacemaking?
I met with a group of
Christian and Jewish leaders to discuss the Middle East. Jewish
participants were concerned that mainline Protestant churches
seemed unbalanced in their attitudes about Israel. Christian
participants wondered why Jews seemed consistently uncritical
of Israel. After many intense and difficult conversations, we
produced a statement. Two of the most significant understandings that we reached were:
• Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
• Christians hope and expect more from Israel than from
other countries because we value Israel’s democracy,
guarantees of civil liberties, and judicial processes.
American Christians want Israel to thrive. We also
expect more from Israel because of the substantial financial and military support that our nation provides.
I’m thinking about these statements as the Middle East peace
process collapses in spite of Secretary of State John Kerry’s herculean efforts. The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times
proposed that the United States walk away from the situation
and tell the Israelis and Palestinians to call us when they are
ready to negotiate seriously.
Is there nothing hopeful and useful that the rest of us can do?
Some support BDS—boycotts, divestment, and sanctions directed at Israel—although the only guaranteed result of that effort
is the anger and alienation of the American Jewish community
and damage to interfaith relations. As an alternative, I’ve long
believed that financial investment in the Palestinian economy is
a positive, practical, and hopeful gesture.
But here’s a third option: it’s time for mainline Protestant
churches to invite mainstream Jewish organizations to sit down
and start talking about what we can do together to support and
animate the peace process.
Here’s my argument: Israel needs to start acting as though it
really believes a two-state solution is possible and the only solu-
MINISTRY
i n t h e 21
st
century
What is pastoral ministry like these days, and how is it being shaped in new ways?
Find all of the interviews in one place.
go to christiancentury.org
3
Christian Century May 28, 2014
May 28, 2014 Vol. 131, No. 11
Editor/Publisher
John M. Buchanan
Executive Editor
David Heim
Senior Editors
Debra Bendis
Richard A. Kauffman
6
Associate Editors
Amy Frykholm
Steve Thorngate
Letters
Lent in the desert
Assistant Editor
Celeste Kennel-Shank
7
News Editor
John Dart
Experiencing prison
The Editors: The movement for reform
8
Contributing Editors
Martin E. Marty
James M. Wall
Dean Peerman
Trudy Bush
Jason Byassee
CenturyMarks
Six-word autobiographies, etc.
10
Poetry Editor
Jill Peláez Baumgaertner
Chicken keepers
Terra Brockman: Loving and eating animals
13
Editorial Assistant
Janet Potter
Listening well
Nicole Chilivis: A chaplain’s vocation
Advertising Manager
Heidi Baumgaertner
22
Art Director
Daniel C. Richardson
Why a church wedding?
B. J. Hutto: Truth telling about Christian marriage
Production Assistant
Diane Tinsley
24 Church(y) weddings
Comptroller
Maureen C. Gavin
Steve Thorngate: When worship is the main event
26 Blessings all around
Marketing Consultant
Shanley & Associates
Editors At Large
M. Craig Barnes
Ellen Charry
Lillian Daniel
Beverly R. Gaventa
Belden C. Lane
Thomas G. Long
Thomas Lynch
Kathleen Norris
Lamin Sanneh
Max L. Stackhouse
Miroslav Volf
William H. Willimon
Carol Zaleski
Katherine Willis Pershey: When my parishioner got ordained online
Walter Brueggemann
Martin B. Copenhaver
William F. Fore
L. Gregory Jones
Leo Lefebure
Robin W. Lovin
Bill McKibben
Stephanie Paulsell
Donald Shriver
Barbara Brown Taylor
Grant Wacker
Ralph C. Wood
28 Mixed and matched
Celeste Kennel-Shank: Challenges of interfaith weddings
30 Painting Pentecost
Amos Yong and Jonathan A. Anderson: The Spirit-filled art
of Sawai Chinnawong
Cover photo © Fuse
NEW S
14
IN
36
Justices bless prayer at civic meetings;
Historic Riverside Church to vote on woman as senior
minister;
Robinson, first gay Episcopal bishop, divorces his partner;
Researcher adds to evidence that ‘Jesus’s wife’ papyrus is
a forgery
22
RE VIEW
Books
Timothy Renick: Inferno, by Robert A. Ferguson
Edward J. Blum: The Age of Evangelicalism, by Steven P.
Miller
Samuel Wells: Faith in the Public Sphere, by Rowan Williams
43
Me dia
Kathryn Reklis: Right-sized stories
47
Art
Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons: Pentecost, by Giotto
di Bondone
COL UMNS
3
Editor’s Desk
10
John M. Buchanan: Can we talk about Israel?
20, 21 Living by the Word
Bradley E. Schmeling
35
Faith Matters
M. Craig Barnes: Stubborn hope
45
Church in the Making
Carol Howard Merritt: Virtual real presence
POET RY
12
13
Daniel James Sundahl: Yahweh at Mamre
Mark Goad: If you had been here, Lord
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30
LET TERS
Lent in the desert
I
appreciate many of the observations
in “An involuntary fast: Lent on a
Minnesota farm” (April 2). I resonate with Debbie Blue’s appeal to the
“good practice” of waiting that, for some,
may be enforced by a harsh climate and
its invitation to attend to and appreciate
the beauty of all seasons.
But as a resident of the Sonoran
Desert, I sometimes become defensive
when I read books and articles that intimately connect the Lenten journey to
winter’s discontents or to the hope of
springtime’s arrival. Often these writings
link the promise of resurrection with the
singing of frogs, crocuses peeking
through snow, and other early signs of
spring. Blue remarks, almost offhandedly: “The Minnesota winter provides us
with Extreme Lenten Practice. I am
thinking we should invite people from
Florida up here to intensify their Lenten
experience.”
Actually, wasn’t it Jesus who went
into the desert to confront the demons?
It was an unseasonably mild winter
in the Southwest. It was the first winter
since our arrival that none of our plants
died and no frost injured our citrus
trees. Some say that means that the
desert will heat up faster this summer
and that by July it will become hotter
than hell. Since hell has become a
metaphor for the kind of climate or
condition that most of us try to avoid,
perhaps we should invite people from
S A V E
T H E
the north down here to intensify their
experience?
Jane E. Davis
Scottsdale, Ariz.
Rule breakers . . .
Life before death . . .
I
’m disturbed by some of Matt Fitzgerald’s assumptions (“Thunderous
yes,” April 2). He portrays those who live
outside the church as either nihilists
(such as Nils in his account) or materialists (Steven)—apparently the only two
options for those who are “going to the
grave.”
The reality is that we all go to the
grave. I will die. You will die. Fitzgerald
will die. The question the church raises is
“What comes after death?” However, an
eternal existence after death does not
mean we can live easy now.
Fitzgerald proposes that those who
worship on Easter are looking for the
resurrection, and the church’s message
should be about how it can change them.
The good news of Easter is that the spirit of Jesus is alive in us, and his spirit provides us with the passion, zeal, and
courage to carry on his work in this life.
We are the embodied resurrection of
Jesus. He is risen in us. His work goes on
through us. Like Jesus, we must become
troublemakers, revolutionaries, and
seekers of change in an individualistic,
materialistic, and militaristic culture. This
S
ince Amy Frykholm broached the
idea of a possible schism in the
United Methodist Church (“A time to
split?” April 16), centered primarily on
“religious rules” being broken regarding
the issue of same-sex marriage, it would
be reasonable to consider going back to
the early beginnings of Christianity.
The early disciples still valued the core
teachings of Judaism since Jesus himself
was a practicing Jew. They were not yet
called Christians. But through the intervening years, following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (from about 80 CE to the
beginning of the next century), the disciples became increasingly gentile in membership and character and began disregarding
the religious requirements of Judaism,
most notably circumcision. Eventually, this
disregard of a central Jewish teaching
became so pervasive that a total separation
from Judaism finally occurred, giving birth
to a new and different religion known ever
since as Christianity. It would be interesting to see what serious implications this
historic fact would have in the ongoing
saga of the UMC’s divisive disagreements.
B. B. Mequi
Killeen, Tex.
LECTURE: THURSDAY
NOVEMBER 6, 2014
7 P.M.
D A T E
CHRISTIAN CENTURY LECTURE AND WORKSHOP
“JESUS IN JEWISH CONTEXT”
FEATURING AMY- JILL LEVINE
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT AND JEWISH STUDIES AT VANDERBILT
COSPONSORED WITH THE JEWISH FEDERATION OF CHICAGO
is the alternative to nihilism, materialism, and easy living.
Kurt Struckmeyer
Farmington Hills, Mich.
6
WORKSHOP: FRIDAY,
NOVEMBER 7, 2014
9 A.M. TO NOON
May 28, 2014
Experiencing prison
L
ast year a man recently released from prison went to the home of
Colorado corrections chief Tom Clements and shot him to death. The
prisoner, Evan Ebel, had served five and a half years of his six-year
sentence in solitary confinement. Ironically, Clements had been an advocate
for prison reform and especially for reducing the use of solitary confinement.
Though one might imagine that Ebel’s action would have terrified citizens
and prompted calls for longer prison sentences and tougher probation laws,
Clements’s reform work received greater attention. In April, the Colorado
legislature passed a law that prohibit prisons from placing prisoners with serious mental illness in solitary confinement and stops prisons from releasing
inmates directly from solitary confinement to the outside world. Other states
have passed or are considering similar legislation.
The use of solitary confinement—or “administrative segregation”—has
been on the rise for several decades, as has the prison population. Under such
measures, prisoners are typically held in single cells, without human contact,
for 22 to 23 hours a day.
To better understand solitary confinement, Clements’s successor at the
Colorado Department of Corrections, Rick Raemisch, spent 20 hours in a 7by-13-foot cell. Even during that short time, he wrote in the New York Times,
his mind was battered. “I felt as if I’d been there for days.” He reported that
he struggled to keep his sanity. “I’m confident that it would be a battle I would
lose.”
Changing the use of solitary confinement is just one of the reforms needed
in the prison system, according to Robert Ferguson in his book Inferno
(reviewed on p. 36). The National Research Institute recently released a
report detailing the nation’s high rates of incarceration. One in 100 adults is in
prison or in jail—at least five times as many as in any other Western democracy. The nation spends 400 percent more on corrections now than it did in
1980. It is mostly African Americans and Hispanics who have paid the social,
familial, and personal costs associated with this focus on incarceration. The
number of people in prison who are mentally ill may be as high as one in two.
Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), Dick Durbin
(D., Ill.), and Rand Paul (R., Ky.) have
introduced legislation with bipartisan support to begin dismantling mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses (a leading cause of incarceration) and
changing the disparity between laws for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
This legislation passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January and is now
awaiting hearing by the Senate; a similar House bill has been referred to committee. While legislative action may be slow in coming, a new political consensus is emerging that recognizes massive incarceration as unsustainable morally and financially.
Rick Raemisch’s actions in Colorado demonstrate one way the movement
for reform begins—by reforming our own indifference to the experience of
prisoners.
Massive incarceration is unsustainable—
morally and financially.
7
GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter spent 19 years in
prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Last month Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who
released Carter from prison 28 years ago,
was surprised to get a call from Carter. “I
want yours to be the last voice I hear
before I pass away, because you were the
one who gave my life back to me. I love
you, man.” They both had a cry. Several
days later Carter died from cancer. Every
year Carter had called Judge Sarokin on
the anniversary of his release. Carter,
who gained fame as a boxer, was never
bitter about his incarceration and was
positive to the end, said Judge Sarokin. “I
was honored to know him and be his
friend” (Huffington Post, April 23).
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: In her
CHRISTIAN KINDNESS: Desiderius
Erasmus, the Catholic reformer and
humanist known for his work on the
New Testament, wrote commentaries
on 11 Psalms. In a study of Psalm 38,
he offered a long litany of the failings
© DANNY SHANAHAN / THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION / WWW.CARTOONBANK.COM
controversial account of the trial of
Nazi executioner Adolf Eichmann,
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt
told the story of Anton Schmid, who
was in charge of a German patrol in
Lithuania. His job was to find and
return stray German soldiers. Secretly,
he befriended Jewish members of the
underground and helped Jews escape
the Nazis. After a year of his clandestine
activity, he was caught and executed.
Arendt said, “How utterly different
everything would be today . . . if only
more such stories could be told”
(Humanities, March/April).
of the church and its theologians. He
added these pastoral words: “It is a
mark of Christian kindness not to
make rash judgments and to forgive
human error in others, while not forgetting one’s own weaknesses; to put a
favorable interpretation on anything
which has been ambiguously expressed
and to express sincere approval of
things which have been well said”
(Howard Louthan, in Church History,
March).
JUST WARS? Self-justification is the
most basic of human instincts, argues
Ted Peters. We want to draw a line
between good and evil and put ourselves on the side of good. What is true
for individuals is also true of groups,
nations included. A country cannot go
to war against an enemy without identifying itself with good and the enemy as
evil. An American marine in the Iraq
war was asked if he had any difficulty
with killing. “No, I don’t have a problem
shootin’ shitheads,” he replied.
Appealing to God to justify war is the
strongest form of self-justification, says
Peters (Dialog, Spring).
JUST ENOUGH: Marilyn McEntyre
was at first wary when congregants were
asked in a worship service to “write
your spiritual autobiography in six
words.” Then these words came to her:
“Eat the manna. More will come.” To
McEntyre this was an expression of her
ongoing anxieties about “saving and
spending, keeping and letting go, prudent stewardship and the practice of
generosity.” Her six-word autobiography reminded her of the way her mother lived—not far from poverty yet “rich
in trust and stories about just the right
amount of food, money, help showing
8
up just when it was needed” (What’s in
a Phrase? Eerdmans).
THE STUDY OF LIFE: Universities
have given up their primary role of asking about the meaning of life, says
Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at
Yale. Students are left on their own to
choose the “end” of their lives, and they
do that like we choose consumer
goods—it’s a matter of preference. “The
Christian faith can help universities
build robust humanities programs in
which the question of life worth living
figures prominently,” says Volf. “This
may in fact be the most important contribution that the Christian faith has to
make to the flourishing of universities.”
Volf is co-teaching a course at Yale
called “Life Worth Living” (ABC
Religion and Ethics, April 30).
TOP 100: Barbara Brown Taylor, a
CENTURY editor at large, has been chosen by Time magazine as one of its 100
most influential people. “Few souls are
as synched to the world’s mysteries as
Barbara Brown Taylor’s,” writes Time
correspondent Elizabeth Dias. Taylor’s
latest book, Learning to Walk in the
Dark, was featured in the cover story for
Time’s April 28 issue. This year’s list of
influential people included 41 women, a
record number (Time, May 5).
BUT IS SHE RUNNING? Despite the
fact that Hillary Clinton has not declared herself as a candidate for president, a Faith Voters for Hillary website
has been launched on her behalf. The
group behind the website is in the
process of filing to become a PAC (political action committee). “The teachings of
her faith, the principles of the Methodist
church, and the examples of her family
have been the guiding light throughout
her life,” the website says. Clinton
recently spoke at the United Methodist
Women Assembly meeting in Louisville
(Washington Post, April 25).
“
Race matters because of the slights, the snickers,
the silent judgments that reinforce that most
crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’
”
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissenting from
the Supreme Court ruling upholding Michigan’s constitutional
amendment proscribing race as a consideration in public university admissions (Washington Post, April 22)
“
We hyperventilate about [racism], yet somehow
manage not to be overly concerned as black boys
are funneled into prison, brown ones are required to
show their papers, voting rights are interdicted,
Fourth Amendment rights are abrogated, and some
guy has his job application round-filed when
the hiring woman sees that his name is Malik.
”
— Columnist Leonard Pitts, commenting on Cliven Bundy’s and
Donald Sterling’s recent racist comments, which were widely condemned (Miami Times, April 28)
Obama. In his speech Dobson referred to
the president several times as the “abortion president.” Hahn said, “Dobson just
blew a hole into this idea of being a nonpartisan National Day of Prayer. It was
very disturbing to me.” She is cochair of
the weekly congressional prayer breakfast (dailykos.com, May 2).
NO COMMENT DEPARTMENT:
Annette Bosworth is running in the
Republican primary in the race to fill the
seat of Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.), who
is retiring. She posted the following on
Facebook: “The food stamp program is
administered by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. They proudly report that
they distribute free meals and food
stamps to over 46 million people on an
annual basis. Meanwhile, the National
Park Service, run by the U.S. Department
of the Interior, asks us ‘please do not feed
the animals.’ Their stated reason for this
policy being that . . . the animals will grow
dependent on the handouts, and then
they will never learn to take care of
themselves. This concludes today’s lesson.
Any questions?” (Raw Story, April 30).
POST-RACIAL GENERATION?
An MTV survey of youth and young
adults, ages 14–24, on racial attitudes
SOURCE: CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (APRIL 30)
75%
73%
66% 64%
58%
64%
WHITES
NONWHITES
65%
63%
52%
61%
58%
51%
54%
33%
ENOUGH ALREADY: Congresswoman
Janice Hahn of California stormed out of
a National Day of Prayer event, saying
she couldn’t stand to hear James Dobson,
former head of Focus on the Family,
engage in a rant against President
Having a black
Don’t see racial
president
minorities any
demonstrates
differently than
they see white minorities have the
same opportunities
people
as whites
9
My own race
is well
represented
in the media
Racial minorities
use racism as
an excuse
more than
they should
Racism will be
It is never fair to Racism is more
give preferential of a problem for less of a problem
treatment to one other generations when my generation moves into
race over another,
than for my
leadership roles
regardless of hisgeneration
torical inequities
Lo v i n g a n d ea t i n g a n i m a ls
Chicken keepers
by Terra Brockman
ON A SUNNY winter day I visited
the Academy for Global Citizenship, a
public charter school on the southwest
side of Chicago. The school emphasizes
sustainability and experiential education,
which includes having the students feed
and water the school yard chickens, clean
their coop, and collect their eggs. As I
approached the coop, a half dozen kindergartners crowded around to introduce me
to Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles. Like the
students, the school’s resident hens were a
diverse trio, one gold-speckled brown, one
glistening iridescent black, and one fluffy
white. But all had the glittering eyes and
brilliant red combs of healthy hens, and
they clucked conversationally with each
other, as contented hens do.
The children chattered away alongside the hens, comfortable with them yet
respectful of their space—neither cuddling them as if they were pets nor keeping a wary distance as they would with
wild animals. When recess was over I followed the children as they scampered to
line up at the school door. I had come to
join them for their afternoon class, a
review of everything they had learned in
their unit on chickens.
Having grown up in the fourth of five
generations of a central Illinois farm family, I have a more than passing familiarity
with chickens. Some of my earliest memories are of gathering still-warm eggs from
the nesting boxes in my grandparents’
chicken coop. But these days I’ve become
interested in urban chicken keeping—and
in the notion of “keepers” in general.
