ad radicem

Greetings to all the friends of Ad Radicem, 

What are we up to these days? Good question! We are in the midst of four weeks of conversation about prayer. Prayer seems to be one of those things (like breathing) that everyone is “just supposed to know how to do.” Yet, so far as I can tell, despite the expectation, most of us pray infrequently, mostly when we are in trouble, and find prayer difficult and tiring. So this series of conversations is an attempt to pool our collective wisdom and experience—to share with one another our own praying practices, to give voice to frustrations or dead-ends, and to connect with new ideas (or new ways of expressing old ideas) that will deepen our practices of prayer. 

In this first week, (July 8th) four of us spoke for a few hours about what sort of activity prayer actually is. What kind of category should we use for thinking about prayer? What is happening while we pray? Is prayer communication? Is it worship? Is it labor? After talking through our own practices for a while, we used six different categories to brainstorm concepts for understanding what is happening as we pray—both on our side and with God. Here is the material that we used.

Next week, (July 15) we will look at Scripture as a source for our prayers—and specifically the sorts of prayers that we don’t often pray. God’s Word is full of prayer and praying through the Bible is one great way to learn more about how to pray, what to pray for, and when to pray. In particular, the Bible has prayers of lament and anger that give expression to the darkest emotions of human life. The points in life when we are torn with sorrow or rage are generally not times that we begin to pray, yet God is there too and praying can open us up to God’s healing at the point of our greatest woundedness.

Carolyn and I will be on vacation the week of the 22nd, so while folks are certainly free to gather in our absence, we won’t be around this week.

The third session (July 29) will focus on the lives and habits of a few mystics of the Christian tradition. We’ll tell their stories and talk about their prayer habits and then use their lives as the basis for a conversation about what we might learn from the mystics and what we might incorporate into our own habits. We’ll invite John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and Anthony of the Desert to teach us a little bit about their praying habits.

In the last week, (August 5) we will talk about a variety of different forms of prayer. There are a lot of strange fruits hanging on the Christian tree, and often Christians misunderstand one another’s practices. So we’ll all bring our own experiences and opinions to the table as we talk about many different ways of praying: intercession, ikons, tongues, praying with the saints, contemplative prayer, liturgical prayer, and more! 

I hope that you are able to join us for one of these meetings! 

Go well, 

Eric

Here is a quick update about what we are doing at Ad Radicem. 

Last week (6.24.08), we talked about the developments in the first two hundred years of the church—how worship, leadership, and attitudes to the surrounding culture changed within that time. We looked at hymns and prayers of the earliest church that many churches still use today. We discussed the way that the New Testament was brought together from diverse collections of letters and documents carried around the Mediterranean and assembled to become the Bible we read today.

This week (7.1.08), we will continue and look at a few specific issues within the early church that have a great impact on the way we live out our faith today.

Specifically, we’ll spend time talking about the role that women played in spreading the faith through the whole Roman empire and the way that the church both challenged the injustices of Roman patriarchy and built its own gender hierarchy. There is plenty to talk about here!

Then we’ll spend some time talking about attitudes toward force and violence in the earliest church and how a movement known for courage in the face of martyrdom eventually turned into an institution that used violent force against heretics.

Understanding the attitudes of the earliest Christians is like using a mirror—it helps us to see our own faith and our own culture in new light. Join us for a rich conversation!

We are still exploring the best way to connect with people to let them know what we are doing and how they can join us. If you’d like to see some of the people who have been participating in our weekly conversations and find out more about what we are talking about, then you can visit the Ad Radicem page on Meetup.com by clicking here.

It is free to join the group and the site includes a host of helpful features that will allow you to RSVP to the meetings, rate them or offer feedback afterwards, and vote on which topics you’d like to discuss in the near future. Enjoy!

For the next two weeks, June 10th and June 17th, we will be gathering at El Mariachi for some good food and good conversation about Creation.

On June 10th, we will start by looking into what Scripture says about humanity’s place in God’s creation and the responsibilities that we have for the planet as people made in God’s image. We’ll talk a little bit about what it humanity’s disobedience and sin means in ecological terms (the Bible says more than you’d think!). Come and join us for a conversation about the spiritual practice of caring for creation!

