Merry Christmas!

Happy Feast of the Nativity! It is interesting that amid native Spanish-speakers, I have yet to hear any replacement for "Feliz Navidad." Hien spent the week trying to teach me to give the greeting in Vietnamese, but, at best, I only got it right 10% of the time. I did better with French last night, although my adult children informed me that I should never, ever again try to pronounce a word in Spanish again in public. Once one reaches age 50 as a white guy, one is terminally white.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:11 PM | Comments (1)

Souls in Transition: A Typology

Smith's sixth chapter provides an heuristic abstract "ideal" types that appeared as a result of the 2300 interviews that he and his associates did with "emerging adults." He warns, rightfully, that these are abstractions. Individuals do not necessarily fit entirely between one or another, particularly at one time or another. Yet they provide a helpful means to understand how the culture tends to form person in these days where the Protestant cultural hegemony is present, but fading.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:01 PM | Comments (2)

Souls in Transition: Chapter 4 -- The Statistical Morass

Chris Smith attempts in chapter 4 to describe the "relgious and spiritual lives" of 18-24 years olds. Again, this is an abtraction as the study only has statistical warrant to analyzed groups that Smith argues are "Conversative Protestants," "Black Protestants," "mainline Protestants," "Roman Catholics," "Church of Later Day Saints," and "Jews." Sociologically, the groupings emerge that put Conservative Protestants, Black Protestants, and LDS emerging adults together; mainline Protestants fall with Roman Catholics and Jews -- with Jewish young adults showing the deepest accomodations to the liberal democratic culture in which we live that undercut their own sense of adherence to the synagogue. The statistics suggest that America is currently doing what early 20th century German could not -- eliminate the Jews as a historic, visible, distinct worshipping people.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:31 PM | Comments (7)

Souls in Transition: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 in Souls in Transition provides comparative data to ask if North American culture is secularizing within ages 18-23. Sociologists (and pastors) have long known that this demographic in the US possesses the lowest church attendance rate in North America -- except for those over 80, but probably for different reasons! With the emergence of the cultural elements that have formed this new life phase, Smith's data shows both continuities and shifts that are occuring. I think these shifts are related to how deeply churches have accomodated to the liberal democratic presuppositions/formations of the society in which we live. This shows that what we call "secularization" is not a "natural process" in relation to science and the "advancement" of the age, but is very much a political program that is still very much in progress.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:52 PM | Comments (1)

Interruption of Smith: The Fate of the Poor

I am trying to use the blog just to communicate what life is for those whose homes are on the streets downtown. I found this news just on a website, quite by accident. I'm trying to get more information from friends downtown. I want to cut and paste the news in, and then, afterwards copy a letter that I sent a week ago, asking the city to allow persons who have tents to use them during the cold weather.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:30 PM | Comments (51)

Emerging Adults Cultural World, Faith, and Congregational Involvement

The particular socially and culturally-induce life-state of emerging adulthood, according to Christian Smith, has implications for adherence to the life of the church, synagogue, or mosque. Smith does not extend his analysis to liberal democractic political theory, but the connection is very clear. Emerging adulthood results from the institutional stripping of the concrete tradition in which a human being exists in order to assimilate a person into the liberal political tradition -- a tradition that masques that it is a tradition. This move is a move from particular traditions to another, hegemonic tradition that presents itself as "wider, more inclusive, and generic." The supposedly particular traditions that one must leave behind make no claim on lives except in terms of "choice." This retraditioning makes adherence to another tradition "optional" -- anchored in the will rather than what is good, true, and beautiful. It is a painful, long instituted, institutionally constructed realignment that is necessary because of the demands of liberal democratic practice.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:57 AM | Comments (3)

Back to Souls in Transition

It seems as if the disruptions downtown have played themselves out. I do not know exactly what happened, but those who were displaced from the library on Thursday night have been allowed to return to their homes -- although Tuesday night the numbers had been thinned about 1/2 to 2/3rds. I am awaiting contact from an officer of the "Homeless Outreach" unit to discuss the incident. It highlights the tenuous life of those whose home and neighborhoods are on the streets. We forget the stability that comes from the architectural feature of walls, doors, and roofs.

I do want to return daily to summaries of Souls in Transition. I think that it is an important work to understand ourselves, our world in North America, and some of the dynamics of Mid-City. I hope that the change of pace the next couple of days in much of our culture will allow you to follow and participate in the discussion. Today I focus on the first half of chapter 2 -- the new, socially constructed "developmental stage" of "emerging adults" -- age 18-29, or for Smith's study, 18-23.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:21 AM | Comments (8)

Updates from the re-location of those whose home is the sidewalk

I really don't have much to report as far as advance. I hope to go downtown this evening and see what is going on. Supposedly several news organizations are looking into the story of the re-location program -- we should call it for what it is. I did hear last night that some had reoccupied the area around the library.

I received an email response from Amy Benjamin that spoke only that the City Attorneys had ruled that setting up tents was illegal "on public and private property" (I wonder if that includes backyards throughout the city?) and that the tent, holding 220 people will be open on Sunday. I did get this last night from my friend, London, who one can't help but like and who will soon be moving to Texas -- to my loss.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:09 AM | Comments (2)

Emergency Interruption on Christian Smith

I have an entry on Christian Smith already done and ready to post. As I checked my email this morning, however, my day quickly changed. It was from Gary, one of my friends from downtown, a man looking for employment, but unable to find it. He and London look out for each other underneath the overhang of the library. Here is his email to me:

As of Thursday November 19th the Library and Post Office have been "BANNED" for the homeless as far as sleeping. The SDPD has cleared most of the homeless out of the immediate downtown area. Only real groups of homeless now are down "A" Street and down by 16th and Market. Thought you should know so you can pass the word around.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:14 AM | Comments (3)

Important Series: Souls in Transition

I finally finished the major chapter that will introduce the interviews that I conducted with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas three years ago. As part of my research, I discovered that Christian Smith, a prominent sociologist, has a new book out to follow up his "Soul Searching" -- a sociological study of the theological convictions of American 13-17 year olds. This new book, published in September, is called Souls in Transitions: The Religious and Spiritual Lives on Emerging Adults. I have decided to blog the contents of the book and my responses in the next week, chapter by chapter.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:26 AM | Comments (3)

On Veteran's Day

Long time readers of the blog know that I think that Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the Scriptures calls the believer to non-retaliation, and thus not to participate in mortal violence of any kind. They also know that I think that history shows that the formation and political theory behind the European nation-state is one of the, if not the most, violent and death-dealing type of political formation in human history. This also has been accompanied by the technical development that allows widescale death -- but I don't think this technical development is independent of the formation of the nation-state. Readers know as well that I think that the United States is a major perpetrator of this violence.