Keep has echoed in my mind ever
since I heard Wendell Berry say that
there’s really only one commandment
concerning the creation: keep it. The
phrase appears early in Genesis, when
God put man “in the garden of Eden to
till it and keep it.” Investigating further, I
found that the English verbs till and keep
come from the Hebrew words abad and
shamar. These are not arcane or abstruse
terms but wonderfully straightforward
words describing everyday activities.
Abad is the root of words related to
work, service, or serving. Shamar means
to preserve and protect—to keep.
Suddenly I understood why a soccer
goalie is also a keeper, and why the inner
region of a castle, the most secure area, is
a keep. Echoes of the gentle benediction
that ends the church service, “The Lord
bless you and keep you,” sent me to my
computer, where I again found the word
Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles might be
good teachers, I thought, because as the
children intuitively knew, hens occupy a
distinct space between pets and wildlife.
We love pets like family members. We
admire wildlife for its beautiful otherness.
But chickens? They do not fit into either
of the animal categories to which we are
most accustomed, and so they force us out
of our comfortable, binary ways of thinking. They are neither completely wild nor
fully tame. Rather they are the domesticated descendants of wild jungle fowl,
prized by many cultures for their powers
of divination. Because they represent the
liminal, they might be a means by which
After I gathered the eggs, my grandmother
would ask, “Did you thank the hens?”
shamar and learned that the benediction
comes from the priestly blessing that the
descendants of Aaron were to pronounce over the people of Israel. I heard
shamar reverberating back thousands of
years, back before Christianity, even
before Aaron. And I heard it ricocheting
right up to the present day, bouncing
around the playground at the Academy
for Global Citizenship. As I began to
fully appreciate the resonance of “to
keep,” even the mundane word and work
of housekeeping began to take on a reverent glow.
But what about our collective home,
our blue marble spinning in space? How
do we keep it, preserve and protect it? It
seemed that by investigating how urban
chicken keepers relate to their chickens,
and how keeping chickens situates
humans in the larger ecosystem, I might
be able to explore that question.
10
we can better understand the contradictions and complexities of the relationships
between us and our fellow humans, our
fellow creatures, and our common world.
A
nd so I found myself sitting in a
pint-sized chair in a colorful classroom, curious to see how city kids
keeping a few chickens might illuminate
the question of our mandate “to keep” the
creation. The teacher calmed the kids
down and then started a PowerPoint presentation to review the parts of a chicken,
eliciting exclamations of “Wing!” “Beak!”
“Comb!” and “Feathers!”
Then the teacher asked, “What are the
five things the animals who live with us
need?” Hands shot up around the room.
“Food!” was the first answer, followed
quickly by “Water!” Then the teacher and
students discussed shelter and how animals needed sun and air to be healthy,
Photo by Terra Brockman
but also protection from the sun on hot
days and from wind, rain, and snow.
I was intimately familiar with animals’
food, water, and shelter needs, since I’d
grown up on a farm and had done chores
every morning and evening. Even on the
coldest, darkest winter mornings, I lugged
two sloshing five-gallon pails of water to
my cow, Frosty, and made sure she had
enough hay before I ran down the lane to
catch the school bus. Each of my five siblings did the same, looking after the food,
water, and shelter needs of their sheep,
chickens, goats, rabbits, cows, and pony.
As far as I was concerned, food, water,
and shelter covered basic animal needs.
But in the classroom more hands were up,
waving the bodies attached to them and
vying for attention. “Friends!” shouted
one student. The teacher nodded as she
clicked to a photo of a flock of chickens in
a green pasture: “And what else?”
“Love!” shouted three or four kids in
unison, putting their arms around themselves and rocking back and forth in
what was apparently the school’s sign
language for love.
Love was not an animal need I would
have thought to articulate. But as I
reflected on the summers spent on my
grandparents’ farm, love was certainly
present, as were “friends” in the large
flock of laying hens. Sometimes a flock of
young males shared the chicken yard as
well—fryers that would end up one
Sunday afternoon as the crispiest fried
chicken on the planet, a fact that compli-
cated but did not contradict the love that
was showered upon all the chickens and
other animals that my grandparents kept.
On that central Illinois farm where my
father and grandfather were born, taking
care of the hens and gathering their eggs
each day was not so much a chore as a mission. Each day eggs appeared in the strawfilled nesting boxes, their size and shape
perfect for a child’s hand to cradle. I’d
return to the house and show the basket to
Grandma. She would oohh and aahh over
it, then ask, “Did you thank the hens?” If I
forgot, she had me go back out and do it.
A
habit of gratitude becomes second nature when you grow up
with a grandmother who insists
that you thank the hens every time you
gather their eggs. Even now, 50 years
later, this question echoes in my mind
every time I eat an egg. And whether I
do it out loud or internally, I always
thank the hens.
The hens on that farm had all five of
the things the children identified: food,
water, shelter, friends, and love. Yet none
had names like Daisy, Buttercup, or
Puddles; in fact, none of them had names.
Perhaps it was because when their egglaying days were over, all their days were
over. I’m not sure what end-of-life issues
the hens and children at the Academy for
Global Citizenship will face, but on the
farm the end came swiftly, and then
Grandma’s hens were transformed into
the most delicious and velvety chicken
11
soup, with the rich, golden flavors that
come only with a long and happy life.
That is certainly an odd notion—to
love a creature and then to eat it. But the
oddness, or outright discomfort, is a surface dissonance—one that can disguise
the deep harmonies beneath. That dissonance may arise from simple, binary thinking (pets vs. wildlife; life vs. death) and
from a reluctance to embrace complexity
and ambiguity. But beyond the dissonance
is the deep harmony of how things work in
this world, with plants dying to feed animals and animals dying to feed plants.
Native Americans understood these
necessary interdependencies and felt
their weight. They apologized when taking any living thing for food, whether it
was a berry, fruit, root, green, or animal.
They did not make a distinction between
plant harvesting and animal harvesting.
In either case they recognized that they
were taking life to sustain life. At the
same time, they acknowledged that one
day it would be their turn to return to
the earth to feed plants and animals,
including other humans.
It has taken scientists quite a while,
but some have come to a point of view
similar to that of the Native Americans
(see Michael Pollan’s “The Intelligent
Terra Brockman is the author of The Seasons on
Henry’s Farm. A version of this essay will be
included in a forthcoming book, City Creatures:
Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness
(University of Chicago Press).
Plant,” the New Yorker, December 23,
2013). It turns out that plants interact
with and react to their environment and
can be shown to have a desire for life
similar to an animal’s. Pulling up a beet
or carrot brings death as certainly as
bringing down the hatchet on the neck of
an old hen. And from chemical signals
that plants emit, we can conclude that
they do not want to be sliced, diced,
sautéed, and eaten any more than a
chicken does.
But this is not a reason to despair or
to stop eating. Rather, it’s a reason to
fully embrace the cycles of life, from living soil to living soil, in the humble
awareness that our lives are dependent
upon the deaths of plants and of animals
and that our own death will contribute to
greater plant and animal life (if allowed
to return to earth without the poisons of
embalming). We are part of a world
where everything eats everything, and
we need to recognize that this is, as the
Creator proclaimed, “good.” It is also
good to acknowledge and accept that we
humans are temporary manifestations,
way stations between soil and soil.
Along the way, we have those clearly
articulated responsibilities of abad and
shamar, to work and serve and preserve
and protect the creation. On the one
hand, this is simple (food, water, shelter,
friends, love), and on the other hand, it is
not. Anyone who keeps chickens enters a
world of complex interconnections and
messy contradictions, facing the problems of chicken sex, of poop on eggs, of
predators—sometimes including your
own lovable yet murderous pooch—and
difficult end-of-productive-life issues.
Dealing with these matters is not easy,
but when we do, we are more intimately
connected to our food, to each other, and
to the world we all share.
Yet many of us, while hyperconnected
to our digital devices, are completely disconnected from the natural world and
from the sources of our sustenance. This
has led to a sort of collective eating disorder, which has in turn led to a disordered
relationship with our responsibilities
regarding the creation.
The vast majority of eggs, for example,
come from chickens given food, water, and
shelter but no respect, gratitude, or love.
Certainly no one thanks the modern battery hens, whose eggs roll off onto a conveyor belt as soon as they are laid. During
my confirmation in the Lutheran church, I
was told not just that there is sin, but that
there are two kinds—sins of omission and
sins of commission. With an inward groan
I realized that in most situations in life I
was pretty much damned if I did and
damned if I didn’t. It’s true that we who
Yahweh at Mamre
We take turns monitoring the storm’s approach;
I’ve rolled the awnings, taken laundry from the lines.
Dull strips of cloud stretch from the west;
Wind-prodded, trees wake from an afternoon’s listlessness.
My wife completes one last stitch from her sewing.
In the lull, I read from Genesis: Yahweh.
Fed and rested in the shade of a terebinth tree,
Walks toward Sodom and Gomorrah, cities of the plains.
Their contempt, we can be sure, is unforgiven.
We know by instinct not to meddle with such intimacy.
The tornado sirens sound; all over town, citizens
Descend to their basements. The temperature drops.
Wind and rain begin their agony; divine demonstrations.
My wife kisses me, covered with the cinders of Lot’s hope.
Daniel James Sundahl
12
eat eggs from industrial sources are guilty
of both. We are party to the sins of commission: the debeaking of the baby chicks
immediately after hatching, their close
confinement with thousands of other hens
without room to stretch their legs or flap
their wings, the whole life of the bird lived
without sunlight, green grass, or fresh air,
without the ability to chase a cricket. But
on top of all that is the sin of omission: no
one ever thanks these long-suffering hens
for their eggs.
T
he notion that keeping chickens
might help recenter and reorder
our lives and relationships led me
not only to the kids at the Academy for
Global Citizenship, but to Mike, who
keeps Henrietta Thoreau and three of
her friends in his backyard in a central
Illinois city (nameless because the town
ordinance prohibits chickens). “I’m curious,” I said to Mike, “How do you relate
to your hens?”
“Well, when I come home, I get a glass
of wine and go into the yard to watch my
chickens. They’re entertaining, and they
chill me out,” says Mike. “But they’re not
too bright. They’re interested in you
because you are where their food comes
from. They don’t realize that the situation is reciprocated: they are where our
food comes from,” he chuckled, collecting three warm brown eggs.
Eating one of those eggs, or any egg,
in gratitude and in full awareness that it
is a chicken embryo, is a kind of sacrament, a humble thanksgiving. With every
bite we can recognize the reciprocity, the
inherent interconnectivity and interdependence that sustains us all. And we can
begin to live in the mystery of a world in
which life begets life, acknowledging that
death is always part of the circle of life.
It’s breakfast, and it’s also an unborn
chicken, and that’s not only OK but
good, because it’s how the world works.
By keeping chickens or tending a fruit
tree, a raspberry bush, or a garden, we are
obeying the command to keep the earth.
We can also practice shamar by supporting farmers who tend their plants and animals in a way that respects, preserves, and
protects a piece of the creation—an idea
that had not occurred to me before I met
Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles. And so I
thanked the hens once again.
A c h a p l a i n ’s vo ca t i o n
Listening well
by Nicole Chilivis
WHEN I FIRST stepped into the
world of chaplaincy as a student in clinical
pastoral education, I was miffed by all the
talk of “listening presence.” Was I merely
a listener? Was I to do nothing different
from what I did as a 15-year-old candy
striper—listen to patients’ stories?
After two decades working as a counselor and a hospital chaplain, I now
understand the tremendous skill required
to listen actively and reflectively. I understand that listening well creates a space in
which a truth can be spoken. I now am
comfortable spending my days saying relatively little, because words often serve to
crowd out the space for deep reflection.
A skilled listener can help people tap
into their own wisdom. The wife of a
dying man, facing end-of-life decisions—
“Are you ready to make him a DNR?”—
may need something besides advice; she
needs help in finding what is in her heart.
Several years of seeing a spiritual
director myself gave me an insight: all of
us have sundry, even contradictory parts
that make us complex people. When my
director compassionately listened and
waited for me to speak, unfamiliar dimensions of myself made an appearance. I
encountered parts of myself that I had
spent years hiding, without being aware of
it. I learned to talk to and relate gently to
the images that showed up in my dreams.
Our time together was spacious because
the director listened without judgment.
The spiritual director’s work is to help
another human feel received and accepted “without judgment or distortion, subtraction or addition,” says Richard Rohr
in Falling Upward. “Such perfect receiving is what transforms us. Being totally
Nicole Chilivis is a minister in the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) and a chaplain in Seattle.
received as we truly are is what we wait
and long for all of our lives.” A mysterious power is often felt in moments of listening. Something shifts. When a human
being looks into another’s eyes, accepting even the broken or unsavory parts, it
evokes a deep and abiding hope.
A spiritual director, much like a chaplain, is skilled at knowing when to turn the
heat up or down or leave it where it is. The
skill is born out of curiosity, experience,
education, compassion, and trust in the
power of listening. The shy parts of the soul
may be invited to speak in a way that
begins to heal a deep wound, alleviate a
depression, or change the course of a life.
Few things are more precious and valuable
than the presence of another person who is
willing to bear witness, to look at another’s
life or death with eyes unaverted.
W
hen someone asks me what I do
as a chaplain, I still occasionally
find myself offering a list of
activities. “I administer the sacraments,” I’ll
say. “I anoint dying patients and hold prayer
vigils at their bedside with family members.
I teach grief and meditation groups.” The
notion lingers that listening compassionately isn’t enough of a job description.
Yet listening itself has a sacramental
dimension. When a family gathers around
a deceased loved one, the hospital bed
becomes a sort of communion table.
Around the bed may be a weeping daughter, two ex-husbands, a current partner,
two sons who haven’t spoken in years, an
estranged sister, and a doting brother.
When I enter the room, I instantly feel
that I am in a sacred space. We form a circle, and we pray. I say something as simple
as, “Tell me about her,” and the stories
begin to flow, followed by the laughter and
the tears. Held by love, people suspend
their judgments and hurt feelings, if just
for the moment. Such moments can be the
beginning of a deeper kind of healing.
Sacramental listening reminds us that
current suffering isn’t the end of the story.
God loves us deeply, and the vision for the
future is vaster and more magnificent
than we could ever imagine. In these
moments of profound human presence,
we are awakened to the divine presence
and see that the kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here.
If you had been here, Lord
Back a week from the grave. He pecks at the food
his sisters set before him. He is afraid to sleep. He imagines
the eyes of everyone upon him but they are careful not to stare,
a meaningless courtesy: the midday sun consumes both sight and soul.
His funeral shroud is unburnt—he won’t allow it—but his sisters
refuse to permit its being brought into the house. Sometimes
they catch him holding it to his face and weeping into it. It smells
so foully that not even the crows will approach it. He rarely speaks
but sometimes talks of going away. It is almost, to their shame,
to be wished for.
Mark Goad
13
Sources include:
Religion News Service (RNS)
USA Today, other newspapers
Associated Baptist Press (ABP)
denominational news services
Justices bless prayer at civic meetings
T
he Supreme Court has declared
that the Constitution not only
allows for prayer at government
meetings, but allows sectarian prayer.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice
Anthony Kennedy held that the town of
Greece, New York, did not violate the
Constitution’s Establishment Clause—
which forbids the government from
endorsing a religion—by sponsoring
clergy who delivered sectarian prayers.
“To hold that invocations must be
nonsectarian would force the legislatures
sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and
censors of religious speech,” Kennedy
wrote May 5 for himself and the conservatives on the court.
Lawmakers and judges would otherwise
have to police prayer, he wrote, involving
“government in religious matters to a far
greater degree than is the case under the
town’s current practice of neither editing
nor approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the
dissent, called the decision out of sync
with American society. One First Amendment legal expert called it a “bad decision” that could lead to marginalizing followers of minority religions in their own
hometowns.
Not surprisingly, the victory for the
town of Greece buoyed Christian conservatives and others who feel that religious expression has been overly curtailed in public settings.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision is a
great victory for religious liberty,” said
Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel of
the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
“Prayers like these have been taking
place in our nation’s legislatures for over
200 years,” he said. “They showcase our
nation’s religious diversity, highlight the
fact that religion is a fundamental aspect
of human culture, and reinforce the
founding idea that our rights come from
the Creator—not the legislature.”
Family Research Council president
Tony Perkins cheered the decision, saying, “The court has rejected the idea that
as citizens we must check our faith at the
entrance to the public square.”
The decision disappointed the Jewish
and atheist women who filed suit against
the town and their supporters. They had
contended that prayers at the town council’s meetings—many of which invoked
Jesus and the Holy Spirit—excluded
non-Christians.
They argued that many who came to
petition the council either had to go
along with the prayers and bow their
heads in seeming agreement or present
themselves as visitors in opposition to
the clergy and the government officials
who had invited them.
E
dwina Rogers, executive director of
the Secular Coalition for America,
said it was very disappointing that the
court “chose to ignore the very blatant
burden sectarian prayer imposes on the
conscience of citizens with diverse religious beliefs and those without religious
beliefs.”
Kagan spelled it out in her dissent: “No
one can fairly read the prayers from
Greece’s town meetings as anything other
than explicitly Christian—constantly and
exclusively so. The prayers betray no
understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich
mosaic of religious faiths.”
Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU
Program on Freedom of Religion and
Belief, said, “We are disappointed by
today’s decision. Official religious favoritism should be off-limits under the
14
Constitution. Town-sponsored sectarian
prayer violates the basic rule requiring
the government to stay neutral on matters of faith.”
Ira Lupu, a law professor emeritus at
George Washington University who specializes in the First Amendment, said the
ruling “effectively did away with decades of
understanding” on how to deal with prayer
in state, city, and school board meetings.
“In past cases, legislative groups that
consistently prayed in Jesus’ name lost.
But if they tried to make some reasonable effort to have a diverse or pluralistic
pattern of prayer, they won. It was the
pattern that mattered,” he said.
The May 5 decision “does away with
that. It does not insist on any such reasonable effort to make prayer nonsectarian or to push for diversity. The majority
faith in a particular community can dictate the prayers, and minority faiths
could be left out if they don’t step up and
say, ‘Hey, what about us?’”
Consequently, said Lupu, “a town or a
city can effectively identify itself with a
particular religious tradition. I think that
is what establishment of religion is supposed to prevent. That’s why I think it’s a
very bad decision.”
But University of Notre Dame law
professor Richard W. Garnett, who specializes in church/state relations and religious freedom, called the decision correct and unsurprising.
“What might be surprising, though, is
that four justices dissented. It would have
been a dramatic and controversial move
. . . to rule that legislative prayers are necessarily unconstitutional,” Garnett said.
Just because sectarian prayers are constitutional, Garnett said, doesn’t mean that
policies like those of the town of Greece
“are wise or welcoming.” —Lauren Markoe
and Cathy Lee Grossman, RNS
RNS / COURTESY OF AMY BUTLER
Historic Riverside Church
to vote on woman as
senior minister
Amy Butler is poised to become the
seventh senior minister and the first
woman to lead the famed Riverside
Church in Manhattan. Butler has been
senior minister of Calvary Baptist
Church in Washington, D.C., for 11 years.