Then, on June 17th, we’ll balance the first conversation by talking about God’s work of redemption for a broken Creation and the Spirit’s work in perfecting what God has made so that the book of Revelation can speak of a “new heavens and a new earth.” The Bible talks about Jesus as the “firstborn of the new creation,” and in his resurrection after three days in the tomb, we have both a sign and a promise of the the work that God is doing to heal the wounds in the cosmos that he loves.

Two Bible studies to help us all connect in a richer way with the dirt on which we live. Come join us!

Here are topics for the next three weeks of meetings, I hope that you can join in!

Are you a body? Or, do you have a body (as something that “you” possess)? Next Tuesday, May 11th, we will gather to talk about bodies. Spirituality is often conceived (disastrously, I think) as a way to get away from, or outside one’s body, to a deeper or higher reality. We rarely stop to think about the bodies that we inhabit, and just how we inhabit them, until something goes wrong and our bodies begin to seem out of control. There are so many fascinating rabbit trails leading away from this subject, and many of them are seldom explored. A favorite professor of mine is teaching an entire course this spring on the theology of food! We could easily spend hours talking about metaphors surrounding eating and being fed. Come and join a conversation that will develop some of the biblical and theological themes surrounding life in the body.

The following week, May 20th, we will gather to talk about death. Death has been conceived in the Christian tradition as the last and greatest enemy of humankind—the insatiable and horrific grave. Yet, at other times, death has been regarded as merely a passage or a veil. In the twelfth century, Saint Francis could even encourage death to praise God, calling it a “dear Sister” in words that inspired this hymn:

And thou, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, Alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way hath trod

Relative to other cultures around the world, we in North America have very thin and paltry traditions surrounding death. That lack often leaves us isolated in grief and at a loss for how to mourn those who are close to us. It is rare that we spend any time seriously talking or thinking about death until we are confronted with it. Here is an opportunity to deepen your own thinking, and enrich the understanding of others in conversation.

Finally, on the 27th of May [update: this conversation has been moved to June 3rd], we will spend the evening talking about various dimensions of healing. When healing and religion are put in the same sentence, some people think of televangelists praying over broken vacuum cleaners, but we’ll try to avoid that scene altogether. We will look at biblical examples of healing, both miraculous and medical and think through what healing means for us today in physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of life. We’ll also talk about attitudes and practices necessary to be an agent of healing in the lives of other people.

Come and join us!

To the friends and sometime fellow travelers of the eccentric gathering known as “Ad Radicem”:

Greetings from a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am writing a brief letter to notify you of a few upcoming happenings (and non-happenings) connected with the weekly meeting at El Mariachi. 

First, I want to make known the topic for this Tuesday’s conversation in hopes that I’ll pique the interest of a few potential conversationalists enough to tempt them into turning up and participating. This week we will be talking about how people of faith, particularly people of Christian faith, understand people of other traditions. Throughout the history of the church, those “others” who haven’t fit inside the Christian fold have been cast in various roles. Sometimes they have been seen as potential converts who have yet to turn from their wicked behavior; sometimes they have been seen as bedeviled enemies entrenched in error whose deceptions can only lead the faithful astray. Other times, they have been seen as innocently misguided souls whose misfortune has prevented them from hearing or believing in the fullness of Christ’s gospel. Of course, these type-castings are do not only take place within the Christian tradition; labels like “Infidel,” “Free-thinker,” or even “Muggle” call to mind the way in which the “Others” has been depicted by various groups. Why in God’s name are there so many people who disagree so strongly over just what God’s name is?!? 

After presenting a few of the options for understanding the “other” given to us by both history and contemporary culture, as well as fleshing out some of the presuppositions that produce those options, we will talk for a while about the relative merits (and demerits!) of these various perspectives. Drawing boundaries and distinctions is a necessary but impossibly thorny aspect of faith, and one that calls for deeper thought and conversation. 

Second, I want to give fair warning that there will be no meeting on April 29th. I’ll be away (and Carolyn is coming with me) at two graduation ceremonies. One for my sister-in-law in California, and another for myself in British Colombia. 