In light of this, I still face Veteran's Day with more sympathy than other national days of remembrance. Even if it is a parody of All Saints Day, and even if the sacrificial language shows a false theory of atonement, there is an appropriate saddenness to the day. As I meet Iraq vets on the streets, I mourn the difficulty that has been embedded in their bodies. Two ex-Iraq vets help now cook our meal on Tuesdays for the Salvation Army. In working through the horrors that they have experienced -- and still experience, their effort to engage in the works of mercy to fend off these demons is humbling. The key is to remember the veterans, not only those who have died, but also who bear the weight of having killed or witnessed killing. And simultaneously, remember the countless "Others," never mentioned on days, who have suffered death, displacement, and poverty as a result of the wars in which the United States has caused and in which they have participated. Saddness, mourning, remembrance. All this is appropriate for Christians, maybe especially Christians who are veterans.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:28 PM | Comments (1)

Between Analytic Philosophy and Knives

I'm a bit confused this morning -- nothing new there. The intensity, however, goes deeper. I'm making progress in my writing the introductory chapter to frame the interviews I did several years ago with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas. Hopefully I'll post some side observations. I'm now trying to read on linguistic philosophy as it developed in the middle of the 20th century and theology. How is it that language works?

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Posted by johnwright at 8:52 AM | Comments (3)

Wesleyan Theological Discussion Group post

I've been much too tardy, as usual, in my blog. I hope to give another update soon -- both from the streets and the sabbatical. The last few days, however, I have found myself inextractibly pulled into a discussion on the Wesleyan Theological Discussion group netserve. The issue has been the language of "co-creation," very important to relational and open theists and process theologians. It takes us to a core issue. I could not resist responding. I thought I'd post it here as well.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:56 PM | Comments (24)

Sabbatical Update

Today I really "started" my sabbatical -- that is, I've finished all the smaller projects upon which I was overdue. I, of course, have been reading on the various projects, particularly trying to get a history of the development of scrolls and writing. But the actual writing and bulk of research time has been spent on three articles for Baker's upcoming "Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics" and two articles on process theology for a collection of essays for a book by Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City -- the Nazarene publishing house press.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:23 PM | Comments (7)

Dorrien and C. A. Briggs

As I've reflected on Dorrien's book, the story of Charles Briggs (of the Hebrew lexicon, Brown, Driver, Briggs fame) struck me as particularly poignant. The dynamics of his story are still very much alive today, it seems to me, as the church struggles between two forms of modernism/(post)modernism: the "conservative" versus the "liberal" that leaves commitments to the historical evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith excluded from consideration. The "conservatives" and "liberals" legitimate each other by their dialectical opposition that allows an exclusionary framing of the issues. The institutional consequences for such framing of the options are equally devastating.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:38 PM | Comments (2)

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Theology, vol. 1

I finally finished volume 1 of Gary Dorrien's work on the origins of the liberal theological tradition in the United States. Dorrien's historical work is also an apologia for this perspective, and a call for a certain type of "moderate" liberal theological tradition -- what he recognizes is very hard to sustain because of theological liberalism's instability. The work is very useful in how this tradition overdetermines so much of contemporary church life in the United States; it also speaks unwittingly of patterns that continue to repeat themselves in the rhetoric and sociological movement within the American Protestant church life.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:54 PM | Comments (5)

Sabbatical Update

Sabbatical has gotten off to a bit of a slow start -- someday I'll learn that everything takes me four times as long to finish than I anticipate. I have written two articles for an upcoming Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics from Baker Press; I have submitted a proposal to the upcoming Wesleyan Theological Society meeting; and have read to continue work on the introduction to the postliberal interviews as well as trying to getting a feel for how the Greek world impacted Judah in the Persian period and how the east influenced the Greek world.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)

A slight editorial change

Yesterday I looked on-line to find someone within the San Diego city government to talk about the removal of the tents. As I searched, I found a site of the San Diego police department about "Dealing with the Homeless." The site perpetuates all the strange societal paranoias about the poor; it does not match my experience at all. Propaganda like this then justifies the criminalization of those who live on the streets. It shows how unChristian the city government is because it encourages persons to avoid personal contact with the poor, and use only mediating institutions.

While I was running, an idea hit me (better an idea than a car) -- what would happen if I changed the category "homeless" or equivalent with "white people" or "whiteness." The result is better than I thought. It reads very well and shows the underlying prejudices against the "homeless" that our society perpetuates. If you want to check the original, check http://www.sandiego.gov/police/prevention/homeless.shtml

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Posted by johnwright at 10:40 AM | Comments (17)

Police Execution

Tonight the streets were buzzing concerning the police shooting of “Nacho” yesterday evening. Sally, who was at the scene, called it “murder.” Ron was nearby, dove behind his suit case to avoid any possible stray bullets. Rumors flew around, most likely untrue; Nacho 'was just of five hours out of prison'; he was a “meth-head;” a new friend who helped us distribute the sandwiches had a brother whom Nacho, after he had lifted the steak knife from a table, looked at through the window “with a crazy look in his eye.” No one condoned Nacho’s behavior; those on the streets live under the possibility of attack all the time. The question, however, kept rising about the police rules of engagement. Independently, two different persons told me that the killing was done execution style.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:27 PM | Comments (7)

Live Blogging: The 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene

The Assembly has gathered after committee meetings; Talmage Johnson, an emerti General Superintendent, is currently reading from Psalm 122 to begin the morning. After his "devotional" they will announce the results from the fifth ballot. I have found out a litle about Dr. Duarte. He is a native of the Cape Verde Islands -- a place that had a very strong Nazarene presence from the 1960s on. He was ordained in 1981 and has a Masters in Leadership from Azuza Pacific University. He is the director of the African Region; speaks English, Portugese, and four African languages. He is a very soft spoken and gentle person by all accounts. He seems a wonderful gift to the church.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:07 AM | Comments (1)

Live Blogging: The 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene: GS Elections

Voting for the General Superintendents has begun. First, resolutions involving the number and nature of the office needed handled. All proposed changes were soundly defeated, about 70% to 30%. Then incumbent GS's were voted upon.