The church has about 300 members with
an estimated 150 people in attendance
on Sunday mornings.
When she arrived at Calvary, she
inherited a church that had dwindled
from 5,000 parishioners to about 70 on a
Sunday. As pastor, she pushed the downtown church to be more multicultural
and oversaw a massive redevelopment of
the church’s downtown property.
Under Butler’s leadership, Calvary
Baptist voted in 2012 to dissociate
from the Southern Baptist Convention,
citing concerns over the SBC’s commitment to the separation of church and
state and allowing local churches to
make their own decisions. Calvary, for
example, is open to gays and lesbians in
leadership.
“Under her leadership the church
has become an influential congregation
in the nation’s capital, and she has
become a much sought-after voice for
Progressive Christianity,” Riverside’s
search committee said in a letter to the
congregation.
If approved, Butler would join two
other women who have been appointed
to senior leadership at significant mainline congregations.
• Shannon Johnson Kershner began
senior pastoral duties in May at
Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church,
where CENTURY editor-publisher John
M. Buchanan served as senior pastor
before retiring from that post in 2012.
Kershner’s academic studies and pastorates have been in southern states. She
described her previous congregation in
Montreat, North Carolina, as having
members from “all over the theological,
social, and economic spectrum.” She is a
strategist in the NEXT Church movement in the PCUSA for what she called
RECOMMENDED: The call committee at
Riverside Church in New York is presenting Amy Butler to be the church’s senior
minister.
“honest conversation about what might
be next for our denomination.”
• Ginger Gaines-Cirelli was appointed February 8 as senior pastor of
Foundry United Methodist Church in
Washington, D.C. As the senior pastor at
Capitol Hill UMC, she helped weekly
worship attendance grow by 62 percent
over four years. She has also held positions focused on younger adults and
youth. Her husband, Anthony, is a
Roman Catholic scholar who works at
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
in Washington.
The towering Riverside Church, built
by tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr. in
Manhattan’s Morning Side Heights in
1927, is an interdenominational church
affiliated with the United Church of Christ
and the American Baptist Churches in the
U.S.A. Its pulpit has been home to some of
the most influential clergy in progressive
Protestantism, including Harry Emerson
15
Fosdick, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and
James Forbes Jr.
Forbes, who was the first black senior
minister of the church, has led Riverside
during the transition as a minister emeritus.
Butler was introduced to the Riverside congregation on May 4. The congregation will be asked to vote on the church
committee’s recommendation after she
preaches on June 8.
Riverside has 1,650 members and
affiliates, and a report in 2008 indicated
the church had 2,400 members.
The church has been without a senior
minister since Brad Braxton resigned in
2009 just two months after his installation when a dispute with his new flock
landed the church in court.
The church debated its mission and
the pastor’s compensation package,
which critics said was $600,000 while a
church council member said it was
$457,000. Under Braxton, the church,
with more than 100 employees, had a $12
million budget.
When Braxton was appointed as the
church’s second black senior minister,
the church’s changing demographics,
from majority white to majority black,
was a source of tension. Braxton’s evangelical and scripturally focused preaching was also reportedly an issue, which
some saw as a threat to Riverside’s open
and inclusive reputation.
“I think it’s high time Riverside had
a woman in the pulpit as the senior
pastor,” said Serene Jones, the first
female president of neighboring Union
Theological Seminary. She pointed out
that she and Butler are both single
mothers (both are divorced): “It just
shows a new generation of women
leaders can be moms and presidents
and pastors.”
Butler received her bachelor’s degree
from Baylor University and a doctorate
from Wesley Theological Seminary. She
grew up in Hawaii and has three children.
Jones said Butler won’t be daunted
by the public nature of Riverside and
would bring humor and intelligence to
the job. “Riverside needs someone who
cannot only preach but someone who
can pastor and care for people,” Jones
said. “She’s also got that wonderful,
strong prophetic edge that Riverside
values.” —Sarah Pulliam Bailey, RNS
Robinson, first gay
Episcopal bishop,
divorces his partner
V. Gene Robinson, whose 2003 election as the first openly gay Episcopal
bishop rocked the worldwide Anglican
Communion, has announced his divorce
from his longtime partner.
Robinson, who retired in 2013 as the
bishop of New Hampshire, and his partner
of 25 years, Mark Andrew, were married in
a private civil union in 2008. The
announcement of their divorce was made
public May 3 in a statement to the diocese.
“As you can imagine, this is a difficult
time for us—not a decision entered into
lightly or without much counseling,”
Robinson wrote in a letter. “We ask for
your prayers, that the love and care for
each other that has characterized our
relationship for a quarter century will
continue in the difficult days ahead.”
He explained his views on marriage
and divorce further in a column for the
Daily Beast.
“It is at least a small comfort to me, as
a gay rights and marriage equality advocate, to know that like any marriage, gay
and lesbian couples are subject to the
same complications and hardships that
afflict marriages between heterosexual
couples,” Robinson wrote.
Hundreds of parishes left the Episcopal Church in protest of his consecration
as bishop.
“Whenever you choose to or are called
into living a public life, one of the prices
you pay for that is public scrutiny, so it’s
not surprising that people will pay attention to this,” said Susan Russell, an Episcopal priest at All Saints Church in Pasadena, California, and past president of the
LGBT advocacy group Integrity USA.
Robinson, 66, is a fellow at the Center
for American Progress in Washington, D.C.
“My belief in marriage is undiminished by the reality of divorcing someone
I have loved for a very long time and will
continue to love even as we separate,”
Robinson wrote in his column. “Love
can endure, even if a marriage cannot.”
In 2012, the Episcopal Church voted
to allow bishops to permit priests to bless
same-sex marriages. Russell said further
discussion about the church’s canon law
and prayer book in relation to LGBT
concerns will be held at the denomination’s convention next year.
Robinson went public with his sexual
identity and divorce from his wife in
1986. He has since been open about the
heavy toll he has paid under public
scrutiny. Four years ago, he underwent
treatment for alcoholism.
Critics say Robinson’s actions defied
scriptural authority and thousands of
years of Christian tradition. His divorce
could fuel the fire, said Douglas LeBlanc,
an Episcopalian who reported on
Robinson’s consecration when he was an
editor at Christianity Today.
“I’m sure there might be some conservatives who might say, ‘We told you so
all along, if you depart from church
teachings on homosexuality, you’re
opening the door to all kinds of chaos,’”
LeBlanc said. “In many ways, I think you
are,” he said, but added that heterosexual sin is not lacking in church circles.
The Episcopal Church’s deliberations
on same-sex marriage will likely continue regardless of Robinson’s divorce, LeBlanc said. Some, though, might seize on
the news of his divorce.
“People will perhaps rub his nose in
this for the rest of his life when he’s
debating folks on the sexuality wars,”
LeBlanc said. “It probably won’t shock a
lot of people and will sadden a lot of
people, too.”
Robinson is no longer the only
openly gay bishop in the Episcopal
Church. Bishop Mary D. Glasspool was
consecrated in Los Angeles in 2010.
—Sarah Pulliam Bailey, RNS
Researcher adds to evidence that
‘Jesus’s wife’ papyrus is a forgery
A FRAGMENTARY
papyrus
dubbed by Harvard scholar Karen
King as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”—
and declared in April after lengthy
tests to be an authentic writing from
centuries ago—has been challenged
anew by some scholars as a forgery.
An American researcher, Christian
Askeland, published findings in late
April that some colleagues say provides convincing evidence that the tiny
fragment was forged.
The Washington Post said on May 5
that suspicions arose regarding another Coptic language fragment purportedly from the Gospel of John that was
part of King’s article in the Harvard
Theological Review. Both fragments,
said Askeland, were written in the
same hand and inked in a dialect that
scholars say did not exist at the time
they were said to be written.
In an interview with the New York
Times on May 4, King acknowledged
that Askeland’s arguments are legitimate criticisms. “This is substantive, it’s
worth taking seriously, and it may
point in the direction of forgery. This is
one option that should receive serious
16
consideration, but I don’t think it’s a
done deal,” she said.
This saga “is moving into the realm
of the absurd,” said Askeland. He is an
assistant professor at Germany’s
Protestant university Wuppertal and
also works for Indiana Wesleyan
University.
Askeland has good credentials for
the analysis of documents written in
Coptic, the language used by the early
Christians in Egypt who translated biblical and apocryphal texts from Greek
codices. Askeland did his Ph.D. thesis
on the Coptic versions of the Gospel of
John. He found, in the John fragment
accompanying King’s article, that for
17 lines the breaks were identical, suggesting to Askeland that a forger may
have copied the document from the
Internet onto genuine papyrus. He suggested that if the John fragment was
forged, it was likely that the “Jesus’s
Wife” fragment was written by the
same hand.
“It’s always exciting to find something new, but I take no joy in messing
things up for Karen King,” he said to
the Washington Post.
RNS / COURTESY OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.)
Protestant, Jewish leaders
seek to mend their rift
Prominent mainline Protestant and
Jewish leaders are trying to revive an
interfaith group that dissolved 18 months
ago over a letter the Protestants wrote to
Congress about Israel.
The Christian-Jewish Roundtable was
founded about a decade ago to deepen
understanding between the two groups,
particularly regarding the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, over which Jewish
groups and more liberal Protestant
churches have frequently disagreed.
After a private meeting in New York
before Holy Week and Passover, both
sides announced that they want to work
together again.
“It was not a ‘kumbaya, everybody
loves each other’ meeting,” said Steve
Gutow, president of the Jewish Council
for Public Affairs, which hosted the
March 27 meeting.
But the 15 participants and two facilitators—one a rabbi, the other a minister
—showed goodwill, he said.
“I don’t want to overstate it, but I’m
hopeful,” said Gutow, who convened the
meeting with Mark S. Hanson, the former presiding bishop of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America.
James E. Winkler, president of the
National Council of Churches, described
the five-hour summit: “You just had the
feeling that there are differences between us, particularly on how we view
the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but a deep,
underlying commitment to each other,
and of course to peace.”
Winkler added that he “breathed a
huge sigh of relief” after the meeting
went well and the two sides agreed to
meet again. The group aims for three
meetings during the next two years.
The roundtable had broken up after
the Protestants sent a letter to Congress
asking for more scrutiny over American
aid to Israel.
For the Protestants, the letter was an
attempt to question what they see as
unconditional U.S. financial assistance to
the Israeli government and a way to
stand up for beleaguered Palestinians
who live in Israeli-occupied territory.
INTERFAITH CONVERSATION: Gradye
Parsons is stated clerk of the Presbyterian
General Assembly, whose church has long
debated divesting from certain companies
that do business with Israel.
For the Jews, who said they were
blindsided by the letter, it reflected the
Protestants’ unwillingness to appreciate
threats against the Jewish state and their
willingness to subject Israel to standards
higher than those applied to other
nations.
“We didn’t talk [at the March meeting] about the content of the letter,” said
Gradye Parsons, stated clerk of the
Presbyterian General Assembly, whose
church has long debated divesting from
certain companies that do business with
Israel.
“The meeting was about how we talk
to each other, about how we begin to get
on that road of reconciliation,” he said.
The roundtable that fell apart in
October 2012 was actually two roundtables—one focused on Middle East issues,
the other on theological concerns—and
included mostly senior staffers from
major mainline Protestant denominations and Jewish groups.
The recent attempt at reconciliation
brought together the principals of these
organizations. The list of attendees read
17
like a who’s who in Protestant-Jewish
religious leadership.
In addition to Gutow, Hanson,
Winkler, and Parsons, the participants
were: Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League;
David Harris, executive director of the
American Jewish Committee; Rick
Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism; Daniel S. Mariaschin,
executive vice president of B’nai B’rith
International; Julie Schonfeld, executive
vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly; Steven C. Wernick, CEO of the
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; David Saperstein, director of the
Religious Action Center at the Union
for Reform Judaism; Geoffrey A. Black,
general minister of the United Church
of Christ; Elizabeth A. Eaton, presiding
bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America; Mary Ann Swenson,
ecumenical office of the Council of
Bishops of the United Methodist
Church; and Sharon E. Watkins, general
minister of the Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ) in the United
States and Canada. —Lauren Markoe,
RNS
UCC sues state over
gay marriage ban
The United Church of Christ has sued
the state of North Carolina over its constitutional ban on same-sex marriage,
saying the 2012 amendment violates the
religious freedom of its clergy.
The liberal denomination of nearly 1
million members is the first in the country to attack a same-sex marriage ban on
religious freedom grounds, taking a cue
from religious conservatives who used
the same argument over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care
Act.
In 1972, the UCC was the first denomination in the United States to ordain an
openly gay pastor, and in 2005 it was the
first to endorse the fledgling movement to
allow civil marriage for same-sex couples.
The suit, filed April 28, asks the federal courts in the Western District of North
Carolina to strike down the ban, which
Militant Nigerian leader
calls captives ‘our slaves’
In his first public claim acknowledging that Islamist Boko Haram militants
abducted more than 200 teenage schoolgirls in Nigeria, Abubakar Shekau said in
a video he would sell the girls because
“they are our slaves.”
The majority of the abducted girls,
ages 16 to 18, were from the Church of the
Brethren in Nigeria, although the group
included both Muslim and Christian girls,
said a letter on May 6 from the Brethren
headquarters in Elgin, Illinois.
The denomination has contributed
more than $100,000 over the last year to
support the Nigerian Brethren affected
by the ongoing violence.
The Nigerian church leaders now
have “asked us to engage in prayer and
fasting,” said General Secretary Stanley
J. Noffsinger and Global Mission and
Service executive Jay Wittmeyer.
Included with their letter is a list of
180 names of abducted girls—both
Christian and Muslim. “We are not making a distinction between them in our
prayers.” Each name on the list is being
RNS / PATRICK SCHEIDER / COURTESY OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
was passed by state voters. It argues that
the ban limits clergy choices and violates
the principle of “free exercise of religion” by requiring clergy to minister to
one segment of the public.
A dozen non-UCC clergy and samesex couples joined the suit.
“By preventing our same-sex congregants from forming their own families, the
North Carolina ban on same-sex marriage
burdens my ability and the ability of my
congregation to form a faith community of
our choosing consistent with the principles
of our faith,” said Nancy Petty, pastor of
Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in
Raleigh, who joined the lawsuit.
As part of the state ban, it is a class 1
misdemeanor for a minister to perform a
marriage ceremony for a couple that has
not obtained a civil marriage license. In
addition, the law allows anyone to sue the
minister who performs a marriage ceremony without a license. —Yonat Shimron, RNS
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ARGUMENT: Lisa Cloninger and Kathi Smith, who have
been together for more than ten years, with their pastor Nancy Allison, speak during a
press conference in April in Charlotte, North Carolina.
assigned to six congregations for focused
prayer.
“We know no religion (that) prescribes abduction or infliction of pain as
a way of devotion,” said Titus Pona, an
official with the Christian Association of
Nigeria.
Boko Haram translates to “Western
education is forbidden” in the Hausa language. For five years, they have
unleashed violence in northern Nigeria,
but the girls’ abduction is viewed as the
most terrifying so far.
More than 1,500 people have been
killed in the insurgency this year, compared with an estimated 3,600 between
2010 and 2013, according to the
Associated Press.
“This violence continues because the
militants have support from powerful people in Nigerian society,” said John Bakeni,
a Roman Catholic priest in Borno.
Nigeria’s top Muslim leader, the sultan of Sokoto, Al-Haji Sa’ad Abubakar
III, condemned the abduction.
“We sympathize with the victims and
their teachers and families,” he said in a
statement. “We call on the authorities to
put all the needed efforts to free these
innocent girls and get them to continue
with their studies.” —RNS/added sources
18
When science and faith
collide, faith usually wins
Believers don’t buy the big bang, godless evolution, or human responsibility
for global warming. Actually, neither do
many Americans.
But a new survey by the Associated
Press found that religious identity—particularly evangelical Protestant—was
one of the sharpest indicators of skepticism toward key issues in science.
The survey presented a series of statements that several prize-winning scientists
say are facts. However, research shows
that confidence in their correctness varies
sharply among U.S. adults. It found:
• 51 percent of U.S. adults overall
(including 77 percent of people who say
they are born-again or evangelical) have
little or no confidence that “the universe
began 13.8 billion years ago with a big
bang.”
• 42 percent overall (76 percent of
evangelicals) doubt that “life on Earth,
including human beings, evolved through
a process of natural selection.”
evangelicals) doubt that the Earth’s tem-
perature is rising “mostly because of manmade heat-trapping greenhouse gases.”
evangelicals) doubt “the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.”
On the flip side, most people are pretty sure the “universe is so complex, there
must be a supreme being guiding its creation”—54 percent of all Americans and
87 percent of evangelicals.
The survey of 1,012 adults, conducted
March 20–24, has a margin of error of 3.4
percentage points.
“When you are putting up facts
against faith, facts can’t argue against
faith,” Duke University biochemist
Robert Lefkowitz, who won a Nobel
Prize in 2012, told the Associated Press.
He called faith “untestable.”
A recent survey on “religious understandings of science,” by Rice University
sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund,
found that the two worldviews are not
always in opposition.
Ecklund’s study for the Dialogue on
Science, Ethics, and Religion program at
the American Association for the
Advancement of Science compared views
of 10,000 U.S. adults, including scientists,
evangelicals, and the general public.
She found that nearly 36 percent of scientists have no doubt about God’s existence and that they are about as likely as
most Americans overall (about one in five)
to attend weekly religious services. —RNS
People
■ Popes John Paul II and John XXIII,
who presided over enormous changes
within the Roman Catholic Church and
across the world, were proclaimed saints
on April 27 before a crowd of nearly 1 million people in a historic ceremony celebrated by Pope Francis with his predecessor, Benedict XVI. About 100 heads of
state and government leaders—including
Juan Carlos, king of Spain, and controversial Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe
—joined the pilgrims who crammed into
Briefly noted
■ The Claremont School of Theology
announced in April that it is ending its
three-year joint venture with Claremont
Lincoln University, which had added
Jewish and Islamic postgraduate studies
to the curriculum of the school, one of 13
official United Methodist seminaries.
That step was initially praised by supporters as a way to enrich the interreligious education of clergy and scholars.
Like many mainline seminaries, Claremont has had many non-Methodist students, but the venture with Claremont
Lincoln led to questions about whether
United Methodist dollars would help
fund the training of rabbis and imams.
The historical connection to the
church—“our institutional DNA”—was
cited by David Richardson, chair of the
seminary’s board of trustees, as the cause
of the split, according to the United
Methodist News Service.
