Pastor John Wright

As I travel down this road, trying to live the Gospel, not as a socialist or a capitalist, not as a neo-con or a civil libertarian, not as a "liberal" or a "conservative", but as a follower of Jesus Christ within the faith handed down to the saints through the ages, I find it often frustrating because of the labels that I receive, and the way that cultural dichotomies and modernist/post-modernist presuppositions push towards equally unacceptable positions. It seems that these tensions are almost inherent within American Protestant institutional cultures -- most likely because of the historical Protestant hegemony in the US, with its commitments to the church to provide the moral voice for the governance of the state. How does one find friends on the way, conversations so that one is not merely stupid, or "leftist" or "pietistic"? How does one maintain the perspective needed for the constant formation that one needs to go through in a culture like this so that one is not merely speaking one's "personal perspectives"?

Of course, reading in the Scriptures and tradition is indispensable as is prayer. But I've also found some helpful blog sites for me along the way. First, ericisrad.com helps me, not only because Eric is so kind to me, but because he reads and thinks while sitting at a computer screen within the marketplace. As he reflects and reads, he perceives well material as it interacts with his network of friends, his work, and his life as part of our congregation.

A little more distant from me are a group of friends that I have yet to meet, but seem networked together. Charles Jones at ressourcement.blogspot.com has an excellent site. Charles is a member of Communion and Liberation, one of the so-called "new religious movements" within Roman Catholicism. Often dismissed as "conservative" by the media, such movements, I am discovering, are conservative in the best sense of the word: attempting to live faithfully within the faith handed down to the saints within the contemporary church catholic. One of my goals right now is to think "protestant denominations" within the framework of the "new religious movements" within catholicism. There might be ways of understanding ourselves here to help heal the fragmented body of Christ today.

From this site, two others come to mind: nouvelletheologie.blogspot.com and, for news and perspective, www.tcrnews2.com. At times I will find myself disagreeing, but what I find helpful is a conversation with people who likewise are trying to live not defined by American/modernist "right/left" issues, but by the Christian tradition.

So I'm thankful for such sites and friends, and looking forward to continued conversation and even, God willing, bodily, not just cyber-, interaction some day!

Thank you, John. I'm thankful and humbled to be journeying along with you. Oddly enough, sometimes these virtual spaces do good to remind me of the church catholic in ways I wouldn't ordinarily receive. In other ways, sometimes people are jerks, both online and offline, but we need to love them anyway. Reading some Augustine last night helped me to remember that even God's righteous need to pray, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."