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Posted by johnwright at 5:30 PM | Comments (2)

Live Blogging from the 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene: Not Business as Usual: The “State of the Church” Address

This morning the Assembly proper began. After various introductions, formalities, and clarification of rules, the General Superintendents began the Assembly as required by a “State of the Church” address. This address represents the work of the Board as a whole rather than any one GS as in the services and sermons. The address possessed deeper reflection, was more tied in with our tradition, and had more thickness in Christian convictions than the sermons during the convention. It tied together trends over the last decade, and tried at the same to keep the church united in mission and resources. Jesse Middendorf read the address in a measured tone, supplemented by power points. Likewise, the delegates and the observers were measured in their responses.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:33 PM | Comments (7)

The 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene: The Sunday Morning Service

The Manual of the Church of the Nazarene instructs that General Assembly, held every four years, begins on Sunday with a service of the Lord’s Supper and a full day for worship and devotion. This section of the Manual was read this morning by Jesse Middendorf after a very long, grandiose, loud orchestration piece as the call to worship. We knew it was a call to worship because first announced over the sound system was “Life from the 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene in Orlando Florida” for the internet audience. Until the Manual explanation by Dr. Middendorf, the introduction to the service again seemed very much based on a televised or movie award show that wants to tell its audience that “they” are part of “history” by watching the show.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:18 PM | Comments (1)

Saturday: Live Blogging from the General Conventions of the Church of the Nazarene

We arrived at Assembly this morning about 6:15 am, Pacific Standard Time. Yes, I was and am very sleepy. When I returned to my brother’s house last night, my nephew, Danny, and I went on a run; Kathy went right to be, exhausted with her fibromyalgia and the exertion of the day. When we got here today, Kath went immediately to the children’s bible quizzing. The children’s quizzing on the Saturday before the assembly brings many families to the assembly who would not otherwise come – over 1800 quizzers, and 3300 family members this year. Most likely the past success of children’s quizzing in drawing people was one factor that led to Orlando as a site. I wonder how many families will blow off going to the Communion Service tomorrow morning for Disney or Sea World?

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Posted by johnwright at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

Live Blogging: 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene: Friday night Service

The Friday service has begun. One looks up at the "platform" and can see the influence of Charles Finney and the "awakening" service with its emphasis on "new measures." The room is a convention hall -- concrete floors, stacking padded seats -- and very large. I am impressed by how many are here (in the thousands), but the room swallows us. To keep our eyes fixed on the front there are three lighted circles suspended above the podium -- showing lavender and pink images. MTV, Grammy Award type television shots move larger images in front of us from the platform. In the middle is a "podium"; a 10 person vocalist group leads music (very loud), with live background orchestration. A childrens choir stands off to a side in front. Farther off to the side is a massive cross. Flags from nation-states across the world stand farther to the side.

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Posted by johnwright at 4:12 PM | Comments (1)

Live Blogging from the 27th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene

Hello from Orlando, Florida! I'm sitting in the back of the "sanctuary" while the NYI convention votes on various resolutions. Kathy and I arrived last night around midnight local time. We are staying with my brother, north of Orlando. Kathy is now working at the Women's Clergy booth. Interesting, here first contact there was a man who came up and asked her how she could support women in ministry. I hope over the next few days to keep up with the affairs and share my impressions and analysis with the proceedings. Hopefully the wireless network will keep up.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:58 AM | Comments (3)

AAR presidential address and Bonhoeffer

Last night the streets were somewhat sedate. It is the beginning of the month – those with limited income have moved to the Single Room Occupancy hotels for a few nights of rest behind a door – one of the little secrets is that many of the so-called “homeless” are forced to live on the streets part of the month because of the inadequacy of their fixed incomes. The depths of connection with those who have built their own neighborhood around the post office grow – we’re now known as “the sandwich people.” I have come to admire those who live with such dignity in such a situation, and pray to expand our presence there.

Meanwhile I’m heading toward finishing my introductory and concluding chapters to my interviews from years back with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas. My reading and reflection in these years have shown me how deeply culture and institutional structures shifted in the 60s to form the current “left-right” continuum, and to make cultural discourse – and theological discourse – about “identity” defined by praxis rather than commitments to the Transcendentals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness – which, of course, Christians find unified as One in the Triune God.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:22 PM | Comments (1)

Tuesday night downtown

It was another interesting night downtown. I continue to think and pray about how to be present more thickly as a congregation with the congregation that has grown there in the past years -- in the Salvation Army and, more recently, on the streets. I noticed a building for rent right across from the library (away from the Gas Lamp district). I can't help thinking of the information that Stan Ingersol gave last year that Phineas Bresee, the founder of the Church of the Nazarene in LA, left a mission to plant a congregation because the poor need a congregation more than a specifized mission. I think that is so. It could serve as a place to care for those who have drunk themselves into unconsciousness.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:33 PM | Comments (0)

Pre-publication Readings

Summer rhythms slowly unfold. I finished grading last Friday except for odds and ends (euphanisms for late work that I'm much too nice in accepting). Kathy and Tasha are in Chicago, looking after four young nephews while her sister and husband take a vacation. Now is the time to get up on the reading and start writing. Sabbatical draweth nigh!