■ The developer who sparked a firestorm in 2010 when he proposed to
build a community center with an
Islamic prayer room two blocks from
Ground Zero announced recently
that he plans to turn the property at
45-51 Park Place into a museum of
Islamic culture. A spokesman for the
developer, Sharif El-Gamal, told the
New York Times that the proposed
museum would be three stories high
and 5,000 square feet, much smaller
than the proposed community center,
which was slated to be 15 stories tall
and include a swimming pool, basketball court, auditorium, classrooms,
and café, as well as other attractions.
El-Gamal ran into difficulties finding
financing for the community center
project, even though the project won
the support of former mayor Michael
Bloomberg, several 9/11 families, and
many Muslim, Christian, and Jewish
leaders. It languished after becoming
the target of criticism from right-wing
groups, anti-Muslim activists, and
some 9/11 families.
19
St. Peter’s Square under gray and dreary
skies. Thirty Jewish leaders were among
the official delegations who took part at
the Vatican. “We declare and define
Blessed John XXIII and John Paul II be
saints, and we enroll them among the
saints, decreeing that they are to be venerated as such by the whole church,” Francis
declared to the crowd in Latin during the
two-hour ceremony. It was the second
high-profile appearance for the frail 87year-old Benedict since he shocked the
world by retiring last year and clearing the
way for Francis’s election. With the
unprecedented twin papal canonizations
and the appearance of two living popes,
the Sunday ceremony was billed as “the
Day of Four Popes.” The Argentine pontiff
greeted Benedict warmly, and he sat at the
side of the altar with some 150 cardinals as
well as bishops and priests who traveled
from around the world for the event.
■ Evangelical peace activist Glen
Stassen, 78, who taught Christian ethics
for more than 50 years, died April 26 in
Pasadena, California, months after being
diagnosed with cancer. The son of former
Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, he
left a budding career as a nuclear physicist for seminary studies that helped him
to advance “just peacemaking,” recognized broadly as an alternative to both
pacifism and just war approaches. The
younger Stassen was also caught up in
civil rights movements. While a student at
New York’s Union Theological Seminary
he went to the March on Washington in
1963, where he ran into his father; neither
of them knew the other was participating.
Stassen earned a doctorate in 1967 from
Duke Divinity School, where he had
organized a civil rights group. He taught
at Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, from
1976 to 1996. He found a more comfortable faculty post in 1997 at the evangelical, multidenominational Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Stassen’s
1992 book Just Peacemaking argued for
“transforming initiatives” to reduce hostilities before they escalate into war. The
Baptist World Alliance last year cited
Stassen as “arguably the leading Baptist
peace theorist-activist of the 20th century”
whose “influence is felt well beyond the
confines of the Baptist family.”
bends our days toward justice and peace; he goes ahead of us
into eternity, where all will one day be gathered. Yet Ascension
Day feels like the day after the party, the day after visiting family has packed up and driven away. It’s the day to wash the
sheets and put away the special dishes. It’s the day for the walk
back to Jerusalem.
There’s melancholy and uncertainty in this ascension. Just
behind the great fullness of Easter comes the confusing
absence; both experiences are bound together in the life of
faith. We love the power and the directness of Easter—lilies
and trumpets, appearances behind closed doors—but there’s
something inside us that knows we can’t take it every day. We
need space to stare at the cloudy sky, moments to wonder if our
experience is really true. We need the long walk back to the
house. We need absence as much as presence.
But I’m not sure we always know how to talk about the
absence. We assume that our feelings of absence come from
doubt. Recently, a confirmand sat in my office and said that he
just couldn’t feel anything. He wanted to feel Jesus. He wanted
to know that Christ was really alive. Instead, he said, “I just sit
in church and feel alone.”
I wanted to assure him that he wasn’t alone, that we were
with him, that the ascended and reigning Christ held his future.
Yet something about our conversation made me know that it
wouldn’t be the right answer to jump to the end of Matthew,
with its promise of Jesus’ presence to the end of the age. All I
could muster was, “Sometimes it’s like that.” I suspect it was an
extraordinarily unsatisfying answer.
Maybe the ascension teaches us to trust these moments,
these spaces between experiences, as the place where new history is possible. If we can let ourselves be suspended in that
moment—maybe even let our mouths fall open for a moment
in astounded disbelief—we may find ourselves beginning
again, changed and maybe more mature. There are times when
Christ has to leave us so that we figure out how to carry light
ourselves. We need his absence to discover the power of Easter
life within us. There is both loss and power, death and resurrection, in this mysterious realization that incarnation includes us.
At our regional gathering on that Ascension Day, we decided
that we would extinguish the Paschal candle as our committee
member suggested. But first, we had a dancer bend and twirl
through the space, carrying a collection of smaller candles. One
by one, she lit the little candles from the Paschal candle and
delivered them to members of the assembly. By the time she
bowed to the candle and extinguished its light, tiny flames flickered throughout the room, even as the smoke predictably disappeared into nothing. In that moment, ascension moved from the
mountain toward Pentecost, and we were the light of Christ.
Sunday, June 1 (Ascension)
Acts 1:1–11
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was in charge of worship
at a regional gathering of Lutherans. Solely by accident, the
opening service was scheduled on the afternoon of Ascension
Day. Not one of us on the committee had ever planned a liturgy for this day. Worship on a Thursday, usually at the end of
May or near the beginning of June, simply pressed Lutheran
piety too far. We might have a devotion at the beginning of a
regularly scheduled meeting, but gathering the whole assembly
for worship seemed like too much. Only the most pious even
suggested it.
One of the committee members vaguely remembered that
one old tradition has the Paschal candle, burning at each worship service since the Easter Vigil, extinguished after the reading of the Gospel. This seemed too literal to most of the group
—a ritual extinguishing of the presence of Christ among us,
nothing left of the light except an unfortunate wisp of smoke
curling its way to the ceiling. I imagined everyone at the worship service standing there staring up as the smoke disappeared into the hotel ballroom HVAC system.
In many ways, the Ascension story is simply too literal for our
postmodern sensibilities. We know that the space station is circling the globe just above the clouds. We know that people don’t
literally float up to heaven or down to hell. In addition, the story
seems a bit forced, the life story of Jesus wrapped up too neatly,
providing a dramatic way to explain Jesus’ absence—the church’s
experience without his historical presence.
Perhaps extinguishing the Paschal candle felt like standing
on the mountain, watching Jesus disappear into the clouds and
leave his friends behind. Perhaps it felt as if the Easter story
were now being extinguished. In Acts, the disciples seem to be
standing there with their mouths wide open, unsure of what to
make of this experience. It takes two angels to break the
silence of the mountaintop: Hey, what are you looking at? He’ll
be back.
The promise is that he will come again on clouds of glory.
But for the livable future, it is clouds of memory that will
obscure his presence—along with the shaky interpretation of
those who try to remember what he said and did. The historical Jesus is gone. He’s not with us like he was with the disciples.
He never will be again.
In some ways, Ascension Day is the first day of Ordinary
Time, the time in-between, the time between resurrection and
the end of history itself. We confess that Jesus has ascended to
the right hand of God. He has gone into the future, where he
20
Reflections on the lectionary
the effect of sending them forth yet again into the wideness of creation’s promise. For centuries, they would tell the story as if it were
judgment, yet all along God meant it for blessing.
When the disciples gather in the safety of the upper room—
50 long days since the confusion of Easter—God simply sends
the Spirit so that the story will, yet again, move forward.
Certainly, the experience is new for them, blown into the
power of love as if they can hear it for the first time. Yet it is
once again God’s reigniting work to fill every single corner of
the earth with love and blessing. In the mystery of fire and
wind, language and understanding, the fearful disciples are
converted to the work that God has always been doing.
This is, of course, Jesus’ work: to love as God loves, to gather and unite, to forgive and raise up. The community gathered
in that room could articulate every kind of reason not to go—
lacking the right words or training or free time or money. Yet
they are suddenly and miraculously inspired, despite themselves, to act just like Jesus. The Spirit embodied in Jesus now
fills their bodies—the body of Christ.
Today, our shifting cultural landscape creates fear about our
future. We might not be gathered in an upper room, but there
is a lot of fear in church basements. We wonder if our towers
and our treasured belief will survive the winds of this century.
We tell our children that Pentecost is the church’s birthday,
but it’s not the founding of an institution. It’s the inauguration
of a movement of people, marked with the cross of Christ, who
Sunday, June 8
Acts 2:1–21
LAST SPRING, as the church moved from Easter to
Pentecost, the governor of Minnesota signed a bill legalizing
gay marriage. Some anticipated another Pentecost when the
weather report predicted high winds at the hour of the signing.
Some dreamed new dreams; others saw the fire of judgment.
Interestingly, all seemed to believe that the events at the statehouse mattered to God.
Earlier that spring, I went to the capitol to hear the debates.
I hadn’t expected so much religious fervor. People on both sides
were prophesying, singing the songs of their traditions, meeting
in corners to call down the Holy Spirit. I suspect there hadn’t
been that many Bibles in the building since the day new legislators dusted off their old family Bibles for the inauguration. One
of my friends said, “Church broke out at the capitol today.”
At one point, I went up to the third-floor balcony and
looked down. Half the capitol was filled with fuchsia “Vote
No” signs; the other half was orange “Vote Yes” signs. Upstairs,
the sound of their chants merged as it bounced off the marble
walls and headed into the dome. All our prayers, the ones we
shared and the ones that sounded like point and counterpoint,
were mixed together in their ascent into the dome of heaven.
Is this what God hears, one great cry offered up from our hope
and our fear? We may experience division on the
ground, hearing only what’s so loud right next to
us. But God hears us as one human family, crying
out for blessing, redeemed by the work of
Christ—Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.
Maybe the Pentecost story isn’t so much
about us and our hopes to unite or divide as it is about a God who
can make a diverse creation into a place of blessing and new life.
Pentecost is something we’re simply called to trust. It’s not about
the mysterious wind or miraculous fire, or even the speaking in different tongues. It’s about God healing the divisions set into motion
at the tower of Babel, when different languages, cultures, and viewpoints were experienced as a punishment. When we hear about the
crowd’s ability to understand the disciples’ preaching in their own
language, we experience the way that God has always heard us.
It’s hard to read Acts without thinking of Genesis. At the
beginning of time, human beings are charged to go forth and multiply blessing for the whole creation. But before long they grow
afraid of the wideness of God’s creation. So they make it smaller,
circling their communities with walls and towers, making stone
and certainty their promise for the future. Walter Brueggemann
suggests that their scattering, the confusion of their languages, has
Pentecost is the start of a movement
of people who speak a blessing.
speak blessing and take back curses. Years ago I heard a
Pentecost children’s sermon in which the pastor asked the children how many candles should be on the church’s birthday
cake. Eventually, one kid guessed the year—but she added that
“you can’t blow out that many candles.”
Again and again, God promises to set us on fire with a promise that cannot be extinguished. From the pinnacle of Pentecost,
we hear that God is already at work filling the whole creation
with blessing. There’s a wind of grace that’s blowing through
capitols and churches, neighborhoods and hearts. If we’re not
careful, it’s going to carry us away, too—to the ends of the earth,
or at least out the door and into the wideness of creation. That
will be the blessing we’ve dreamed about.
The author is Bradley E. Schmeling, who serves on the pastoral staff at
Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
21
Tr u t h te ll i n g a b o u t C h ris t i a n m a r ri a g e
Why a church wedding?
by B. J. Hutto
ATTRACTING THE ire of older church members
is never a pleasant experience for a pastor. My friend Matthew
found this out when a young woman who had grown up in his
church wanted to return to it for her wedding. She and her
fiancé agreed to participate in pastoral counseling sessions, but
when they met together with the pastor, problems arose. The
young woman became uncomfortable when Matthew asked
her why she wanted to be married in the church. The young
man was candid about not being a believer. As they talked,
Matthew learned that the idea of a church marriage was not
theirs; the bride’s mother had suggested it.
The couple didn’t object to getting married in her family’s
old church; in fact, they found the idea a little romantic. But
they weren’t particularly interested in a church wedding as
Matthew described it. He told them that he would marry them,
but only after more extensive conversations about Christian
marriage and Christianity itself: a community shaped by the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They were offended and
left. Matthew spent the rest of his week dealing with parents,
aunts, and church members who could not understand why he’d
turn down an opportunity to serve a young couple.
Before considering Matthew’s point of view in this situation, I
want to note that I admire this couple’s candor. They could have
dissembled, nodding their heads through counseling sessions and
paying just enough attention during the service to get their lines
right. A lot of couples do that. A lot of couples have little interest
in the church’s understanding of marriage or in subsuming their
shared life in the church’s life. The young people who came to
Matthew were honest enough (if not with the bride’s family) to
admit their lack of interest. I believe it would good for both the
church and the marrying couples if more couples were honest
about their reasons for wanting a “church” wedding.
The truth is that fewer young couples are choosing traditional church weddings. An increasing number of couples
choose a small civil ceremony, or a Christian ceremony offsite,
or no wedding at all. Many establish a household and a life
together without any official civil or religious sanction. These
changes in relationships and in commitment decisions feed a
growing apprehension that young people are divorcing themselves from the church. If couples are not choosing typical
church weddings, doesn’t that indicate the marginalization of
the church in these people’s lives and, by extension, in society
at large? And so congregations like Matthew’s ask anxiously:
Why wouldn’t a pastor unquestioningly embrace a couple askChristian Century May 28, 2014
ing to be married? Why would a pastor pass up a chance to
draw a young couple into the church?
But perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps the question we should be asking is, What does it mean for a couple to
get married in the church? One of my seminary professors
once recited the nursery rhyme: “Here is the church, and here
is the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.” Then he
added, “Of course, it’s only when you open the doors that you
see the church. The church is the community.” Viewed in that
light, Matthew did not deny the engaged couple a church wedding but instead offered them one.
W
e need more pastors who are as bold as Matthew and
more couples who are as honest as the one that came
to him. Most couples, instead of intending to surround their life together with the stories, blessings, and community of the church, ask for a church wedding for other reasons.
They feel obligated by tradition. They want a sanctioning of
their relationship. They feel pressure from family and friends.
Not all who want a church
wedding should get one.
Often couples want only the style: the church contributes a
romantic setting and ceremony. Pastor Janet serves a congregation that has a beautiful building just down the street from a
large “contemporary” church. Several times a year an engaged
couple from the contemporary church stops by to ask if they
can be married in her church’s sanctuary. Janet usually says no.
She says no because they want only the setting and because
their church is opposed to her church’s theology, its theology of
marriage, and even to her ordination as a woman. They have no
interest in her church as church. And when she says no, they
are surprised that “any pastor would do such a thing.”
The honesty of these two pastors is refreshing. It offers a
glimpse of a church that is free to claim its identity instead of
being taken for granted by the wider society. Matthew and
Janet represent a church that’s offering a witness instead of
just a service, particularly when the service itself is only an
empty introduction to a bigger celebration. In these situations
most friends and some family members skip the wedding and
show up for the reception. Ministers are asked to simplify the
22
© Fuse
formed in the church ought to lead to a marriage that’s lived in
the church and shaped by the church’s good news. A second
couple, who were moderately active in the life of his congregation, wanted to get married. They agreed to the church’s wedding policy and were open to premarital counseling. But
halfway through their counseling sessions, they told Matthew
that they had decided to call off their wedding.
Christian marriage, they had come to realize, was not merely
dating 2.0. It was not something to do simply because it was what
everyone did. It did not promise a lifetime of domestic tranquility and romance. They had come to realize that it was a serious
promise, a vow to love their neighbor as themselves even when
that neighbor might be an enemy with whom they were sharing
a bed. They decided that they needed to discern whether or not
they were ready to commit themselves to a Christian marriage.
Matthew supported them in this courageous decision and
helped them explain it to their families and friends.
A year later the couple returned to him ready to make the
commitment, and Matthew noticed that their second engagement with one another—both inside and outside of their counseling sessions—had a depth and a clarity that had been lacking before.
Matthew offers a bold witness, not only because he expects
couples married in his church to immerse themselves in
liturgy and shorten their homilies. And while some aspects of
the wedding are still cherished—the declaration of intent, the
presentation of the bride, the exchanging of vows and rings—
others, such as communion, are viewed as irrelevant. If two
people are giving themselves to one another as Christ gave
himself to the church, however, what could be more relevant
than communion?
Stanley Hauerwas says that “Christians are required to love
one another—even if they are married. That may be a cruel
and even heartless demand,” he says, “but it is nonetheless the
way things are if you are a Christian.” Not everyone wishes to
make so reckless a commitment, and not everyone is ready to.
Because of this, the biggest issue related to fewer church weddings is not the loss of the Christian ceremony, but the loss of
Christian community. Pastors miss the opportunity to counsel
couples who are beginning the hard work of marriage.
Churches miss the opportunity to support couples as they
begin a life together, and to have their congregation enriched
by the couple’s presence. The couples themselves pass up the
opportunity to immerse their fledgling marriage in the rhythms
and stories of the household of God.
Many Christians believe that everyone who wants to be
married in the church should be granted that request, no questions asked. But another story from Pastor Matthew helps
challenge that assumption. Matthew has continued to be
upfront with engaged couples, telling them that a wedding per-
B. J. Hutto is a Baptist minister. He lives in New York City.
23
church life, but also because he expects those who aren’t interested in doing this to be truthful about it, and he understands
that he and the church must respect their truthfulness. His
convictions about Christian marriage will probably anger
more parishioners and families, but the couples that he counsels are receiving a great gift: the opportunity to have their
love for each other shaped by Christ and his love for the
church.
W h e n wo rs h i p is t h e m a i n e ve n t
Church(y) weddings
by Steve Thorngate
NADIA STEFKO and I got married in her hometown,
ism was the bridal procession. Nadia made the usual grand
entrance, complete with theme music and a standing cue. The
presider—and the cross—stood idly by.
Since our wedding, we’ve seen other liturgically minded couples forge ahead where we balked, jettisoning even the bridal
march. Instead, the bridal party and the presider followed the cross
in—while the rest of us sang a processional hymn. One couple
even began at the font with the Thanksgiving for Baptism liturgy.
Our friends Heather Bixler and Dave Allen processed to a
hymn. “A wedding is not a celebration of us as a couple,” says
Dave, “but a celebration of the God who made us and called us
at an Episcopal church we had no particular connection to. “You
are free to personalize the service in a number of ways,” the rector explained in our first conversation. “But we do require that
you include at least one reading from the Bible.”
Nadia smiled. “How about three of them, plus a psalm?
We’ve already narrowed it down to five or six choices.”
For some couples, the ceremony is an afterthought. Some
approach it as a celebration of themselves and their love. We saw
it as a worship event at the center of the day’s festivities. Sure,
we obsessed over the reception menu and seating chart. But the
ceremony was where our planning-fixated hearts were—and we
understood it to be a worship service first and a wedding second.
In our case, this meant the traditional eucharistic ordo, so
the assembly did a lot more liturgical praying than some were
used to. The preacher gave us not five minutes on marriage but
15 minutes on the good news of Jesus Christ. There was what
some might call an excessive amount of congregational singing.
