2 quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer for your Advent week 1 reflections.
Words are powerful: both in their elemental nature & as floating signifiers. Some people protest the fluid nature of language – but this lens can be helpful to understand why.
What if ‘hope’ is like a memory: it is not located in any one place but is created and accessed what a constellation (configuration) or elements are activated at the same time?
3 minutes – let me know what you think.
Sidenote: Day 6 was actually about chapter 7 (sorry for the confusion)
We never start from scratch. There is no blank slate. We don’t operate in a vacuum.
Our work as humanity, communities of faith, and activist-organizers is working with what is to bring about what can be.
It is like a cosmic Scrabble game.
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Elizabeth Johnson was right – our language about God functions.
I am reading two ‘advent’ devotionals and they both quote Bonhoeffer.
and I am just not sure that I am there.
There is a metaphorical – demythologized – deconstructed – linguistic turn that can be really helpful to the way that we conceptualize and talk about ancient concepts.
Event, in philosophy, is a happening whose outcome exceeds that which one would expect if you just added up the smaller component parts.
So the ‘miracle of birth’ is not super-natural … but actually the most natural thing in the world. The same for the ‘the miracle on the Hudson’.
We can use that same permission to address the antiquated notion of ‘spirits’.
On day two of our Advent Reflections, I want to ask the question, do our bodies matter?
In the second chapter of the book that we are reading, the passage comes from John chapter 10, where Jesus wept.
And this is an active and lively debate in my circles – whether bodies matter- because earlier in John chapter six, Jesus makes the comment that the flesh basically means nothing, that it profits nothing, but it’s the spirit that matters.
I am a big fan of bodies and the concept of incarnation. The idea of ‘spiritual’ is very elusive and abstract. This is one of the reasons that I tell people “I am religious, but not spiritual”
It is the embodied and enacted nature of religion that appeals to me.
Bodies, in this sense, matter.
It might be your greatest vehicle to experience divine revelation
It might be Your best opportunity for service and participation
It might be your greatest obstacle to overcome, depending on your circumstances
In the end, your body – the good and the bad – matters.
They matter in the religious life.
They matter in the human experience.
They matter in community.
So, at every level, I can say resoundingly that the answer to the question on day two, “do
bodies matter?” is a resounding yes for multiple reasons at multiple levels
Your body matters!
Is the Evangelical’s fascination with the End Times their undoing? Could this be the apostasy?
In this video I outline my journey with End Times theology (eschatology) and share a ‘thought experiment’ that I have been doing with my Evangelical family and friends (min 8).
Watch the video and let me know what you think.
Feel free to comment below, on Youtube, or on Facebook.
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Individualism is the assumed, and thus unquestioned, operating structure of for both the Left and the Right, conservatives and liberals. They are two sides of the same coin.
Nearly every disagreement and conflict that see in our society is framed within individualism and often ‘both sides’ are just the inverted – or photo negative – of each other simply focusing a different aspect of the individuals experience.
I ask the question: what is the most dangerous or objectionable thing that you believe? Not to your opponents but to your chosen group? Do you vote the party line? Do you vary at any point? Do you diverge from popular opinion at any level?
It’s like language – there is no private language. Language is socially constructed as is nearly every aspect of our life and culture. Race is socially constructed. Sexuality is socially constructed. Religion is socially constructed.
The problem comes when we don’t realize the ways that we have been:
- Groomed
- Conditioned
- Formed
- Informed
Thus even our deepest conviction and true opinions are not independently our own. We are acting within a given structure that acted upon us and within in that we have some agency but we are never choosing from an unlimited menu of options. We are located socially and thus make choices within that structure.
Conservatives focus on one aspect of the individual. Liberals do the same just prioritizing different aspects of the individuals. Libertarians are just radical in this regard.
Watch the linked video and let me know your thoughts. Share with with groups your think might benefit from this challenge as a conversation starter.
Until we recognize the dominating ideology that is operational in all of our politics and social strife, we will not be able to fix the broken, fractured, and fragmented state or our societal problems.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 