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Posted by johnwright at 7:18 PM | Comments (0)

Four Weeks -- and still grading

The last four weeks have proven very full. We finished the end of the church year; began a new one. Honors projects defended; final papers and exams given. I'm still working my way through them. Also entailed was a quick trip to Durham, North Carolina, and a few days with Stan Hauerwas who advised me on contents of a reader on theology and the university. Kathy and Tasha left today for eight days in Chicago, to care for four young nephews of Kathy's sister while the parents escape for a vacation. All in all, life has been full.

Soon I hope to have grading completed -- tomorrow? Until then I wanted to post my annual report from the church. Your observations and comments are welcome. When grading is done, summer leading into sabbatical begins!!!

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Posted by johnwright at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

Bread of Life, the FBI, and the Unworthy Poor

Tuesday night was Bread of Life as usual. I have come to treasure our congregation that meets in the Salvation Army downtown. They are the most gracious group who has ever received my preaching. They have taught me the good news of the gospel that does not trivialize the difficulty of life or the fallenness of the world in a real and concrete way.

In the past several months I have also watched also a tent city has emerged on F Street on 8th Street. I noticed its growth correlated with the dropping numbers at our food distribution – people leaving/forced out of housing as the Great Recession. What began as three tents, two weeks ago grew to eighteen tents. I was thankful that the city did not force people away – though they delayed when the tents could be built until 9:00 pm. It is okay to be poor as long as one is not visible.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:06 PM | Comments (0)

Biographical Reflections

I have spent some time in the past two weeks -- in the little time available -- trying to understand what is going on institutionally in the North American culture and to own influential sources that have formed me. One of the strangest events has been how I am now perceived as a "conservative" by colleagues and the institution whereas seven years ago, I would have been branded a "liberal." Such are the categories that come in this awkward transition between high and late modernity. Of course, I am both and neither.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:40 PM | Comments (8)

Easter Sunday – He is Risen!

Today we gathered for our Easter service – a multicongregational, baptismal service. We started a little late – not unusual, as we waited for the French-speaking baptismal candidate who had transportation problems and the Khmer-language congregation was a little late joining us. Pastor Anthony and the French congregation led music – the beauty of the Caribbean transformation of praise choruses was wonderful. Marietta and two daughters sang a wonderful a cappello piece; the Swahili congregation sang; Peter Biel, the pastor of the Nuer congregation, preached; the Spanish language congregation was there in its presence. It was long for Anglos and others with Easter plans (approaching 1:00 by the time we finished); but as usual numbingly profound.

The highlight for me was the baptismal service, of which I got to participate in directly. From our congregation I baptized Theresa Luginbuhl, sealing her faith after many years; I also baptized Emmanuela Antoine. According to early Christian practice, I submerge each candidate three times: once in the name of each Person of the Triune God. According to Mid-City practice, we invite the children forward for teaching purposes.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:40 PM | Comments (1)

Holy Saturday

Today at the distribution we had celery, carrots, and other products to distribute -- 2 1/2 tons of carrots. They were in 50 lb bags, though broken into pieces. Someone speculated that they were packaged for animals and had found their way to the foodbank. It is fascinating to see how these economic processes work themselves out. Our numbers are down from their peak two months ago; a direct correlation with the vacancy signs in the apartment complexes. One can feel the deflationary cycle run through the neighborhood -- even dropping the demand for free goods.

The day's most moving point when Igor came to me and wished me a happy Easter. Igor rooms with Vladimir, who spit on Ericka Poole when we put numbers on people's hands -- they are elderly Jewish men who survived the German invasion of Russia in World War II. Igor explained to us that after the Nazis, one doesn't put numbers on human skin after such an experience. Vladimir has recently been in the hospital with back problems -- we are trying to translate some of his Russian biblical poetry. Igor's act of forgiveness of Christians for their involvement in this atrocity in his words to me brought tears to my eyes.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)

Good Friday

We finished our Good Friday service on the Seven Last Words of Christ with Southeast Church of the Nazarene, as has become our practice over the years. The preaching was wonderfully good; it is good always to gather with them. We have established deep ties over the years.

This section provides a small reflection from The Glory of the Lord appropriate to today, it seemed to me on the conversion necessary to see the suffering of Christ, that which "shows for the hiddenness of God and the sinner's ruinous condition," that is simultaneously the place where the church, and the individual believer, finds his true self.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

Maundy Thursday

We held our traditional Maundy Thursday service tonight -- simple barley soup, cheese, crackers; the Lord's Supper; foot-washing. It is a slow moving service and evening -- which is good. It is as close to a contemplative service that we have in the course of the year.

Of course von Balthasar framed much of the evening, heightening my sensitivity to the simple but profound beauty of the evening. The simple candles and fruit and table cloths; the chalice and the bread; the piano and the violin. Even amid the orange carpet and the duct tape, we participated in the beauty of the Last Supper/Footwashing on the evening that Jesus was betrayed. The footwashing takes a long time; it was a wonderful gift for quiet prayer.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Beauty Impressed from Above rather than Discovered in the Depths

To appeal to beauty as theologically significant reaches into our daily lives with a language that is unavoidable. Yet the language by which one accounts for this beauty makes all the difference in the world. We have been shaped, profoundly, by a concept of beauty that arises from German and English romanticism, with the result of what von Balthasar calls "aesthetic theology". He, instead, wants to develop a theolotical aesthetics. How does one render the beauty that we experience as intelligible? As we pass through the horrible Beauty that we observe in the Maunday Thursday through Easter Sunday service, what is it that we experience?

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Posted by johnwright at 7:13 PM | Comments (0)

Tuesday -- The Call to be In-formed

Tonight, of course, is Tuesday -- which means Bread of Life downtown. I've been a little nervous about the evening -- the first Padres game; the winter shelter is closed; and the new "camp" around the post-office. The camp, set up and taken down every evening, is on a migratory path of those wealthier who are going to Padres games. I was afraid that the city might intervene. I am very thankful to say that they did not. All was very come on 8th Avenue.