The whole thing took 80 minutes.
It wouldn’t have killed us to keep the ceremony under an
hour, but we were pleased with how it all went. The people
closest to us were convening at our invitation, and a ritualized
celebration of ourselves seemed like the wrong activity. Festive
worship was what this occasion called for. So we tried to relinquish most of the spotlight to Christ, to proclaim his good news
rather than ours. We did this by giving word and table their full
due, by choosing readings and songs we would also choose on
a Sunday, by encouraging the preacher not to talk about us too
much. The ceremony did reflect us personally, of course; we are
personally and deeply invested in liturgy.
During the planning process, Nadia and I observed that the priority we gave the ceremony was sort of our little secret: our families expressed more interest in the reception, rehearsal dinner,
accommodations, and all the rest. When the ceremony did come
up, any pushback we got came couched in appeals to tradition—an
odd thing given that what we basically wanted was to get married
in the context of the ancient ordo of the faith our families gave us.
The most notable bone we threw to this alleged traditionalChristian Century May 28, 2014
“It was like a church service
—only a couple got married
in the middle of it!”
together. There would be plenty of time to celebrate us at the
reception.” As Dave sees it, multiple readings and an untruncated sermon were there to “proclaim something significant”;
the congregational hymns let all those gathered participate in
this proclamation; and communion ensured that the service
would “center on the grace of God.”
Others frame their attention to participatory liturgy as an
extension of why they had a church wedding in the first place.
“The way we build our family, in the day to day, should be a
microcosm of how we want to build our society,” says Kate
Paarlberg-Pvam. “Committing to that isn’t something that can
be done by just two people and a preacher.”
Kate and her spouse, Dave, eschewed the bridal procession altogether. By including communion and multiple congregational hymns, Kate aimed to make the service feel “like
a community gathering and a collective commitment to life
together—not just Dave’s and mine, but all of ours.” Kate
emphasizes that wedding vows, like baptismal vows, can’t be
made outside community.
24
Meagan Sherman-Sporrong echoes this point. She and Isaac
got married shortly after difficult losses in both of their families.
Meagan saw the gathered assembly as a significant expression of
support and community at a tough time—one that practically
demanded a eucharistic service. “It just felt like communion was
needed to bring this new community together,” she says.
Heidi Haverkamp and Adam Frieberg’s choice to have a
very churchy wedding was about the wider Christian community as well. “Setting our wedding in the context of church traditions made our marriage feel bigger than just we two and our
two families,” explains Heidi. Instead, she and Adam saw
themselves as “part of the body of Christ, and part of generations of Christians who’ve been celebrating the milestones of
their lives inside churches and church liturgy.”
It’s no coincidence that the quotes above all suggest a certain level of theological formation. When I asked around about
people whose weddings looked roughly like mine, I heard from
two groups. A few were Catholics, for whom a full eucharistic
order at a wedding is common and who don’t necessarily
expect to take the lead in planning the ceremony. The rest were
mostly clergy and others with some seminary training.
Is such a ceremony just a niche within the culture of the personalized wedding, the liturgy lover’s version of a special day?
Or might it function as a corrective to that culture?
If it’s going to be the latter, this would seem to be fundamentally a project of liturgical formation, not wedding planning. It’s hard to imagine selling that many people on a longer
ceremony with more praying, more singing, more standing up
and sitting down again. But if people are growing more deeply
engaged in the life of worship—if they see it shaping their spirituality and their very lives—then the idea that a wedding is
primarily just another communal service starts to make sense.
When Heather and Dave got married, Dave was on staff at
a university chapel, and some students attended the wedding.
One reacted to the ceremony with enthusiastic surprise. “It was
like a church service,” he told a colleague of Dave’s, “but they
got married in the middle of it!” Exactly.
© Scott Cramer
Soon I was reading a couple’s complaints about a pushy pastor
who seemed confused about the difference between a wedding
and a Sunday morning. Just where did this guy think he was?
The wedding industry, of course, has a far more powerful
hold on betrothed Americans than the church does. The idea of
renting a room for a Sunday-morning special event might
sound crazy to CENTURY readers. But to the wider public—and
the Google algorithms that reflect it—the far stranger notion is
reducing your special day to a bullet point in the week’s church
bulletin. Yet people do this.
When Adam Copeland and Megan Thorvilson decided to
get married at a Sunday service, they were thinking about having a wedding that honors God. “What does that better than
Sunday morning worship?” asks Adam (yet another ordained
minister). Their decision was also an intentional rejection of
the wedding industry’s expectations. Adam’s goal was to make
it clear that “we were all there in service to God and neighbor,
not mammon and one particular couple.”
“So often, weddings are out of control,” says Angel Sanchez,
who married Andrew Youngman at a Sunday service. “All of
the pageantry and consumerism can strip away the true meaning, which, for us, is a living, breathing covenant with God and
with each other.” The idea of a truly open guest list also
appealed to Angel: “I loved knowing that anyone could walk in
on that Sunday and be a part of our wedding.”
Jodi Montgomery recalls that “there were at least two couples
who were attending church for the first time” the day she and
Ben Baker got married during worship. “Imagine their surprise.”
I did try to imagine it, and I realized that my first reaction
would be to feel very out of place, casually dressed at a
stranger’s wedding. But as it sank in that this was indeed a public worship service—and that I was welcome there—I think it
would feel just right to witness someone’s wedding in the context of something as meaningful as the Sunday assembly.
“I liked the idea of getting married on Sunday morning,”
says my friend Bob Francis, “because I think marriage itself is
lived in the everyday, not on the mountaintop.”
Whatever else Sunday worship is, it’s something that happens all the time. So when Bob and Yvette Schock were planning their wedding, Bob liked the idea of “having the marriage
happen during something as routine as weekly worship rather
T
here’s at least one way, however, that such a wedding
remains unlike an ordinary church service: it usually isn’t
fully public. While I doubt any of us liturgi-couples would
have turned away the odd wedding crasher, even the churchiest
weddings tend to be planned with a carefully crafted guest list in
mind. And ultimately, good worship is never by invitation only.
Yes, a lot of couples issue open invitations to the ceremony;
some churches require this. Yet add this basic hospitality question to our whole line of thinking so far—the importance of
community, the focus on the gospel, the comparison between
marriage and baptism—and the logical conclusion is clear: sooner or later, you’re going to end up at a Sunday morning wedding.
Or more precisely, at a wedding that takes place within a
regularly scheduled service. When I searched for “Sunday
morning wedding,” Google didn’t catch my drift. Instead, I got
a lot of advice about how to save on vendors or book a desirable room by choosing a less popular day. On one forum, someone asked about etiquette for a wedding within a regular service; her respondents didn’t seem to comprehend the question.
25
ily for their space, and that the couple and their families
may have saved thousands of dollars that could be put to
better use during their lifelong discipleship to Jesus.
than some whitewashed, catered event.” To Bob, a “special
event” wedding seemed symbolically off.
Bob’s emphasis on mundanity points as well to something else:
a wedding doesn’t actually have to cost a small fortune. The problem with the wedding industry is not just its relentless focus on
you and your personal dreams and tastes; it’s that it exists specifically to sell you this vision, at the highest trim level it can. A positive take on the mundane presents an alternative to more easily
monetized ideas like the magical or the glamorous: a wedding is
something that happens every day, right here in the real world.
Weddings are part of life as it is actually lived—much like
gathering for word and meal. Financial constraints may seem
distinct from liturgical concerns as an angle on weddings, but
they work together here. As we’ve seen, downsizing the wedding industry’s emphasis on a two-character fairy tale is a theological issue. It’s about redirecting our gaze toward Christ’s
work through word, table, and assembly. It’s about embracing
the idea that a church wedding is about worship, not a one-day
immersion in finery and opulence.
In a 2011 blog post, Taylor Burton-Edwards, director of worship resources for the United Methodist Church, took a pastoral approach to this subject, offering the Sunday-morning
wedding as a way to give people permission to bypass weddingindustry madness. He concluded:
Burton-Edwards doesn’t propose tightening restrictions on
Saturday weddings, and I wouldn’t either. But I wonder what it
would take to nudge expectations of church weddings in a
churchier direction. When people’s lives grow deeper liturgical
roots, perhaps there is space to nurture an attitude more like
that of the Catholic couple who wouldn’t show up at the
church expecting a blank creative slate. Maybe a few more
people will start to expect church with a wedding in it instead
of a personalized wedding with (perhaps) a dose of church.
This won’t always mean pursuing the Sunday-morning option,
and it might not even mean pushing a typical Sunday order, with
the marriage vows filling the baptism slot. For some it might
mean preserving the (also very old) order more typical of weddings—but with a higher priority on communion, a substantive
and gospel-focused sermon, and multiple Bible readings and congregational songs. Maybe it’s simply about having church, about
somehow conceiving of the day primarily in these terms.
If a church wedding is an everyday function of the life of worship, can it also be special? Chrysostom said that it’s the gathered
worshipers that make a church holy. For people formed by worship,
perhaps the same could be said of what makes a church wedding
special. Jodi Montgomery summarizes her Sunday ceremony as “a
church service that just happened to also be a wedding. And that
made it special to us. We wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
I can’t help but imagine that weddings might rise a considerable bit on the pastor’s preferred list, that congregations
might feel much more empowered rather than used primar-
W h e n m y p a ris h i o n e r g o t o rd a i n e d o n l i n e
Blessings all around
by Katherine Willis Pershey
IT WAS THE kind of voice mail that gives a pastor
pause. Allison didn’t quite sound like she was in crisis, but as
she requested a call back I could tell that something was bothering her. After a day of phone tag she caught me at home. By
that time my concern and curiosity had escalated, so I set down
my onion and chopping knife to take the call.
There was no crisis, but there was a conundrum. Close friends
of Allison were getting married. They had asked her husband to
be the best man in the wedding, and—in a far more surprising
invitation—they asked Allison to officiate at the ceremony. She
was honored, flattered, and profoundly uncomfortable. She’d
accepted the invitation on the spot, assuming that there must be
some sort of process in place for a person who is neither a judge
nor a clergyperson to obtain credentials to perform weddings.
There is such a process: a person can become either a judge
or a clergyperson. No one has invented a fast track to judicial
authority, but thanks to the Universal Life Church, anyone
who agrees to “do only that which is right” can get ordained
online for free. After all, the ULC “wants you to pursue your
spiritual beliefs without interference from any outside agency,
including government or church authority.”
Clergy—real clergy—are notoriously agitated by the ULC
and the countless esteemed colleagues it churns out. (“You will
receive notification of your ordination status by e-mail.
Ordinations are conducted several times each week, so normally you will hear from us within a day or two.”)
It’s not exactly territorialism we pastors feel. We’re still the
ones signing the marriage licenses of our own parishioners;
26
many of the weddings these ULC “ministers” officiate would otherwise have taken place at courthouses. And while the reaction
may be about pride, it’s an understandable pride. A seminarytrained pastor—who faithfully endured her denomination’s
ordination process, who dutifully adheres to her regional adjudicatory’s continuing education requirements—reports that she
was recently asked at a wedding reception if she’d gotten
ordained online. As if! Clergy are generalists, but weddings are
one of our few specialized functions. Furthermore, we offer premarital counseling! Surely we are not entirely replaceable.
A
llison felt some consternation at the prospect of a
ULC ordination. This was, I’ll admit, a balm to my ego
and music to my ears. She explained that she has a
deep respect for the office of the clergy. Reducing the ordination process to an exchange of e-mails seemed to her like more
than a cheapening of the vocation; it was a mockery of it.
What’s more, Allison is an adult convert to the United Church
of Christ. Her own sense of religious identity would be compromised by the ruse of joining the ULC as a so-called religious leader. And yet it was such an honor to be asked by her
friends that she couldn’t bear the thought of refusing.
I suggested that she might ask her friends to have a private
legal ceremony with a judge, after which she could preside over
a public blessing and exchange of vows that subtly excluded
legalities. She agreed that this could be a solution. Then she
trailed off, her ambivalence apparent.
I realized at that moment that Allison wasn’t looking for my
help in finding a way out of doing what her friends were asking. What she wanted—even if she did not yet know it—was my
© Staras
by reminding her that even American Marriage Ministries—a
less polemical alternative to the Universal Life Church, founded by actual religious professionals—must call itself a church
and issue ordinations, because that is what most states require.
But we didn’t just talk religion and politics and culture. We
also talked about the role of the church and marriage in our
own lives. I was privileged, as I so often am in my work as a
congregational minister, to hear Allison’s story. Most important, we prayed together. It was one of the most enjoyable and
meaningful conversations I’ve shared with a parishioner.
Days after the newlyweds departed for their honeymoon,
Allison sent me a long note detailing her foray into my world.
I laughed at this classic clergywoman moment:
Could I bless a decision to
be ordained online?
I was told by a 20-year-old sound expert that I would have a
lapel-clipped mic. He said it was easy to use and then asked
where I would like the small mic and the garage-door-openersize sound pack to be clipped. I smiled at him and said nothing.
I was wearing a form-fitting, boat-neck, silk dress with no pockets. There was a long silence. Then I said kindly, “Please make
a suggestion of how this can work.” He shook his head and said
twice, “Um, I have never had this happen.” I took a deep
breath and said, “Do you mean you always clip this to a man in
a suit?” and he nodded. Alrighty. I resolved that I would clip it
to my binder. Because at that moment there was one thing I
knew for sure—a woman CAN wear a dress and use a mic.
blessing. Not my permission, not my acquiescence. My blessing.
I often underestimate the inherent authority that I have as
a member of the clergy. Yes, I preach and baptize and consecrate, but as a pastor in a tradition with congregational polity,
I rarely have a vote. Whatever pastoral authority I possess, I
don’t wave it around for the world or my parish to see. So the
question I proceeded to ask did not come naturally to me. In
fact, I felt a bit like I was impersonating the pope as I haltingly asked Allison if she would like for me to grant her my blessing. Her answer was swift and relieved: yes.
I offered to help Allison think through the wedding liturgy,
and she gratefully accepted. When we met several weeks later,
our conversation touched on a constellation of related issues as
well. We considered the causes and ramifications of the growing
trend of couples enlisting friends or family to perform wedding
ceremonies. We talked about the role of the church in a postChristendom society. We lamented some of the ways marriage
has been and is being transformed, and we celebrated others.
We noted the peculiar custom of vesting legal power in otherwise strictly parochial authorities. I tried to assuage Allison’s
lingering guilt about having sent off for her ordination papers
I cringed knowingly at Allison’s minor mistake of forgetting
to instruct the wedding guests to be seated, having made the
same mistake during my first wedding. I nodded as she marveled at the honor of it all—being a part of such a momentous
moment, not only for the bride and groom but for the community that gathered to bear witness and pledge support.
And finally, I rejoiced that officiating at this wedding had
the same effect on Allison as officiating at weddings invariably
has on me. “Is this selfish?” she wondered. “One of the greatest
Katherine Willis Pershey is associate pastor at First Congregational Church in
Western Springs, Illinois.
27
someone dare ask me at a wedding reception if I obtained my
credentials online, I would have to concentrate very hard on
not kicking that person in the shins. I believe that what clergy
offer—spiritual guidance, pastoral care, accountability to an
imperfect but holy church—is valuable.
Yet even though I didn’t perform this particular wedding
ceremony, I did manage to offer those same gifts to Allison.
She gladly received them and passed them on, in a sort of newfangled priesthood of all believers.
Her thank-you note included this Wordsworth quote: “All
that we behold is full of blessings.” Inside she wrote, “Thank
you for beholding, providing, sharing, and helping me participate in blessings.” I could say the same to her.
benefits of this experience is that it brought Dave and me together in such a meaningful way,” she said, referring to her husband.
He helped me write and proofread the ceremony, and in so doing
we found ourselves having many long conversations about what
love is, why we value our marriage, what we admire about other
relationships, and how we can support marriage. And we talked
about the strengths and weaknesses of our own marriage. I
pulled out our own vows and letters we wrote when we were
engaged. Lovely. It was just a lovely moment in our marriage.
I remain ambivalent about the rise of the nonprofessional
wedding officiant and the sidelining of the clergy. Should
C h a ll e n g es o f i n te r fa i t h w e d d i n g s
Mixed and matched
by Celeste Kennel-Shank
WHEN AN INTERFAITH
grounds. “The ceremony is an opportunity for the couple to
explore and to talk out loud about things that they might not
explain to one another,” she said. “I’m most concerned that
the couple be intentional about religion or religions in their
lives and that they know that religious communities and religions can be a resource from which they can draw throughout
their lives.”
Shin looks to symbols to help the couple find their connections to the traditions. “You find there’s a lot of commonality” in
symbols, she said, noting, for example, that many traditions use
the image of a strand of rope to express unity and strength. “I’m
fascinated at how elemental some of the symbols are.”
Symbols can create coherence and meaning for the couple
and the congregation, she said. “They might be from different
traditions, but people quickly and easily grasp onto the meaning
of symbols, and are moved by them. . . . By examining and carefully integrating symbols from different religions, you can create
a very emotionally coherent service.”
couple told pastor
Joyce Shin that they’d like their wedding to include a Hindu ritual involving fire, she wasn’t sure at first whether they would be
able to conduct it safely in church. But it turned out the ritual
required only “a flame,” which served as a witness to the marriage, said Shin, associate pastor for congregational life at Fourth
Presbyterian Church in Chicago. “We all have candles and light
and flame.”
Clergy who participate in interfaith marriage ceremonies
have to maintain a delicate balance, respecting the couple’s differing religious traditions and the concerns of the two families
while staying faithful to their own religious commitments.
Interfaith weddings raise issues about a particular faith tradition’s view of interfaith marriage and about who may or is willing to officiate or co-officiate (most mainline Protestant bodies
trust the discretion of the pastor in these matters).
Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How
Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America, found that the
rate of interfaith unions increased from roughly 20 percent
before the 1960s to 45 percent for couples married between
2000 and 2010. (Her definition of interfaith marriages includes
Catholics married to Protestants, mainline Protestants married
to evangelicals, and the religiously affiliated married to the
religiously unaffiliated.) Among interfaith couples, more than
half had a wedding officiant from only one religion, and 43 percent had a civil ceremony. Only 4 percent had officiants from
two different faiths.
As when planning any wedding, Shin begins planning an
interfaith ceremony by learning about the couple’s backChristian Century May 28, 2014
W
hen it comes to choosing sacred texts for the service,
Shin said, “I ask them to select passages that are full
of imagery” rather than those that “are more opaque
or abstract or legalistic.”
She encourages couples to consider the responses of family
and community members. “Religious faith is all about trust and
loyalty,” she said. “Loyalty in a marriage means also valuing those
relationships.” She wants the ceremony to respect the integrity of
the traditions that had handed down the symbols and rituals.