After this brief hiatus, Ad Radicem will resume on the 6th of May. We will start a new series of conversations working within a constellation of topics dealing with Christian faith and the human body. We’ll talk through various notions and spiritual practices surrounding bodies: souls and bodies, the suffering and healing of bodies, the death of bodies, and the resurrection of the body. In all of this, we’ll think about the implications of the Christian confession that the Son of God has a human body, one which he offers to share with you and I. There are a number of fascinating issues surrounding these topics, and a lot of confusion in the air as well. “We” have an odd relationship to our bodies, we often think in terms of “having” a body, and we do our best to wield control over our bodies through exercise, prescriptions, surgery, and tattoos. Yet our bodies do things that we don’t like. Besides the obvious and embarrassing farts and warts, our bodies slowly deteriorate, develop tumors, or catastrophically fail us. We seem to be both “in control” and “out of control” when it comes to our bodies. That tension is fruitful space for some good conversation about identity, faith, and embodied life. These conversations will aim to explore what a deeper and a healthier relationship to our bodies might look like, both individually and as a society. 

Below you will find the material from our discussion on April 15th. It comes in the form of four answers to the question above (why is pluralism profoundly challenging to faith?). Each answer is given a brief response, reasons not to abandon faith despite the challenges that life in a pluralistic context can impose upon people of faith. Enjoy thinking through what you find here and feel free to comment at the bottom!
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1. We can all see the world in more than one way. Living alongside people with very different beliefs and goals reinforces the plausibility of alternative ways of understanding ourselves, our place in the world, the world itself, and the relation of the whole to God/god/the transcendent. This leads all of us to recurrently think, “I/we could be wrong.”

Insofar as ideological pluralism keeps us from killing one another over our disagreements, pluralism is an aid to humility, love, and justice. Insofar as it undermines the credibility and coherence of the deepest motivations toward humility, love, and justice, those embedded deep within particular traditions, pluralism leads us toward a crisis in which these values are question-able.

2. In a secular context, religion is regarded as something peripheral, something private, something that does not belong in “public” spaces (yet religion is made “appropriate” when it takes the form of spirituality). Politics and economics take place in a “neutral” space where controversial theological and metaphysical questions are (supposedly) excluded.

For better and for worse, the boundary between public and private breaks down in both directions. It is necessary to carry “private” convictions into “public” spaces insofar as those convictions deeply affect the manner in which people act there (i.e. ethics), and influence the projects that they choose to pursue in that space (i.e. legislation on abortion vs. free trade agreements). In the other direction, supposedly “neutral” political and economic messages inevitably carry theological content. For example, the “duty” of patriotism; or, advertisements that market a product as an identity. In short, while the ideal of a theologically neutral public space has some pragmatic value, it is essentially an un-human place where humans come to interact with all their different “theological” perspectives. No human being sleeps, loves, is born, or dies in neutrality; there is no such thing as a neutral position.

3. The strong claim of faith to have access, or partial access, to truth requires an implicit claim that otherwise rational, good people are wrong about their most basic commitments and self-understanding. By apparently signaling a special privilege for some people over others, this claim calls into question the love and justice of a God who would create all people and allow only to some of them to grasp the truth.

Every perspective deals with the challenge of accounting for alternative viewpoints; every “us” looks like elitism to everyone lumped into the “them.” Each tradition’s story meets this challenge in one way or another. To speak of the logic of election, mission, and service is not inherently less plausible than to argue that all religion can be explained by muddle-headed projections of cosmic parental-figures or the persistence of superstition.

4. Living as a person of faith is challenging in a pluralist context, not only because of the interaction between many different faiths (and non-faiths), but also because of intra-tradition pluralism. People who share a basic starting point and theoretically ought to be able to agree with one another in common practice and fellowship (i.e. Christians, or even more narrowly Lutherans), seem unable to do so. This makes every tradition and sub-tradition look more and more like a “merely human construction”—especially as adherents to different sub-traditions lay that charge against others.

There is no way out of “human constructions,” nor any good reason to believe that truth should be found totally beyond history, language, culture, and material embodiment. The idea that truth should be universally or automatically accessible to every individual through reason or experience, quite apart from interaction with other people (or even institutions) is a claim far from obvious at first glance. In fact, it looks suspiciously like a concession to individualism and a cynical distrust of all authority. Once the notion of a “pure” truth, unmediated by others is disallowed, the conversation must turn to consider which human constructs are better and worse, both within each tradition and between traditions, and the criteria on which those evaluations should be made (e.g. faithfulness to revelation, instrumental value for society, universal benevolence, etc.).