After preaching and the meal, I went out to the street with some sandwiches with Maddie Flag. I talked with Jay and two others -- a woman who was spending her first night on the streets and a woman who had one time been a business owner but had suffered spousal abuse, head injury, amnesia, and subsequent homelessness. I didn't count exactly how many tents were there, but it was at least nine in fine, good order, symetric, well-formed. It seems that Jay has become a leader in the area in the upkeep, construction, protection, and care of the neighborhood that emerges every evening and dissolves every morning. They spoke that the police now smile in the morning at them as they see them clean the area in the care for their neighborhood.

As I sat on a blanket, rolled up as a seating cushion to protect from the hardness of the concrete -- a mobile chair cushion -- I couldn't help feel like I was back in Winamac on a porch in an evening talking with parishioners and their neighbors. I have wonderful neighbors here where I live, but none treated me with the kindness and care in providing seating for a conversation as I stayed there. There was an orderliness, a beauty, a form in which I participated. On the streets, in the doorway to a tent, I found neighbors.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:25 PM | Comments (0)

Monday Night of Holy Week

I gathered with the Monastic Living and Learning Community tonight to share in the Lord's Supper -- after playing half of a basketball intermural game. My season points per game average dropped to 1.0 -- four points in four games. I set a pick and got sent about 5 feet from where I sent it. Thank God for Motrin tonight at bedtime. It was wonderful meeting with these men and sharing their experiences from the year and in the Body and Blood of Christ.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:28 PM | Comments (0)

Palm Sunday: The Beginning of Holy Week

Holy week, of course, began today. We gathered in the parking lot for our multicongregational procession. Henrique again brought the Palms; Pastor Anthony led the music; Pastor Mona led the singing. A guitar quartet emerged from Haiti, the Congo, Los Angeles, and the central valley of California, with a drum player who had literally to destroy all evidence of his past to survive the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; they joined together for an impromptu jam around the Hebrew word, “Hosanna!” It was a fascinating fusion of American folk, Caribbean, and Congolese guitar music. As the procession began, a 2 year old Swahili girl enthusiastically entered the void formed by the movement of the musicians – with her mother reaching to keep up! She caught the joy and excitement of entering the parade better than anyone else in the morning!

As we traditionally celebrate today as Passion Sunday, we had our long reading of the Passion narrative, this year from the Gospel of Mark. We moved straight from the Gospel reading into the Lord’s Supper, with only our baptismal candidate prayed over and dismissed separating the reading from the Eucharistic rite. It was a moving, joyous/sad occasion.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:55 PM | Comments (2)

The San Diego Economy from the Streets

This week has continued to humble me. Internet sources have emerged about tent cities emerging in the United States; the governor of California has opened a fairground in Sacramento for housing for people. Unemployment continues to rise in California; it hits minorities and the already poor disproportionately. San Diego County finished 85 new housing units in February; four years ago it was over 1000. There are some indications that the hotel industry may have been a little higher than expected – but only because of the drug violence in Mexico has brought more college students to San Diego. Two of my neighbors are unemployed.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:29 PM | Comments (1)

Kyoto Laureate Symposium

Yesterday I had the distinct honor of attending the 2008 Kyoto Laureate Symposium that honored the work of Charles Taylor at the University of San Diego as a VIP -- a guest of PLNU's provost John Hawthorne, who knew that I had read and admired Taylor's work. I'm not used to such treatment -- special parking, a golf cart ride to the site of the lecture, seating in the reserved section at the front, seats away from the Japanese ambassador to the United States, a fancy luncheon afterwards, where I thanked the CEO of the San Diego National Bank for providing such an opportunity for me and my students (and probably made an inappropriate joke about the importance of Taylor's lecture given the current state of banks in the United States resulting from a loss of locality after he said that the San Diegans were more interested in the technical prizes rather than the thought and ethics prize). I ate with the academic administrators from USD, itself an interesting experience. There was a blessing before the meal, prayed to the "Creator God" rather than the "Triune God." I found this wonderfully ironic given Taylor's historical assessment of this "more subtle language" and its anchorage in 18th century deism and romanticism.

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While Sick

The past five weeks have been intense, I guess as usual. Each day has enough concerns of its own. Last night my body caught up with my neglect, and broke down a little. I was able to teach through the day, but canceled my evening plans to rest. I finally finished Jennifer Herdt's Putting on Virtue, a text that I hope to blog on consistently. The rest seems to have done me some well -- I'm feeling a little better. So I thought I'd put a Lenten quote from Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum. I found it at the first of January, but had not taken time to share it yet.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:59 PM | Comments (0)

Economic update from the streets

It was humbling today to watch 630 people pass through our food line. People were gracious, though the "pickings were slim" -- to use a midwestern phrase. Food for America continues to generously share with us what they have, but one gets the impression that their receipts have lessened. A member of our congregation who had started driving a forklift for them in November has been laid off since Christmas. This indicates, quite possibly, a lessening of goods flowing into the food bank.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:25 PM | Comments (0)

On Ohio, Shrines and Wesley on the Eucharist

We returned to Ohio at the end of the 12 days of Christmas. It was interesting to see and feel how things have stayed the same and also how they differ. Deep social and economic changes have occurred. We could tell the depth of the recession, the loss of population, and the aging of the population. From sight, all new economic activity in the Dayton activity seems to have come from health care in response to the aging of the population. There seemed a cultural Angst that sought its consolation in Ohio State football to compensate for the political disappointments of the past decade.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)

Happy Epiphany!

Blogging has had basic starts without follow-up during the past year. I hope to remedy this now by more consistent writing again. We're just back from our "midwestern sojourn," a four day trip to Ohio to see family. The spring and summer await; I'm to work on larger projects now after a year writing 8 separate essays on diverse subject. I hope now to share some of the reading that I've done, as well as that of which I hope to accomplish.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)

Tears and Mid-City in Israel/Palestine

After the first of January, I hope again to blog more regularly. It has been much too long since I've been able to keep up, and I hope things will be different -- at least I plan for them to be. I miss the time of cyber-reflection.