“I’m not someone who’ll say, ‘This is your wedding, do it the
28
way you want.’ I really want them to take seriously the relationships they have with other people.”
For example, including the Eucharist in the service could
exclude one partner’s family from participating. Shin recalls one
bride who had converted to Christianity after being raised a
Buddhist and who wanted the Eucharist at her wedding.
“It was really important for her to say that this was a Christian
marriage, and I think that her family lovingly understood,”
though they did not participate.
Conversations with parents are a big part of interfaith wedding planning for Jamal Rahman, imam and cofounder of
Interfaith Community Sanctuary in Seattle. In most cases, Muslim parents want a separate Muslim wedding, he said, so “the
Muslim ceremony is totally Muslim.”
Rahman is one of the few imams willing to co-officiate at an
interfaith ceremony. In conversations with parents, he stresses
commonalities between the religions. He said he is usually able
to address the parents’ concerns.
In some ways, the Muslim ceremony, nikah, is compatible with
other rituals or ceremonies, whether combined with others or held
separately. “An Islamic wedding is basically a contract which must
© Nigel Euling
marriage is something many Conservative and Reform Jewish
rabbis also do. The Rabbinical Assembly of the United
Synagogue of Conservative Judaism prohibits rabbis from officiating at interfaith weddings. However, a USCJ document
states that an interfaith couple “should know that they have
open-door access to the rabbi and the cantor.”
At the Union for Reform Judaism website, Rabbi David M.
Frank of Cardiff, California, explains that body’s official position
on intermarriage: the rabbinic conference opposes officiating at
interfaith weddings but says some rabbis believe “that interfaith
officiation benefits the Jewish people.” In the Reform movement’s rabbinate, “autonomy is granted to each of us to wrestle
with the claims of God and Torah upon our lives.”
Frank noted that Jews “are shedding Jewish affiliation as
assimilation increases,” which is a reason for Jews to welcome
interfaith families. “This is the great struggle of our day: how to
balance perpetuation of Judaism with perpetuation of the
Jewish people themselves!”
Rabbi Denise L. Eger of Congregation Kol Ami, a Reform
synagogue in West Hollywood, California, has performed Jewish
wedding ceremonies for interfaith couples but will not co-officiate
with clergy of another religion. The wedding ceremonies of different faiths “are not the same theologically,” she said. “To me that’s
just making blender religion.”
She finds the goal of such ceremonies is “often to soothe family tensions” rather than work through spiritual and cultural differences. Holding a Jewish wedding service helps the non-Jewish
partner to understand Jewish faith and culture.
Most of the interfaith couples Eger has worked with include
one partner of a Christian background, while a few have been
Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim. In many cases they have held separate ceremonies to express each of the two faith traditions.
Eger has also officiated for same-sex couples, in which case one
person is often from a more conservative religious background.
Many of them are “really happy to have a clergyperson because
they’ve been excluded from their tradition,” she said.
In premarital counseling, she helps couples talk about “the
cultural gap that happens between faith traditions.” A key role
of clergy, Eger said, is to help couples build trust, “which is the
building block of any marriage.”
Symbols from different religious
traditions can give coherence
to an interfaith service.
have at least two witnesses in the presence of God,” Rahman said.
The ceremony includes a recitation of Qur’anic verses; a sermon; the mahr, or gift to the bride, which can be financial or
emotional; and a ritual of acceptance. He has done the ritual “at
probably 90 percent of these interfaith weddings,” Rahman said.
“The bride must say ‘I accept’ aloud and loudly, three times.”
The ritual is often playful. The imam acts as a go-between: he
goes to the groom and says, “You love this woman, but that
doesn’t mean she agrees to marry you. What can you offer her?”
The groom might then pledge to fill the room with bars of
chocolate or offer gifts of silver and gold. The bride declines
each time. The groom then tells the imam to say, “The only thing
that I can offer her is my heart.” The bride accepts three times,
and then the couple signs the marriage contract.
Rahman receives calls from all over the United States and as
far away as Australia from interfaith couples looking for an
imam. Though Muslims are not required to have an imam for a
wedding, they often prefer it, especially in the case of interfaith
weddings, Rahman observed.
Muslims are instructed in the Qur’an to marry believing men
and women, not those considered to be idolaters, worshiping
other gods. Another verse in the Qur’an gives only men explicit
permission to marry women of the People of the Book, usually
understood as Jews and Christians. As Rahman sees it, however,
“just because women are not mentioned does not mean that
they are restricted. Women have equal rights.”
Grappling with their tradition’s understandings of interfaith
29
T h e S p i ri t - f i ll e d a r t o f S awa i C h i n n awo n g
Painting Pentecost
by Amos Yong and Jonathan A. Anderson
OVER THE PAST CENTURY the Christian
center of gravity has been shifting from the Euro-American
West to the Global South, where the prevailing forms of
Christianity are Pentecostal and charismatic in character. It’s
not just that these are the fastest growing denominations. More
significantly, the broad range of Christian traditions—including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches around
the world—are being touched and invigorated by Pentecostal
and charismatic renewal.
One place where we can see expression of this is in art. The
work of Thai artist Sawai Chinnawong, for example, gives a
glimpse into the renewing presence of the Holy Spirit in other
settings around the globe. In his painting Pentecost (on p. 31),
Chinnawong depicts Acts 2:1–4. On the Jewish day of
Pentecost all of Jesus’ disciples are gathered in one place when
a sound like a violent wind fills the house, and “they saw what
seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest
on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled
them” (Acts 2:3–4, NIV). The text links the tongues of fire with
a proliferation of speech in other tongues, reminding us of
Jesus’ pronouncement that when the power of the Holy Spirit
comes upon the disciples it will propel them as witnesses from
Jerusalem throughout Judea and Samaria and even “to the
ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Although many artists have depicted this event, Chinnawong does so in surprising ways. He situates the Pentecost
event within the traditions of Buddhist painting. The bright
red and gold colors, along with the triple-peaked blue sawtooth sinthao line at the top of the image, identify a holy space.
In Thai painting it is common to see the Buddha seated in the
center of this space, often with his head surrounded by a stylized flame similar to the one filling the center of Pentecost.
But where one might expect to find the singular figure of
Buddha, instead one sees a community organized around a
massive holy fire that is repeated in the small tongues of fire
burning above each of the disciples’ heads. The Holy Spirit
fills the space and the disciples, burning intensely but not as a
consuming fire.
Paintings of this subject traditionally associate the
tongues of fire with the tops of the disciples’ heads.
Chinnawong borrows this convention but seems to emphasize that the outpouring of the Spirit is filling the disciples,
enlivening their minds and their bodies. They gesture and
“speak” (speech is conveyed in painting by bodily motion
more than by open mouths) with a joy that is striking in its
individuality and its commonality: their speech is an array of
colorful patterns and gestures all vitalized and unified by the
Spirit.
Chinnawong’s painting leads us to reflect and reconsider
the implications of this outpouring as it relates to the global
dynamics of Christian thought and practice. It is the Holy
Spirit that propels Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth,
and it is through the Spirit that people encounter God existentially and historically. Christian theology also ought to have
Tongues of fire blend with
Buddhist iconography.
such a starting point and acknowledge that it is the Holy Spirit
that makes our encounters with God possible. Renewal movements realign traditional theological approaches by bringing
the person and work of the Spirit into the foreground and
reminding us that the Son and the Father come into focus
through the Spirit.
S
awai Chinnawong is an ethnic Mon who was born in
Burma and raised in Thailand in a Theravada Buddhist
home. After losing both parents he moved to Bangkok to
live with two older sisters. He decided to study art, and during
his time as a student he became deeply curious about a
Christian community located near his house. At age 23 he was
baptized into the Christian church. For more than two decades
he has devoted his artistic practice to painting biblical (or theological) images, while acknowledging and embracing his own
cultural context. As Chinnawong says:
I believe Jesus Christ is present in every culture, and I have
chosen to celebrate his presence in our lives through Thai
traditional cultural forms. . . . My belief is that Jesus did not
choose just one people to hear his Word but chose to make
his home in every human heart. And just as his Word may
be spoken in every language, so the visual message can be
shared in the beauty of the many styles of artistry around
the world. (ArtWay.com)
30
COURTESY OF SAWAI CHINNAWONG
Chinnawong’s work and beliefs have been controversial.
The pastor who baptized him, for example, told Chinnawong
that his artwork was “Buddhist” and that he must reconsider
his entire approach to painting now that he was a Christian.
Chinnawong responded by abandoning painting to attend seminary at the McGilvary Faculty of Theology at Payap
University in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. In this period
of his life, the language of Christian belief was incompatible
with the modes of visual meaning that he knew—or at least all
those that were indigenously Thai. This changed in 1984 when
he attended a series of lectures on the history of Christian art
by Nalini Jayasuriya, a Sri Lankan Christian artist and professor who focused on Asian examples of Christian art. The lectures stimulated Chinnawong’s imagination, launched him
back into his artistic practice, and persuaded him that he must
live into the gospel as a Thai artist.
In Pentecost, Chinnawong’s adoption and adaptation of
Thai Buddhist imagery are evident in several ways. In Thai
painting gold and red are strongly associated with the holy:
red is associated with a sacred life force, while gold (particularly in the form of fire) signifies a blazing divine energy.
Chinnawong saturates the outpouring of the Spirit with these
colors.
The gestures and postures of the disciples are also drawn
from Thai painting. We might associate their gestures with the
ancient orans posture of prayer (raised open hands) depicted
in early Christian Roman paintings, but hand gestures are
also common in Thai Buddhist iconography. Many of the disciples’ gestures resemble the Buddhist abhaya mudra—a sign
of spiritual power, fearlessness, and reassurance often seen in
images of the standing Buddha. Chinnawong thus uses a symbol of liberation from fear to articulate the courage and boldness associated with the filling of the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:13,
29). The upward-facing open hands of the varada mudra are
an expression of compassion, giving, and willful acceptance.
In the upper right corner of the painting, one disciple touches his index finger to his thumb. This suggests vitarka mudra,
the gesture of wise teaching. In addition to hand gestures, the
dancing of the disciples is reminiscent of images of flying
deities and holy men, which are ubiquitous in Thai Buddhist
painting. But here the energetic enlivenment depicted in
Buddhist “flyers” is reassigned to an earthy Spirit-filled joyful dance. In all of these examples, the Buddhist iconography
of spiritual power serves to illustrate the Spirit’s power filling
the church.
Thus in Chinnawong’s Pentecost the tongues of fire are
“articulated” in the visual language(s) of traditional Thai painting. As his painting comes from one end of the earth and this
essay from another, the many tongues of the Acts 2 event
invite theology in the third millennium to speak in the many
languages of the peoples, nations, and tribes of the world. And
this invitation points not only to the wide variety of verbal and
written languages around the globe but also to a range of visual, musical, and kinesthetic “languages” and forms of meaning.
For Chinnawong this includes the hope that Christian theology might be able to think eloquently within the visual vernacular of Thailand, notwithstanding the fact that this implies
OPEN TO THE SPIRIT: Sawai Chinnawong’s 1997 painting
Pentecost (acrylic on canvas) puts Christian disciples in the position and postures assumed by the Buddha in Thai Buddhist art.
speaking and thinking in visual grammars inherited from Thai
Buddhism.
B
eyond the presumed incorporation of Global South perspectives, the many tongues of Pentecost are not only
heard but also seen and felt. Chinnawong illustrates this
in the way he pictures the exuberance of the disciples as they
are filled with the Spirit, but even more significant is the very
fact that a painting is the site for Chinnawong’s theology. The
throbbing red visual field, the winding linear forms of the disciples against the otherwise geometrical composition, the play
between symmetry and asymmetry—these things carry meaning in ways that are different than in verbalized theology. For
much of Christian history, visual art has functioned alongside
verbal and written commentaries as a means of facilitating exegesis and theological interpretation of scriptural texts (and, like
Amos Yong is a professor of theology and dean at Regent University’s
School of Divinity. Jonathan A. Anderson is an artist and associate professor of art at Biola University. This article is adapted from their forthcoming book, Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global
Christianity (Baylor University Press).
31
differentiate Christianity from the Western cultural forms that
written commentaries, with varying degrees of effectiveness
have often carried it, the unease that Chinnawong’s paintings
and orthodoxy). The benefits of employing images in scriptural
provoke might be of real value. By reimagining scriptural narexegesis reside in their capacities to drive readers toward conratives in a Thai visual form, he can help Thai Christians realcrete considerations of the realities behind the text, to facilitate
ize that their rich cultural heritage does not lie beyond the
empathetic and affective participation in the text, and to sensiintelligibility of the radically many tongues of Pentecost.
tize readers to how a text might operate in poetic and aesthetic
For entirely different reasons, Chinnawong’s image can
registers of meaning. A sometimes overly intellectualized and
also be challenging for Western viewers. On the one hand, in
conceptualized Western theological tradition can benefit from
the context of the high art world this
opening up to other aesthetic modalipainting would be dismissed as didacties of meaning.
This week’s On Art (p. 47) features
tic, beholden to the operations of
For Thai viewers, this painting genwhat David Morgan calls “visual
erates meaning in a very challenging
a rendering of the scene of Pentecost
piety” (from his book, Visual Piety).
way. The iconography and symbolism
by Giotto di Bondone, one of the
In the context of Western churches, on
used to discuss a holy, enlightened, and
great painters of the Italian
the other hand, the challenge of this
fully alive human person within a
Renaissance.
painting is in its unfamiliarity. The colBuddhist framework is here redeors, clothing, gestures, setting, and
ployed to discuss holiness, enablestylizations all deviate from (or heavily revise) Euroment, and enlivenment within a Christian understanding. This
American ideas of what a painting of Pentecost should look
is a provocative strategy, and, as already noted, it is controverlike. This disruption of expectations and our subsequent
sial with fellow Thai Christians. In his essay, “The Art of Sawai
scrambling to make sense of the image is valuable: it may lead
Chinnawong,” William Yoder has noted that because the Thai
us to imagine and interpret the Pentecost event with a fresh
Christian community often perceives Chinnawong’s art as
alertness to the text.
“Buddhist” and therefore believes “good” Christians should
Looking at the Acts 2 narrative through Chinnawong’s eyes
shun it, Thai Christians are much less likely to accept his Thai
might lead us to realize that our familiarity with the text has
formulations and expressions of Christian concepts.
domesticated the strangeness that the original readers felt. On the
However, as Thai Christians continue to disentangle and
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32
disciples toward each other and opens them outward toward us
on this side of the picture plane. While the sinthao line denotes
holy space in Buddhist art, in this context it may also be a stylized mountain range, suggesting that Pentecost opens ever outward across global and historical expanses. The very act of projecting Pentecost into a modern Thai vernacular implies the
outpouring of the Spirit across temporal, spatial, and sociocultural localities, even “to the ends of the earth” and to the ends
of the ages. The day of Pentecost thus historically anticipates a
day when people of many tongues, tribes, and nations will gather around the throne of God.
The Spirit’s outpouring exists not only on the day of
Pentecost. Lives are continuously being touched through the
Spirit’s empowered witness (Acts 1:8). Chinnawong invites
others to be filled with the Spirit whom he has experienced. If
the Spirit’s outpouring did not include Thai Buddhists 2,000
years ago, today the Spirit is touching many Thai people and
may touch many more.
There are new opportunities for Christian theology in the
third millennium if it takes seriously the renewal movement
around the world. Doing so invites us to see afresh the Spirit of
Pentecost introducing all peoples to the Son in order to reconcile them to the Father and enabling witness to the Son and the
Father through many tongues, cultures, and peoples. God is
empowering human beings to participate in and perform the
truth proclaimed by the Spirit of Christ.
one hand, we can think about how what Acts 2:2–4 communicates
was first encountered—audibly (sound rushing), visually (fire
alighting), perceptually (tongues of fire resting), and verbally
(human tongues speaking). Chinnawong reminds us that behind
the narrative are real, embodied encounters with the living God.
On the other hand, think about how those from the synagogue must have reacted to the fact that in addition to Jews
and proselytes, “Cretans and Arabs” were receiving the Spirit
(Acts 2:9–11). If we contemporary Christians doubt that Thai
Buddhist cultural dynamics can be appropriate mediators of
the gospel message, we may need to remind ourselves that
some who had traditional views of God’s election of the Jewish
people were aghast that even Cretans, who were considered to
be “liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons” (Tit. 1:12, NRSV), were
“speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11).
L
ast but not least, these considerations lead to the insistence that the many tongues of Pentecost exist not for
their own sakes but for enabling Christ’s disciples to
declare the wonders of God (Acts 2:11) and bear witness to the
ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). The sights, sounds, and words emanating from the Pentecost event are not just informative but
performative: disciples are moved into relationship with others
in anticipation of the coming reign of God.
Chinnawong’s Pentecost does not insist on depicting the
event exactly as it unfolded in Acts 2. Instead it’s a distinctly
modern Thai visualization of the event—
or a distinctly modern Thai reiteration of
the event. Whereas Pentecost is almost
Faith in the Face of Empire
always depicted as a gathering of 12
The Bible through Palestinian Eyes
Jewish male apostles (a symbolic alluMITRI RAHEB
sion to the church as the new or reconstiHere is a challenging view of how the reality of
tuted Israel), Chinnawong presents a
empire shapes the context of the biblical story
community of 11 Thai Christians, includand the ongoing experience of Middle East coning both men and women and even one
flict. For “the people of the land,” those who
child. This highlights the “all” who were
endure from one empire to the next, the question,
gathered on the day of Pentecost, which
“Where is God?” carries practical and theological
certainly included women and children.
urgency.
978-1-62698-065-5 176pp softcover $20
It also prompts us to see this as
another event altogether: the outpouring of the Spirit in a room in 21stFrom Enemy To Friend
century Bangkok rather than first-century
Jewish Wisdom and the Pursuit of Peace
Jerusalem. Chinnawong sets the scene
RABBI AMY EILBERG
here not out of disregard for the historiAncient Jewish traditions offer a guide to
cal particularity of the original event but
reconciliation and peace building in our
as a means of imagining and visually
lives and our world. Eilberg blends ancient
praying for the Spirit’s presence in his
Jewish sacred texts on peacebuilding, real life
own historical moment. For Chinnadescriptions of conflict engagement, and conwong, the Holy Spirit’s filling is not isotemporary conflict theory.
lated to a single event, a particular
978-1-62698-061-7 296pp softcover $25
moment, or one place but may be
repeated at any time and place and for
any people. Thus the circle of believers
From your bookseller or direct
O R B I S B O O KS
being filled with the Spirit is repeatedly
Maryknoll, NY 10545
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repopulated and renewed.
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As in the Pentecost painting, the
movement of the Spirit both turns the
33
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by M. Craig Barnes
Stubborn hope
I WAS LEADING a meeting of the vice presidents of
our seminary, but I could think about only one thing—my
teenagers. My wife and I had been up late the previous night
having the “these are our values” talk with one of them. Again.
