Wedding - The Christian Century
Transcription
Wedding - The Christian Century
Biweekly $7.95 May 28, 2014 Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully. Wedding PLANS by setting up an annuity, tony schumacher helps the CENTURY reach future generations. “I’ve read the CHRISTIAN CENTURY since I discovered it in the public library 25 years ago. With its insightful and interesting articles on ecclesiology and ministry, it’s a significant voice among religious magazines. It reaches out to people intent on understanding and living the gospel of Jesus Christ at a deeper level.” —Father Tony Schumacher served 42 years in parish ministry. He works parttime at the Adult Day Health Center at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Put us in your estate plans today. Call (312) 263-7510, ext. 228. 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 SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE: Tel.: 800-208-4097. E-mail: [email protected]. The CHRISTIAN CENTURY, P.O. Box 429, Congers NY 10920-0429. Fax: 845-267-3478. Subscriptions $65 per year; $105 Canadian; $125 other foreign. Online only subscriptions available at christiancentury.org: $4.95 for four weeks; $24.95 for six months; $39.95 for 12 months. EDITORIAL OFFICE: General queries to [email protected]; 312-263-7510. Letters to the editor: [email protected] or the CHRISTIAN CENTURY, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 104 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 1100, Chicago, IL 60603. For information on rights & permissions, submissions guidelines, advertising information, letters to the editor: christiancentury.org/contact. Established 1884. Renamed the CHRISTIAN CENTURY 1900. Copyright © 2014 by the CHRISTIAN CENTURY. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, Universal Copyright Convention and Pan-American Copyright Convention. The CHRISTIAN CENTURY, (ISSN 0009-5281) is published biweekly at 104 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 1100, Chicago IL 60603. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 1406523. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to CHRISTIAN CENTURY, P.O. Box 429, Congers NY 10920-0429. 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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). Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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.” • 37 percent overall (58 percent of evangelicals) doubt that the Earth’s tem- perature is rising “mostly because of manmade heat-trapping greenhouse gases.” • 36 percent overall (56 percent of 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.” Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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. Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 “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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 DISCOVER OUR UPCOMING CLASSES No u r i s h yo u r s p i r i t Fo o d a n d G a r d e n S p i r i t u a l i t y October 23-26, 2014 with Gail O’Day Exodus: Freedom and Formation with Christine Yoder Sep. 18-21 Introduction to Spiritual Direction with Jim Dant & Debra Weir Sep. 28- Oct. 1 Immersion Experience: An Invitation to a Deeper Spiritual Life with CTS Faculty Oct. 2-5 Contemplative Prayer for Beginners with Carl McColman Nov. 10-14 ENROLL NOW 404-687-4557 [email protected] www.spiritualityprogram.com 2:15:52 PM Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Follow us repopulated and renewed. 1-800-258-5838 www.maryknollmall.org As in the Pentecost painting, the movement of the Spirit both turns the 33 Christian Century May 28, 2014 Body language can tell you all sorts of things. Like someone is having a stroke. SPEECH DIFFICULTY FACE DROOPING ARM WEAKNESS TIME TO CALL 911 Know the sudden signs. strokeassociation.org Spot a stroke F.A.S.T. 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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, Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 An Issue? Help Food Aid Reach More People, More Quickly et your church or community of faith involved in Bread for the World’s 2014 Offering of Letters—and urge Congress to reform U.S. food aid. Without spending additional tax dollars, U.S. food aid can be more nutritious and reach those in need more quickly—when natural disasters or humanitarian crises take place. Organizing an Offering of Letters is easy. Worship bulletin inserts, a handbook, and videos are available free of charge— to help you conduct a letterwriting event that will help your members turn their faith into action. G To order your free resources, visit www.bread.org/ol2014 or call toll-free 1-800-822-7323 Contact CHRISTIAN CENTURY subscription services for back issues. Call (800) 208-4097 or go to our website: christiancentury.org. 37 425 3rd Street SW, Suite 1200 Washington, DC 20024 www.bread.org XB14-CC reformed and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be any subsequent service to the community. © JOSEPH MOLIERI / BREAD FOR THE WORLD 4:29 PM P Christian Century May 28, 2014 that it was the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Nine years later, Time magazine declared that 1976 was the “year of the evangelical.” Seven years after that, President Reagan was calling for 1983 to be the “year of the Bible.” Then in the new millennium, pundits began discussing a God gap between the political parties. How did the era of the new left and the hippie harems give way to the age of the new right and evangeli- The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years 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 2014 CONGRESS ON URBAN MINISTRY June 23 - 26 DePaul University Chicago, IL e stic Faith & Jreunce Confe Register Today Arts & Worship Renowned Speakers Workshops & Site Visits Faith In Action Reviewed by Edward J. Blum, who teaches American history at San Diego State University and is coauthor (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. www.CongressOnUrbanMinistry.com Christian Century May 28, 2014 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- Help your congregation move from a membership to a discipleship culture! North American Association for the Catechumenate Catechumenate Parish Training Event Thursday, Sept. 25 thru Sat. Sept. 27, 2014 At St. Johns Episcopal in Portsmouth, Virginia Also Annual Gathering featuring Bishop Will Willimon from Duke August 5-8, 2014 on the UBC Campus in beautiful Vancouver, Canada Register for either or both events online at www.catechumenate.org For details, contact Devra Betts, Registrar at [email protected] The 2014 Lansing Lee Conference welcomes Dr. Eben Alexander New York Times best-selling author of Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the A6erlife October 26-28 at Kanuga This three-day event will explore the ways God reaches across time and space to meet us and how this connection shapes and transforms our lives. Celebrate the transcendent power of God’s love with powerful story, great worship and creative experiences in the beauty of autumn in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hendersonville, NC Learn more at kanuga.org/lansinglee *Receive a 10% early bird discount when registering by June 26. 39 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Web price: $12.80 wipfandstock.com/cascade_books (541) 344-1528 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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. Christian Century May 28, 2014 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. 45 Christian Century May 28, 2014 C L A SS I F I E D RATES: $1.75 a word, ten-word minimum. Phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and URLs count as two words; zip codes count as one If you’ve moved or are planning to move, please let MOVING? word. All ads must be prepaid; deadline is four weeks prior to issue date. Please send ads to us know. Send us a copy of your mailing label and your new address or give us a call at 1 (800) 208-4097. Please allow six to eight weeks for an address change to become effective. [email protected] or Classified Department, The Christian Century, 104 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 1100, Chicago, IL 60603. To inquire S U B S C R I P T I O N S E RV I C E S about display ads or online advertising, contact the advertising department at (312) 263-7510, x229, or [email protected]. AVAILABLE Explore God’s love with the new SHINE SUNDAY SCHOOL CURRICULUM! Shine: Living in God’s Light has engaging stories and activities that will teach children the Bible and help them understand that they are known and loved by God and learn what it means to follow Jesus. Find sample sessions, Bible outlines, and more at www.shinecurriculum.com. CHURCH LOANS from Everence, a lender with a long history of working with congregations. Mortgage loans for new purchases and refinancing available. Let us help you fund your vision. Call (800) 348-7468 for more information. I N T E R V E N T I O N S S E R I E S 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Christian Century May 28, 2014 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 Century Foundation” with our IRS tax ID #36-2167022.Then let us know so that we may add you to a growing list of Martin E. Marty Legacy Circle supporters. Thank you!