I mourn the continued conflict in Palestine/Israel. I'm concerned for my friends in the IDS who have probably been called up; I mourn for the victims of the bombing and the devastation of a society that has become Gaza; I hope that the siege of Gaza that has occurred will soon end so that at least children may eat and the sick have medications given to them. It is always the poorest and the weakest who suffer most in the conflict that arises out of the nation-state system that humans have constructed. At any rate, I wanted to share with you a first hand account received this morning from a member of Mid-City who is leaving Israel today. I won't mention his/her name so as not to compromise his/her safety through Israeli checkpoints.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:33 PM | Comments (1)

The Narrative behind the History of the Church of the Nazarene

One important lesson that Alasdair MacIntyre has taught me is that human actions become intelligible only within broader narratives. The narrative in which one embeds an action determines before hand how one understands that action – and, of course, we can place actions within various underlying narratives. Actions never come to us as “fact” separated from “value” but already have their “value” embedded within them.

This does not force us into relativism. Narratives are not mere human constructions; narratives are true or false to the extent that they can account for what is at hand better than their rivals. We can improve the rationality of narratives by placing what is at hand in narratives that form us more adequately to what really is.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:39 PM | Comments (0)

Happy Birthday, Church of the Nazarene

Tomorrow we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Church of the Nazarene, a date determined by the joining of eastern and western wings of different groups, including an already existing Church of the Nazarene, in Pilot Point, Texas in 1908. This fact reveals much about the Church of the Nazarene: Pilot Point Texas is not exactly the cosmopolitan center of the universe. According to its entry on Wikipedia, the town, as of the 2000 census, has a population of 3538 persons on 3 square miles of land; if my search of ancestry.com was correct, the town possessed a population of 1371 in the 1910 census. It is hard to be triumphalistic when your founding event takes place in Pilot Point, Texas!

Tomorrow all seven congregations that comprise the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City in San Diego will gather in a multicongregational service. It also begins a “heritage month” within the English-speaking congregation at the Church of the Nazarene in San Diego. During this time, we hope to place our mission within the tradition of these obscure people who decided to live in discipline with each other as followers of Christ for the pursuit of Christian holiness in witness to the world in 1908. I hope that I can do some blogging during this time to tell this story within the context of the story of the church catholic. I would like to begin by explaining why this is so important.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:08 PM | Comments (0)

The Journal of Dorothy Day

The last week has been very busy as usual. I traveled to Bluffton University to participate in the Fides et Historia conference, and sat on a panel on Tal Howard's German Theology and the Making of the Modern University (Oxford, 2006) -- a wonderful book. I traveled with colleagues from the history department, which was a great joy as well.

On the way our rent-a-car broke down on I-75 about 12 miles out of Bluffton. We got to stand on the side of the highway over the midwestern fields -- a nostalgic moment, as I even got to see a path made by groundhogs and deer in the background of a harvested field. We eventually got picked up by a policeman (with whom I had a common acquaintance yet in Ohio!), and had the joy of riding in the back of the police car. I returned home Saturday, and the past two days have been full getting back into the flow of church and school.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:57 PM | Comments (1)

Romanticism and the Church of the Nazarene

Last night I finished Tracey Rowland's new book, Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford University Press, 2008). Rowland is one of the premier interpreters of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, a champion of a "post-modern Augustintian Thomism" that seems to me to answer John XXIII's call for an "up-dating" that is really a "return to the sources." Of course, this is precisely the tradition in which I think John Wesley and H. Orton Wiley stand within. I do not think that the parallels between the American Holiness movement's and the Roman Catholicism's struggle against and within theological modernism are accidental, nor the social processes within American culture whereby both have moved from "outsiders" to "members in good standing" in terms of social upward mobility and self-understanding. Of course, Roman Catholicism has a much thicker history and knowledge and resources than the Church of the Nazarene. Yet the parallels between the Methodist/holiness movement and post-Vatican II's "new religious movements" have been an underlying current behind my interests in the past decade. While at least Rome and the Cardinals have withstood the "subtler languages" (to use Charles Taylor's terms) of theological modernism/post-modernism in the last 35 years, the Church of the Nazarene has largely succumbed in its academic and publishing endeavors to these resources through adopting "relational" languages that have grown out of what I have called "Tillichian pietism" of the 70's. These languages have allowed the Church of the Nazarene to embrace the church growth's movements distinction between "kernel" and "husk" for theological language to allow a thinly veiled Christian version of conservative American civil religion, with its personal, therapeutic emphasis, to "up-date" the worship of the Church of the Nazarene from the outdated hard core authoritarian revivalism of the post-WWII era.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:28 AM | Comments (1)

Modernity's Suppression of the Church

I've finally gotten all my books on the shelf in my new office at school -- a long, tedious process that has filled the gaps of my last two weeks. We had our first faculty meetings yesterday; more coming tomorrow. I'm trying to finish today the work that I wanted completed by the end of May. This includes two book reviews and an abstract; in the middle, I hope to work on syllabi.

One book that I have to review is a new book by Regina Mara Schwartz in the important series, Cultural Memory in the Present by Stanford University Press. It is called Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World. It is a fascinating work, but I think it is mistitled -- it should be "how the repression of the sacramental authority of the church catholic by the rise of the modern state failed to eclipse God". In a real sense it documents the Christian conviction that humans have an innate desire for that which exeeds our reason.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)

Guardini on Revelation and Illiberalism

Guardini saw the dissolution of the modern as it moved farther away from its unconscious dependence upon the Christian tradition that emerges within it as a parody. He saw that the human person, separated from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, will eventually become a commodity, a tool of technology for a supposed greater good – whether it is the sacrifice of Iraqis for the sake of “democracy and freedom” or the starvation of persons for the cause of global socialism. Guardini saw, like Aquinas, that humanity needs revelation because our end is beyond human reason by itself; with Revelation lost, the world collapses into itself into a continual play, deathly play, for utopian agendas within immanence. As Guardini wrote, “In truth, all human values find their root in Revelation; everything immediately human is related uniquely to Revelation. . . . . Man might then become conscious of values which, although evident in themselves, only take on visible manifestation under the aegis of Revelation” (pp. 97-98). In words of Vatican II, in God’s Revelation in Jesus Christ, God simultaneously revealed humanity to our selves. In Jesus we see “Personality is essential to man. This truth becomes clear, however, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation, which related man to a living, personal God, which makes him a son of God, which teaches the ordering of His Providence” (p. 98).