We have two fabulous sons who are doing well at navigating
their way through adolescence. The talk the night before was not
because our son had done something wrong, but because he was
overwhelmed by the messages of his teenage culture that conflict with those of our family and church. This tears at his soul.
There were always good kids and dangerous kids in high
school. Drugs and booze have been around forever. The back
seats of cars have long been used for things other than carrying passengers. And this isn’t the first generation to feel pressure about getting into a good college. I get all of that. It has
always been hard to be a teenager, but today there are new
threats. Here are just a few of them.
Previous generations of students didn’t worry about being
indiscriminately shot during a killing spree or running into a
terrorist explosion during a marathon. We are now way beyond
fretting over getting beaten up by the school bully.
When today’s teenagers are “alone” they can constantly text
their friends, post on Facebook, surf the net, watch videos, or
listen to music—all from their phones. They are no longer left
with periods of quiet where all they can do is read, ponder,
brood, imagine, or pray. I worry about these distractions to the
holy “still small voice” that calls to young lives.
When birthdays and Christmas celebrations come around,
my wife and I struggle to find presents for our kids because
they already have everything they want. Frankly, so do we.
What happens to the soul that doesn’t know how to live with
desire, hope, saving, and waiting? Other teenagers in our society do not have everything they need, never mind want. My
children see that and have no idea how to fix this problem.
The schools of law, medicine, business, and divinity are all
struggling to find jobs for their graduates. But the cost of
attending these schools, on top of an undergraduate education
that costs up to $60,000 a year, will saddle these graduates with
crippling student loans. There’s lots of debt but a dearth of
jobs. It’s a story that’s told over and over, and every kid going
off to college knows it. This next generation doesn’t go to
school thinking that it will secure a better future for them.
We didn’t used to think that the fashion models in catalogues should look as if they’re overwhelmed with despair. But
today being sad is so cool it can sell.
Today’s teenagers have never seen a federal government
that does more than engage in political stalemates. They have
no Kennedy who can inspire them to ask what they can do for
the country, no King who can make them want to march in the
streets for a dream. Instead they have grown up in a post-9/11
culture that has done everything it can to make them afraid.
And they know that we have done more damage to the
environment than can ever be repaired.
What fascinates me is how many teenagers refuse to buy the
marketed temptations to despair and fear. They go to work camps,
volunteer at homeless shelters, plan careers in social work, and
study Arabic in the hopes of listening to someone who is different.
Some of them will finish college and come to seminary. I am
impressed by our students’ missional commitments. When they
applied for admission, none of them were confused by the lack
of jobs in ministry; they remind me that they’ve heard only
bleak forecasts for their future since they were teenagers. So
they don’t think about getting into a good career. If they can’t
find work in a church, they’ll start a church or work for a nonprofit. They’ll find a way.
Youth don’t trust big ideas,
but they have a quiet hope.
This next generation has little interest in our debates about
sexuality and church property, and they demonstrate an extraordinary comfort with difference. Since they’ve never known the
metanarrative that idolized June and Ward Cleaver, they seem
to live easily with a society filled with many narratives coming
from people of different colors, religions, and orientations. They
don’t trust anything big or meta, but they believe strongly in the
small and winsome communities they create for themselves.
This refusal to despair is seen not only in those who hang
out in church youth groups or who are looking for a service
project to put on their college applications. A quiet hope
abounds in this generation. It seems to me that its members are
saying, “We get it that our future is filled with obstacles, but
we’re just going to keep moving.” And that has always been the
best response any generation could ever make to the mess that
an earlier generation placed in their hands.
M. Craig Barnes is president of Princeton Theological Seminary.
35
American gulag
by Timothy Renick
T
he numbers are disturbing. More
than 2.2 million inmates currently fill prisons in the United
States. One out of every 143 Americans
is incarcerated—seven times the rate in
Europe—and one in five of these prisoners is serving a sentence of 25 years or
more.
Not only is the size of the American
prison population growing, it is increasingly skewed racially. African-American
males make up 6 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of prisoners, and
black men on average receive longer
prison sentences than do their white
counterparts. According to one estimate,
“the odds of an African-American man
going to prison today are higher than the
odds that he will go to college, get married, or go into the military.” Evidence of
racial profiling in the justice system persists. In New York, for example, police
made 684,330 stops in 2011; 80 percent
involved people of color.
Meanwhile, one in nine government
employees in the United States now
works in corrections. A growing number
of states now spend more money annually on prisons than they do on education,
yet prison overcrowding is chronic, and
rehabilitation programs for inmates are
being downsized or eliminated.
This sobering picture of the American
penal system provides the context for
Inferno, the latest work by Robert
Ferguson, a professor of law, literature,
and criticism at Columbia University.
According to Ferguson, we have poured
immense resources into a justice system
that has woefully failed to deliver justice.
“Even educated Americans do not know
what they are doing when they want to
punish, but they nonetheless hold passionate views about it,” he writes. In fact,
the majority of Americans and their legislators have pushed for harsher punishments and less leniency, then turned a
blind eye to the evidence that these
approaches are failing.
Even worse, Americans have also
turned a blind eye to the increasing levels of inhumanity in their penal system.
Using a combination of legal theory, philosophy, and literary examples, Ferguson
argues that we have become willfully and
culpably indifferent to the conflation of
pain and punishment that characterizes
modern American prisons. “Let them
rot in jail” is not just an expression. It
has become the reality. According to
Ferguson, “by keeping those in prison
securely hidden from public view, . . .
society confirms that it does not want to
think about whatever suffering takes
place behind jailhouse walls even if it
knows that humiliation, discomfort,
crime, and physical abuse are prevalent
there.”
Take, for example, the rise in supermaximum prisons in the United States.
As recently as 1984, the nation had one
supermax federal penitentiary, located in
Marion, Illinois. Today there are 57. In
supermax prisons, Ferguson tells us, the
“dynamics of domination, control, subordination, and submission are fundamentally different from those in regular maximum security prisons.”
More than 20,000 supermax prisoners
are currently being held in solitary confinement for periods of at least a year
and often for much longer. Here, with
the use of video monitoring, sensory deprivation has been turned into an “art
form.” Prisoners have zero contact with
other prisoners and even with prison
staff. Cells are windowless, roughly ten
by 12 feet in size, have a steel toilet and
36
Inferno: An Anatomy of
American Punishment
By Robert A. Ferguson
Harvard University Press, 352 pp., $29.95
sink, and feature a trap door through
which food is passed without human contact. Exercise is one hour a day and
showers are once a week; both occur
with the prisoners in shackles and in isolation. Aggressive behavior in solitary
confinement has been known to result in
prisoners being given as many as eight
additional years in solitary—sentences
rendered by neither judge nor jury but
by penal officers.
Ironically, the practice of solitary confinement became common in the United
States after it was advocated by the
Quakers in the 1820s as a tool for rehabilitation—a progressive alternative to
mutilations, amputations, and the death
penalty. “The hope was that long periods
of introspection would help criminals
repent.”
However, many studies have shown
the devastating and permanent effects of
solitary confinement on the psyche of
the prisoner. As early as 1890, Supreme
Court justice Samuel Miller wrote:
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even short confinement,
into a semi-fatuous condition, from
which it was next to impossible to
arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed
suicide; while those who survived the
ordeal better are not generally
Timothy Renick is vice provost and professor of
religious studies at Georgia State University in
Atlanta.
Despite Justice Miller’s plea, the
Supreme Court ruled solitary confinement to be compatible with Eighth
Amendment protections against “cruel
and unusual punishment” and hence
constitutional. As a result, Ferguson
laments, we are left with a disturbing
paradox: “You are placed in solitary confinement because you have been found
to be mentally disturbed or physically
aggressive, and solitary disturbs you
more and makes you more aggressive.”
According to Ferguson, American
courts have been no more sympathetic
when it comes to prisoner humiliation,
overcrowding, and subhuman conditions. Federal courts dismissed damage
claims made by the incarcerated, for
example, when prison guards ordered
“prisoners to strip naked and performed
body cavity searches while members of
the opposite sex were present, . . . made
harassing comments to an inmate
because of his perceived sexual orientation, and ordered one prisoner to ‘tap
dance’ while naked.”
In Hudson v. Palmer, a 1984 case in
which a prison guard willfully destroyed
a prisoner’s personal effects “for no reason other than harassment” during a cell
search, the Supreme Court granted the
material facts but found in favor of the
prison guard, ruling that “society is not
prepared to recognize any subjective
expectation of privacy that a prisoner
might have.” Chief Justice Warren
Burger wrote for the majority, “So dangerous is prison life that correctional
officers deserve a free hand in monitoring it.”
Not only are prison guards largely
given a free hand by the courts, so too
are prison authorities. One inmate who
was serving time for credit card fraud
was placed with a population of prisoners doing time for violent crimes, was
repeatedly beaten and raped, and
became HIV positive. In the resulting
1994 case, Farmer v. Brennan, the Supreme Court remanded the case back
to the trial court with instructions.
These included: “An official’s failure to
alleviate significant risk that he should
have perceived but did not, while no
cause for commendation, cannot under
our cases be condemned as the infliction of punishment.” Justice David
Souter explained: “The Eight Amendment does not outlaw cruel and unusual conditions; it outlaws cruel and
unusual ‘punishments.’”
How have we arrived at this sorry
state of affairs? For Ferguson, the
Calvinist roots of the EuropeanAmerican psyche are a piece of the puzzle. “Unquenchable fire for the wicked is
our sole comfort,” John Calvin wrote. A
trained lawyer as well as Christian
Reformer, Calvin held that the human
race struggles under a deserved curse.
Even believers are “sheep destined for
the fire,” and all punishments meted out
to humans are righteous by definition.
Rehabilitation is neither mandated nor
possible.
For Ferguson, though, the ultimate
blame for the injustice and inhumanity
of the modern American prison system
is not Calvin’s but our own. As citizens,
we have failed to monitor what goes on
behind prison walls and willfully averted our eyes in order to preserve our
comfortable ways and to maintain a
public veneer of justice. Unlike Calvin,
Ferguson sees no righteousness in the
inferno that we have created.
MIssInG
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reformed and in most cases did not
recover sufficient mental activity to
be any subsequent service to the
community.
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4:29 PM P
that it was the “dawning of the Age of
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Then in the new millennium, pundits
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The Age of Evangelicalism:
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By Steven P. Miller
Oxford University Press, 240 pp., $24.95
T
he musical Hair may have been
great comedy when it was released
in 1967, but it was poor prophecy. The
spirit of the 1960s had audiences singing
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www.CongressOnUrbanMinistry.com
cal empires? In this short and brisk
book, historian Steven P. Miller maintains that evangelicalism marked an era
because it was enmeshed in how Americans conceived of the links between religion, politics, and the public.
The watershed moment was Watergate. It left a vacuum of moral leadership
and propelled the search for something
new. Almost like magic, a new type of
identity emerged—the born-again person. Unlike the biblical Nicodemus,
many Americans of the 1970s were anything but perplexed when they learned
that they must be, as Jesus explained,
born again. These individuals could be
found all over the American map. The
most obvious was Jimmy Carter, whose
born-again label helped launch him
toward the White House. There were
also singer-songwriter Bob Dylan,
misogynist essayist Eldridge Cleaver,
and Nixon tough guy Chuck Colson.
In the 1970s, evangelicalism had not
yet become tethered to conservative politics. Carter, a Democrat, received almost
50 percent of the evangelical vote (Nixon
had received 84 percent in 1972). The
evangelical left of Ron Sider and Jim
Wallis took shape in the 1970s too. In
that decade evangelicalism seemed noteworthy less for being conservative than
for being cool.
Then came Ronald Reagan. If 1976
was the year of the evangelical, then
1980 was the year of the evangelical
right. Televangelists Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson puffed Reagan. They
were thrilled when Reagan declared
1983 the year of the Bible, and they reveled in his 1984 book In God I Trust.
Evangelicals rallied to the work of
Francis Schaeffer and his attacks on secular humanism. The 1990s, though, were
a tough time for conservative evangelicals. They lost the presidency to Bill
Clinton and then failed to defeat him
even after yet another sex scandal. If
Reagan was the “Teflon president” on
whom nothing could stick, Clinton was
the comeback kid.
38
Then came George W. Bush. As
Miller points out, Reagan was the evangelicals’ president, but Bush was the
evangelical president. He became the
“de facto head of evangelicalism,” and
“faith-based initiatives” became popular. Bible study was not mandatory in
the White House, but it was not exactly
optional either. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, international relations
were discussed in terms of good and evil.
Americans flooded movie theaters to
watch The Passion of the Christ, in which
Jesus was whipped so many times they
were reduced to tears. “What would
Jesus do?” became a fashion statement,
and Christian musicians made big bucks.
All of this left Democrats scrambling to
bridge the God gap. Then Barack
Obama strode in, a young politician who
seemed to be able to address both secularists and evangelicals (or at least the
evangelical left).
Most of the above is common knowledge for those who pay attention. What
is novel about Miller’s book is the way
he positions evangelicalism as the foil for
other thinkers, movers, and shakers:
evangelicalism seemed so powerful and
ubiquitous that those outside the tent
felt compelled to address it. In the 1980s
the American Civil Liberties Union
attacked evangelicalism itself and not
just the legislation that evangelicals supported. The film Footloose set up the
conflict as generational and cultural. Is
dancing to 1980s music really that sinful?
Two broad new metaphors for the
United States emerged from considerations of evangelicalism: Richard John
Neuhaus’s “the naked public square”
and James Davison Hunter’s “culture
wars.” Then in the 21st century, evangelicalism provided fodder for comedians
like Jon Stewart and for new atheists like
Christopher Hitchens and Richard
Dawkins.
Miller’s designation of an “age
of evangelicalism” is important. For
decades historians have emphasized
evangelicalism’s cultural elements and
have approached it as a subculture. In
Funda mentalism and American Cul ture, George Marsden claimed that
what was a fundamentalist “coalition”
before 1925 became an evangelical
subculture after the Scopes trial. Joel
Carpenter followed evangelicalism
into the middle decades of the century,
when it became a “way of life.” Randall
Balmer explored it through travelogue
narratives of its summer camps, television shows, and new megachurches in
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. The
shift from “subculture” to “age” allows
Miller to engage evangelicalism from
within and without.
Moreover, by approaching evangelicalism as an age, he joins the new scholarly search for a name for the post–civil
rights era. Some aspects of the period
connect with evangelicalism, and some
do not. Daniel Rodgers has called post-
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39
1960s America an “age of fracture” during which earlier interests in collective
good will and broad social change gave
way to individual options, choices, and
identities. Robert O. Self has viewed the
period as an age of the family. In the
1970s, the most popular television show
was All in the Family. Television in the
middle of the 1980s was dominated by
The Cosby Show. The Simpsons supplanted The Cosby Show in the 1990s,
and with it came an evangelical character, Flanders—but he was anything but
the star.
The modern age has been called by
other names as well: the information age
and the digital age, for example. As far as
I know, neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates
nor Mark Zuckerberg had evangelicalism on the mind while tinkering in
garages or dorm rooms. But, as Miller
mentions, eHarmony founder Neil Clark
Warren had evangelical ties.
The age of evangelicalism, then, was
an age within many others. More attention to the others would have lengthened
and strengthened Miller’s book. Much in
Miller’s book makes the most sense in
such broader terms. The 1970s was an
age of stagflation (economic stagnation
and inflation), and the Democrats could
have run a nonevangelical in 1976 and
carried the White House. The 1980s and
1990s witnessed the emergence of 24hour cable news and then the World
Wide Web, which not only broadened the
media but changed their nature profoundly. New niche communities formed,
and evangelicals worked within these
movements.
Just as the 1960s were not the age of
Aquarius, the years since have not been
the age of evangelicalism. Instead, evangelicalism has been one factor among
many others. Certainly evangelicalism
does not have to be reduced to an age to
be meaningful. It can be both an age and
a subculture. It can be both political and
cultural. This is one of the marvels of
religion in America—the ability to be
many different things to many different
people.
40
Faith in the Public Square
By Rowan Williams
Bloomsbury Academic, 352 pp., $29.95
R
owan Williams never set out, as
archbishop of Canterbury, to be an
energetic chief executive of a flailing
denomination. He saw himself much
more as an interpreter—between one
religion and another, between faith and
unbelief, between civil society and politics, and between the West and the twothirds world. He knew there was no one
better placed in public life in England
(and perhaps beyond) to speak to issues
of common concern without the need to
be popular, simplistic, reductionist, or eyecatching. He could be intelligent, probing, compassionate, generous, challenging, bold, even-handed, reflective, and a
little playful—as he is in this collection of
25 lectures.
So what does he want to say? More
than anything else, that there’s an honorable and needed place for religion in public life. That means making a distinction
between programmatic secularism and
procedural secularism. The latter, which
Williams favors, assumes a crowded and
argumentative public square and thus
requires an honest broker to mediate
and manage genuine difference. The broker must hold a high view of respect for
law as that which enables vibrant diversity to flourish and that fosters a society
that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Programmatic secularism is, by contrast, the great enemy in the book: it seeks
a merely instrumental liberalism and
aspires to little more than maximized
choice, rendering the human subject a lone
figure facing a range of options, any of
which may be adopted but none of which
has any public validity—and it perceives
religion as no more than such an isolated
and private choice. In such a perspective,
“conviction is free, . . . but visible and corporate loyalty to the marks of such conviction is to be strongly discouraged.”
What is so bad about the neutral space
posited by programmatic secularism?
Williams points to its consequences. One
is that when there is no “accepted,
conviction-based and widely approved
rationale for taking responsibility for oth-
ers,” the motivation for doing so plummets. Another is that all major moral
questions are reduced to calculations
over finite resources; only by being “parasitic on three-dimensional cultures” can
an ethos of public neutrality avoid dissolving into “functionalist and bureaucratic tyranny.” This is where the Enlightenment legacy goes awry: of course it was
right to eject irrational and tyrannical
assertion, but “the effect was to confuse
unchallengeable authority with the
unavoidably social elements of learning
and discovering one’s own humanity, and
by rejecting the first to obscure the
importance of the second.”
By contrast, the vision of procedural
secularism—or interactive pluralism, as
Williams also calls it—is rooted in his
Augustinian politics. With Augustine he
holds to a sense of the flawed and selfdeceptive nature of personal and political
life, and thus he has no time for a theocratic state that sees itself as the fount of
every blessing. But also like Augustine, he
has a realistic notion of the shortcomings
of human beings left to themselves, so he
sees a lively role for the state in guaranteeing stability, offering freedom, and giving each their due. Giving each their due
requires a somewhat elastic notion of law,
for law is not a comprehensive code that
enforces a set of universal claims, but an
expression of what mutual recognition
requires, especially in relation to society’s
weaker members—and thus it cannot
avoid judgments about priorities.