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Posted by johnwright at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)

Guardini on the Dissolution of Modern Culture

I’m back to Guardini, I hope. The summer has been much more intense than I hoped – of course, I should expect this from life now. The latest challenge has been completing notes for an upcoming Wesleyan Study Bible on 1 and 2 Chronicles. I got the contract late, and then, mistakenly though it would be a week or so of work. Always behind because of teaching pressures, I turned to it at the beginning of summer. It turned out as an extensive project – I wrote over 25,000 words – I need to edit some down. The publishers have rightfully pushed because of necessary publication deadlines. I wrote on it 17 hours on Wednesday and have been since getting caught up on my class work. So much for Guardini.

But I have not forgotten. The third move in the “dissolution of the modern”, after nature and the person, and “a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence” (p. 50). Perhaps before turning to this it is important to hear his intent is not “conservative” in a reactionary sense. He writes at the beginning of “The Dissolution of the Modern World and the World which is to Come," “My hypothesis has nothing in common with that cheap disposition which revels always in prophesying collapse or destruction. It has nothing in common with that desire which would surrender the valid achievements of modern man. Nor is my hypothesis linked with a longing for a romantically envisioned Middle Ages or with an advance into a glorified utopia of the future. But this hypothesis has its crucial importance; it will enable us both to understand and to master the meanings implicit to the new world that is upon us” (pp. 50-51). “To understand and to master the meanings implicit” is the goal of his work. It is what Charles Taylor would call to uncover the “social imaginary” or Wittgenstein the “background” or Michael Polyani, “implicit knowledge.” The analysis is to help us see, to help us be prudent within the contemporary situation, not reactionary or nostalgic or even revolutionary. It is to help us live faithfully. For this reason it is important.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

The Loss of Personality

Guardini continues his analysis of the “dissolution of the modern world” by discussing how our concepts of the human person have changed. His analysis bears much analysis. A profound gift that I receive at Mid-City is “personalities” – interesting persons who often society doesn’t have the skills to appreciate. I think of the late Crazy Mike, or Monty, or the late Bear. Such persons don’t fare well in the disciplinary society in which we live, but bring a vibrancy to life. I remember when Crazy Mike dumped about 500 pennies in our offering plate – his gift from his begging. Or when “Captain America” read our Scriptures and, as he walked down back to his seat, expressed, “I did it!!” Tremendous gifts. It just struck me today that yesterday we had two “disruptions” during the sermon – and I didn’t even realize it, but incorporated the gifts of those whom God brought to us into the flow of things. As Guardini recognizes, the “dissolution of the modernity” leaves us without personality, substituting “mass man” for “personality.”

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Changing Nature

Guardini's next chapter after "The Birth of the Modern" surprisingly is entitled "The Dissolution of the Modern and the World which is to Come." Guardini gave these lectures in the ashes of Germany, after he had been arrested for not supporting Hitler; images of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki hung in human minds. The situation seems to have given him extraordinary insight into what we have come to call "the postmodern" -- but as a repetition within the modern, rather than a liberating presence, as seems evident now.

Guardini writes, "The intellectual consciousness of modern Europe as commonly delineated and accepted even in our day proclaimed those three ideals: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence. The European mind believed further that the constant creation and perfection of this 'culture' constituted the final goal of history. This was all a mistake" (p. 50).

These ideals still endure, particularly in the United States. Nonetheless we understand when Guardini speaks of how these ideals quiver in the contemporary culture.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:14 PM | Comments (0)

Back to Guardini

The past month has been filled with various unanticipated activities. I should know by now. But I still want to return to the task of working through the three books on the birth of modernity – Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World; Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity. There are interesting common themes that the books share, as well as complementary differences. The purpose is to understand the deep shifts that affect us in what we presuppose as “normal”, but really are not.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)

On the Medieval

To speak of retrieving a medieval intellectual tradition provokes strong reaction within the contemporary world. One immediate has to deal with claims of wanting to return to the Crusades and the Inquisition -- even if one thinks that the Scriptures demands that Christians must commit to non-violence as I do. To speak sympathetically of the medieval European world does not evoke much sympathy. To speak to retrieve a sophistication of thought and life from that times strikes us (post)modernists as positively barbaric. Of course the irony here is that none of the barbarism matches the barbarism of Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Hitler's Germany, nor Bush's Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Guardini begins The End of the Modern World to understand the deep continuities and differences between the classical and medieval world to sympathetically understand the medieval. This is not merely an antiquarian interest, but a means of retrieval of a medieval Christian humanism in contrast to the modern anti-humanistic humanism that Guardini saw around him.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:20 PM | Comments (0)

Romano Guardini -- The End of the Modern World

With 1 Chronicles notes finally in and summer quickly moving, I'm been spending time reading "big views" of Western intellectual/cultural history. I spent much of the spring working with late 18th, and early 19th century figures and institutions. It seems to me that we are working with diminished sense of the human person that ironically, arose by the particularities of the modern rejection of the medieval. The modern grew out of the nominalist rejection of high medieval understanding of God and creation, but sustained, or inverted, the political attempt of the church to use its authority coercively over temporal authorities. In Yoder's terms, the modern sustained the Constantinianism of the medieval but did so by undercutting classical Christian understanding of God and the world. Our current struggles with "the secular" in Western culture, it seems to me, comes from the particularity of the contingencies of this development.

What would it be like to rethink the modern, its obvious technological improvements, by re-inverting this history? In some way, I think that we can find this going on in our world as the modern (morphed into a new phase in the post-modern) seems to be reaching exhaustion. There is an opportunity for understanding and the life of the church in this age.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:32 PM | Comments (0)

Compassionate Ministry and Social Justice

This Monday and Tuesday Nazarene Theological Seminary is presenting the Nees Lectures in Social Justice. NTS wisely overlaps recruiting visits with lecture series, and have put together a time of reflections and group discussions to go with the social justice lectures.