What does the church offer? Christianity challenges consumer pluralism
and rootless individualism; it upholds
local communities and encourages other
faiths; it cherishes the stranger; it holds a
public space for moral debate and thus
prevents faith being relegated to privatized fanaticism and exclusion. Williams
does not pretend that the church always
does these things. He laments the way
that traditional religious affiliations
“lose their integrity when they attempt
to enforce their answers,” and he blames
this impersonal and coercive ethos for
alienating much of the culture at large.
On the other hand, he believes that with-
out the positive role of the churches,
European pluralism would collapse.
The route back for the churches has
been charted by thinkers such as Michael
Sandel, who laments that the West has
come to think about justice primarily
legalistically, in terms of individual
rights, thereby impoverishing the notion
of the good. A richer, thicker civic life
requires a greater public discussion of
the good—which involves a more visible
role for moral and religious convictions.
Although these core arguments form
the first half of the book and undergird the
rest, Williams includes a number of complementary lectures in which he develops
similar lines of thought in relation to ecology, aging, economics, and interreligious
well-being. Perhaps the most impressive
lecture, for its depth of understanding of a
vast and complex subject, is the one on
punishment and the criminal justice sys-
LEADERSHIP
in the
Academy, Religion and Civic Life
June 5-7, 2014 • Nashville
Announcing our inaugural events for 2014
The Abraham J. Malherbe
Plenary Lecture
with
The Everett Ferguson
Lecture in Early
Christian Studies
with
Carl R. Holladay
Elizabeth A. Clark
Charles Howard Candler
Professor of New
Testament Studies at
Candler School of Theology
at Emory University
John Carlisle Kilgo
Professor of Religion
and Professor of History,
Emerita, at Duke
University
Biblical studies sessions, including those honoring Abraham J. Malherbe, featuring:
Carl R. Holladay, Elizabeth A. Clark, Lamin Sanneh, Ellen Davis, Johan Thom,
David Mackay-Rankin, Gregory E. Sterling, Walter Brueggemann, John T. Fitzgerald,
James W. Thompson, Phillip Camp and many others.
For details and to register, visit our website:
Reviewed by Samuel Wells, vicar at St. Martin-inthe-Fields, London, and author most recently
of Learning to Dream Again (Eerdmans).
csc.lipscomb.edu
41
HOW MY
MIND HAS
CHANGED
Essays from
the Christian
Century
13 prominent
Christian theologians
speak of their
journeys of faith
and of the questions
that have shaped
their writing and
scholarship.
“this illuminating volume, the
most theologically diverse in
the series, is a compelling and
worthy successor to the five
that preceded it.”
—Gary Dorrien, union theological seminary
“these essays will light the
reader’s path through his or
her own struggles with
continuity and change.”
—Richard Lischer, Duke Divinity school
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tem. What emerges is an awesome
achievement, a testament to a life lived on
the frontiers of faith and reason, the fruit
of deep thinking, wide reading, and profound patience with unanswerable questions and indefatigable critics. Religion
may continue to have its cultured despisers, but it would be hard for any cultured
person to read this book and despise its
learned, subtle, and probing author.
Yet for all this magnificent discourse I
found myself wanting one thing more. As
Karl Barth consistently pointed out, and
as Williams notes, it’s not entirely clear
that Christians have a particular stake in
securing the status of religion as a general conceptual or sociological phenomenon. It’s not certain that Jesus needs a
prolegomenon, or that the clarity and
subversive quality of the gospel is aided
by formal claims for the plausibility of
faith in general or for the usefulness of
faith communities for social cohesion
and renewal. Williams’s erudition has
earned the respect of an audience that
seldom attends to Christian claims. That
status attained, what is the task of the
apologetic theologian or, more specifically, the constitutional prelate, once the
ear of educated elites has been secured?
I suggest that the task is not simply to
expose the inadequacy of a world without
God or to show the collaborative spirit of
religious engagement in the common good.
It surely must more specifically be to
demonstrate the unique power and thrilling
wisdom of the logic of God in Christ and to
reconceive tired issues in the light of the
shape of Christ’s coming. The authority and
the credibility of the public theologian rest
not so much on the theologian’s insight,
intelligence, or subtle grasp of complex
issues (wondrous as each may be) as on the
ability—respectfully, lucidly, and accessibly—to show how Christ redefines human
nature, transforms death, and overturns the
givens of life; to show what only God can
do and what only God has done; and more
intriguingly, to highlight the way that questions in public life today reflect and recall
issues faced by the church in shaping and
embodying Christian doctrine. This is a task
that only someone who listens to society’s
soul and to the rhythms of God as deeply as
Rowan Williams can accomplish. When he
does, he does it brilliantly; I just wish it were
the heart of this book.
42
BookMarks
My Promised Land: The Triumph
and Tragedy of Israel
By Ari Shavit
Spiegel and Grau, 464 pp., $28.00
In this personal, impressionistic history,
journalist Shavit lays out the variety of
Zionisms—secular and religious, socialist
and capitalist, ascetic and hedonistic, utopian and pragmatic—that constructed the
modern state of Israel. Shavit captures the
sense of desperation behind many of these
efforts: the Jews of Christian Europe had
“discovered that they were alone in the
world. . . . That is why they came to Palestine
and why they now cling to the land with
such desperate determination.” He is by no
means blind to the dark side of this history—the forced and often violent removal of
native Palestinians from the land. Indeed,
he is haunted throughout the book by this
history and devotes a chapter to the expulsion of Palestinians from the town of Lydda
during the 1948 war. Shavit wishes that
Zionism could have succeeded in another
way but doesn’t pretend to know how,
under the circumstances, that could have
happened. He deeply admires the heroic
efforts but sees few untainted heroes.
I Am the Beggar of the World:
Landays from Contemporary
Afghanistan
By Eliza Griswold
with photographs by Seamus Murphy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 160 pp., $24.00
Journalist Eliza Griswold has been to
Afghanistan (and Pakistan) numerous
times since 9/11, where she discovered landays, a centuries-old form of poetry usually
composed anonymously by illiterate Pashtun women, passed along and adapted from
one generation to the next. In Pashto these
two-line poems have nine syllables in the
first line and 13 in the second. Landays
often deal with love, sex, and the relationship between the genders, sometimes with
acerbic intent: “You sold me to an old man,
father. / May God destroy your home; I was
your daughter.”
© 2013 SUNDANCE CHANNEL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Right-sized stories
F
or the most part we consume visual narratives either in two-hour
films or in television series that
stretch out for years, even decades. Films
offer the pleasure of something made
and done, a one-time encounter that
invites reflection and judgment. The
boundaries of the format can generate
beauty and power, but it has limitations.
How many of us, for example, have criticized a movie because the characters
were not well developed or because the
plot felt rushed or fragmented?
These criticisms seldom apply to highquality serial television. With 75 to 100
(or even more) hours available, a six-toeight-year series can explore the most
intimate recesses of characters’ psyches
and develop storylines that mimic the
complexity of real life. It is not surprising
that this style of television is most often
compared to the sprawling novels of
Dickens and Dostoevsky—masterpieces
of human psychology and narrative.
The miniseries offers something between a film and a long-running television series. Most miniseries run for four
to eight episodes. The History Channel’s
popular The Bible is one example of a
miniseries with a topic too complex to
squeeze into a two-hour movie but with
a limit on how far its plot could be
stretched. Literary adaptations fit the
miniseries genre well, too. Fans of a
novel may reject a film adaptation that
cuts up essential plots or rewrites characters, but a six-hour or ten-hour miniseries can honor these elements (and the
readers) faithfully. On the other hand,
no one wants to watch season after season of new plots written for Elizabeth
Bennet and Mr. Darcy.
One of the most captivating miniseries I watched this winter was Jane
Campion’s Top of the Lake (Sundance
Channel). This haunting crime drama set
in the New Zealand outback follows a
female detective (Elisabeth Moss) as she
returns to her hometown and is drawn
into the case of a missing and pregnant
12-year-old girl.
Unlike Law and Order or CSI, serial
crime series that rely on formulas, or
Dexter, which uses cliff-hanger endings
to tie one episode to the next, Top of the
Lake is driven as much by Campion’s
austere visual style as it is by plot. She
focuses on the rugged, expansive landscape—the mist of the mountain lake
and the flat plains below the mountains.
This atmosphere of desolation and wonder links the episodes to each other even
as viewers begin to care deeply about the
plot and a resolution of the crime. The
genre allows the director to create a
unique experience with an exposure that
is longer than a film but still defined by
the limited hours of a shorter series.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook (distributed by BBC Worldwide) is a wildly different example that emphasizes the
episodic nature of the miniseries. In one
of the most darkly comic and outlandishly macabre shows I’ve seen on television,
the series chronicles the memories of an
older doctor (Jon Hamm) reflecting on
the misadventures of his younger self
(Daniel Radcliffe) in his first post in a
tiny, isolated village in rural Russia on
the eve of the Russian Revolution.
The series runs just under two hours
and could easily have been a film. But
stringing together the four 25-minute
episodes would have created a deeply
unsatisfying movie. The plot is made up of
fragmented memories, each of which
implies more about the main character’s
life than the miniseries reveals. This
“suggestive effect” would be lost in an
ongoing series. As episodes in a miniseries,
43
ROOM TO BREATHE: Miniseries, like
Top of the Lake (featuring Mad Men’s
Elisabeth Moss, above), can accommodate
more plot complexity than a standard twohour feature.
however, the fragments of memory are a
perfect vehicle for exploring the allusive
and elliptical nature of human memory.
As we watch some of these new miniseries, maybe we can learn something
about our own storytelling techniques.
We know the experience of listening to a
contained sermon as well as the experience of following the narrative of a liturgical year. We know that poems, novels,
and short stories have all influenced
Christian ways of thinking about and
communicating our sacred stories, even
though we expect different things from
each genre. English poetry, for example,
has been influenced by the psalms, and
the psalms influence what we think of
poetry. And when we talk about how the
Christian story shapes our lives, we
largely rely on narrative assumptions
drawn from psychologically realistic
novels. We’ve long understood that liturgy is a kind of a drama.
These experiments in visual storytelling are a sign that the visual medium
is maturing to encompass the breadth of
our “story-love.” In our increasingly visual world, the narrative styles provided by
film and serial television have a counterpart in the miniseries, a genre worthy of
our attention.
The author is Kathryn Reklis, who teaches theology at Fordham University in New York.
Read Stephanie Paulsell @
Faith Matters
“We need places to pray as if someone
were listening, to study as if we might
learn something worth writing on our
hearts, to join with others in service as
if the world might be transformed.
Churches are places to learn to practice,
with others, a continual conversion of
life, a permanent openness to change.”
(from “Soul experiments,” Faith Matters)
CHURCH in the
MAKING
by Carol Howard Merritt
A
child tore off a piece
of bread and fed it to
her mother, saying,
“This is for you, because God
loves you.” The mother took
the morsel into her mouth,
swallowed it, and promptly
posted news of the feeding on
Facebook.
The mother’s report wasn’t
a disrespectful act, born out of
a short attention span or the
urge to disrupt a service
through the vanities of social
media. The post was part of her
worship; she was sharing the
beauty of that sacred moment
with her community.
The worshipers surrounded
her, even though her daughter
was the only other person in
the room. They celebrated
communion, even though the
walls enclosing them were not
constructed of cold limestone
and lacked the glimmers of
stained glass. The mother and
daughter fed one another with
the consecrated bread of life,
even though the minister had
never broken their particular
loaf. They joined in a chorus of
prayer, even though the only
voices reverberating in the
room were their own. The
mother and daughter prayed
with Extravagance, an online
congregation of the United
Church of Christ.
Of course, this sacred
moment may cause confusion
for some. Can a church or spiritual community form online? I
posed the question to Meredith
Gould, a sociologist who wrote
The Social Media Gospel:
Sharing the Good News in New
Ways. Gould has led prayer and
convened chats for church lead-
Virtual real presence
churches come from a landbased community, but we don’t
have a land-based population.”
Instead of live-streaming a
service from an existing church,
or launching a Facebook site
with members who worship in
the same sanctuary on Sunday
mornings, the Extravagance
community gathers people
across the country by using different digital platforms.
Extravagance usually meets
on Facebook, because so many
people are already active there.
The host sends out an invitation to a retreat, or to lectio divina, or to a prayer vigil. At the
designated time, people from
across the country go to the
Extravagance Facebook page.
The host will offer a question, a
prayer, a scripture, or a song
and invite the worshipers to
reflect.
For instance, the host might
ask, “Where is your holy
space?” to which people respond by showing pictures of
the place where they worship
in their homes or a landscape
that makes them feel spiritually alive. Then the host generates a discussion by replying
and asking more questions.
Hudson sees a surprising
honesty on social media. In the
midst of the give-and-take of
needing, caring, lamenting, and
hearing one another, bonds
begin to form. People recognize names and hear each
other’s stories.
ers on Twitter from the early
days of that medium.
“If digital technology has
taught us anything, it’s that how
and when people form groups
of any size is not determined by
location,” Gould said. “Sociologists have known this theoretically, but 21st-century technology in general and social media
especially have given us empirical evidence of this truthiness.
We now have abundant proof
that meeting face-to-face is not
a necessary prerequisite for
encounters to morph into relationships that will in turn lead
to communities—small groups
joined by shared values, beliefs,
and intentions. This seems to be
true for SBNR [spiritual but not
religious] types as well as those
whose faith is deeply anchored
in the institutional church.”
Now that online community
is possible, and people are
looking to their computers,
tablets, and phones for those
sacred moments, how are
churches responding? Members of Christ’s body have routinely carried the gospel to foreign lands and cultures.
Machetes in hand, they forged
through jungles. Steering in
hollowed-out canoes, they
journeyed to distant regions.
So isn’t it time to explore the
digital horizons?
Jo Hudson, the gathering
pastor of Extravagance, sounds
like an explorer, exhilarated by
the fact that the community
isn’t trapped by geography.
“Our space is different,” she
explained. “A lot of online
Hudson sees herself as
“beta-testing” this kind of
worshiping community. She’s
exploring what platforms people will engage with and what
formats will interest people
the most.
“We’re all trying to figure
out how to do church differently,” Hudson observed.
“Everybody is thinking about
this. How do we start new
church plants? How do we
start worshiping communities? How do we do bivocational ministry?” Hudson sees
digital ministry as part of that
conversation.
Hudson also understands
the many questions and challenges ahead. For instance,
what might membership mean
for an online community?
How does a loose gathering
of people become a church,
according to UCC polity?
They can have communion
by inviting people to prepare
bread and wine and then eat
it at the same time, but
they’re not sure how they will
celebrate baptisms. Will the
community need to gather
physically a couple times a
year in order to baptize people or receive them into
membership?
The community engages
these questions with excitement. “We shouldn’t be afraid
of these things,” Hudson said.
“We should explore them and
talk about them.”
Carol Howard Merritt is the author of Tribal Church. Church in the Making
appears in every other issue.
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HAUERWAS
a (very) critical introduction
DON’T COGITATE—INNOVATE! The Center for
Innovative Ministry offers inspiring workshops.
www.centerforinnovativeministry.com.
POSITIONS AVAILABLE
Independent Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), Birmingham,
AL, is seeking a dynamic, experienced individual as full-time
DIRECTOR OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. The DCE
will be responsible for all educational ministries of the
church. Independent Presbyterian Church is a 100-year-old,
2,400-member church, supporting ministries dedicated to the
glory of God. Please visit us at www.ipc-usa.org. For additional information: [email protected].
PASTOR for interdenominational congregation located in the
city of Horseshoe Bay, TX, a retirement/resort community in
the Texas Hill Country, 60 miles northwest of Austin, near
Marble Falls, on Lake LBJ. The Church at Horseshoe Bay, a
750-member congregation, is seeking an experienced,
ordained minister to serve as pastor. Job emphasis will be on
preaching, pastoral care, and community outreach. Will work
collegially with the senior pastor, whose job emphasis is similar. Opportunity exists for future advancement, depending on
performance. This congregation is an equal opportunity
employer. Respond to Jim Jorden, P.O. Box 8111, Horseshoe
Bay, TX 78657; e-mail: [email protected].
First Presbyterian Ithaca, NY (home of Cornell University
and Ithaca College), seeks SENIOR PASTOR AND HEAD
OF STAFF. See our details at www.firstpresithaca.org/MIF.
Inquiries to [email protected].
Nicholas M. Healy
“Theological controversy is an art in which few are skilled. This (very) critical
response to a much-admired contemporary, however, exemplifies the virtues
necessary to mount a substantial challenge without straying into invective: it
keeps calm; it concentrates on matters of substance; it manifests sympathetic
understanding of the body of writing which it seeks to contest; and — more
than anything — it articulates its puzzlements and disagreements on the basis
of convictions about God and the gospel.”
— John Webster
“A must-read! Healy interprets Hauerwas as mirroring Schleiermacher. It’s a
provocation so clearly argued that this will become a touchstone, not just for
future interpretation of Hauerwas but for our engagement with a great deal
of contemporary theology.”
— R. R. Reno
ISBN 978-0-8028-2599-5 • 154 pages • paperback • $23.00
At your bookstore,
or call 800-253-7521
www.eerdmans.com
46
Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.
4052
2140 Oak Industrial Dr NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49505
1:37:39 PM
ALINARI / ART RESOURCE, NY
Pentecost (Scrovegni Chapel, Padua), by Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336)
G
iotto di Bondone painted a fresco cycle of the life of Christ at the Scrovegni Chapel (also called the Arena
Chapel) in Padua, Italy, in 1304–06. Pentecost is the final scene of the cycle. The arrangement of the disciples
around a table is similar to the painting of the Last Supper directly opposite on the south wall. Such balance is typical of Giotto. The artist placed the figures inside an architectural space, which creates the illusion that the event
occurred within a small church. This is probably the first visual depiction of Pentecost in a prominent location. The
Holy Spirit is represented through rays of light emanating from outside the room and above the painted ceiling. It
is striking that this series on Christ’s life concludes not with the ascension but with Pentecost, the birth of the
church. The image visually anticipates C. K. Barrett’s aphorism, “In Luke’s thought, the end of the story of Jesus is
the church.”
Art selection and commentary by Heidi J. Hornik, who teaches in the art department at
Baylor University, and Mikeal C. Parsons, who teaches in the school’s religion department.
47
the
martin e. marty
LEGACY CIRCLE
“Ever since 1952 as a reader and
1956 as a contributor and an editor,
I have looked forward to each new
issue of the CENTURY to inform,
stimulate and challenge me—as it
has many thousands. To assure that
generations to come can profit from
this unique theological journal, I
happily lend my name and support
to the Legacy Circle and urge you
to join me.”
—Martin E. Marty
To become a member of the Martin E. Marty Legacy Circle, designate a bequest of
any amount to the CENTURY from your estate. Call your lawyer and name “Christian
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Wedding - The Christian Century

Transcription

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