In the Wiley Lectures at PLNU, George Marsden mentioned the rise of the evangelical left in the late '60s, a group through persons like Tom Nees, Ron Sider, and Ron Benefiel, impacted me. They produced a call to social engagement by evangelicals in 1973. Interestingly, this groups was largely evangelical social scientists. In some ways deeply impacted by the presuppositions of the social gospel movement (in some ways, itself very evangelical in its underlying pietism), aspects of this movement, particularly in younger persons, moved towards liberation theology and now liberataion/post-colonial theology to express this evangelical left. Yet it's presuppositions remain tied to a mediating theological tradition that seeks to discipline the church by a social criticism found in "nature" to mobilize the church to the right type of political action in the world.

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Posted by johnwright at 5:31 PM | Comments (4)

An Invitation

I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to our annual multicongregational "Founder's Day" service next Sunday, starting around 10:30ish multicongregational time. After the service we will gather for a multicongregational potluck. It looks like we may even complete the basic remodeling of the kitchen before then! We know, at least, that the roaches have been evicted from the kitchen!!! As Sister Gehane said as we ripped out the old cupboards, "No more roaches!!!!"

This service is one of our four annual multicongregational services in a year. But this service stands out, at least to me, as very significant -- it marks our 10th anniversary together as a multicongregation, sharing life in Christ together in the building. We want to use this time to celebrate God's goodness to us through these years. Your presence, if possible, would deeply help us celebrate these ten years.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)

Nihilism, Protestant Liberalism, and the "Wesleyan"

I've been wanting to share on the blog a correspondence that seems very interesting to me. I intended to move to this when I began blogging on Protestant liberalism -- what I see as coming back into play through certain varieties of "post-secular thought". The correlation comes from reading sections again from Michael Alan Gillespie's important Nihilism before Nietzche with Gary Dorrien's historical account of the rise of early American liberalism. If the correlation is accurate, I shows the deep affinity between Protestant liberalism as a proto-nihilistic reaction to late medieval theological shifts in the understanding of God from their high scholastic origins.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:53 PM | Comments (2)

More on Protestant Liberalism

The history of the church in the United States has been overdetermined by the liberal philosophical and political context in which the church has found itself. Whereas the origins of European liberalism was explicitly and strongly rhetorically anti-ecclesial, liberalism in the United States attempted to tone down this rhetoric except for "sectarian forms" of Christianity. History has shown that this rhetorical difference does make a difference; check the statistics for adherence to congregations in the US versus Western Europe. Yet it also shows, so it seems to me, that the underlying philosophical/theological antagonism of liberalism to the on-going, concrete institutional life of the church is very real and present.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:38 PM | Comments (4)

On Protestant Liberalism

To understate the obvious, I am not a fan of Protestant liberalism. I consider the holiness movement, and the Church of the Nazarene with its emphasis on Christian perfection to have embedded into its fundamental reason for existence to run counter to the accommodation to categories formed by "modernist" reason and liberal democratic political setting in which we find ourselves. I find such categories, even with the post-Vatican II struggles of Roman Catholicism, to violate the fundamental catholicity of the church and the communion of saints. Protestant liberal categories have proven death to congregations and larger ecclesial communities who have adopted them as fundamental to their language and mission.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:50 PM | Comments (0)

On the Fourth Day of Christmas

Today has been a bummer. I was up and down all night long with a sore throat; I awoke this morning to no voice at all. Of course, this is good news to Johnny, Carl, Tony, and Tasha. But I have been reduced to a slightly feverish, uncomfortable, achy glob of protoplasm. Sickness is no fun. I wonder how those who don't have a home survive even such minor discomfort as I'm experiencing.

I spent much of the day reading Gaudium et Spes, the Vatican II document, The Church in the Modern World. I recorded ever instance of the occurence of the word "hope" in it. I've wanted to write a small essay on reactions to Benedict XVIth Encyclical Spe Salvi. It is fascinating how the "spin" for the interpretation of Vatican II continues in various media. The reflections below address that continuous battle.

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Christmas Reflections

Last night less than twenty of us gathered in the "orange sanctuary" to begin the Feast of the Nativity. The French congregation met in the chapel; the Samoan congregation met for a full scale, "old time" Christmas paegant in the Fellowship hall. Earlier in the day Carl and Jeremiah Wood picked up a massive supply of bread after two weeks of scarcity. Tomorrow Scott Borger and I will have the honor of picking up more of these goods.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:09 PM | Comments (0)

To Stop Saber Rattling

We live in a day of wars and rumors of wars. The de-stabilization of Mesopotamia continues to threaten new outbreaks. Oil prices continue to climb. One wonders what would happen if, according to rumors in the press, the United States plan to bomb Iran would commence.

I finished reading the book by/about the Blessed Teresea of Calcutta, "Come Be My Light." It is profound at several levels; someone needs to do a Balthasarian type of study of her life as a type of first-order language of Christian theology. I recommend it to all. What I would like to do in light of this current situation is to copy Mother Teresea of Calcutta's letter that she wrote before the outbreak of armed hostilities in Iraqi in 1991. She addressed the letter to both George H. W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. Tragically, both parties ignored Teresea's wisdom. What she feared still goes on today.

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Tuesday Night Pastoring

I had hoped to focus a little more on my professorate responsibilities and reading and writing and revising today and tonight. Yet as I often find, God has other ideas. It ended up being a night of shock, suffering, and joy.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:56 PM | Comments (2)

Charles Taylor, In a Secular Age

Over the weekend I began Charles Taylor's new book. Secularity obviously cuts across my concerns and life. I was profoundly shaped by the positivism of the 1950s and 60s. To work in the academy or the church one must deal with secularity. To work in both at the same time one must come to an understanding of its insidious nature. It was the post-structuralists, such as Foucault and Baudrillard, who helped break the disciplinary chain of the secular so that I was able to see the disciplinary powers at work underneath it that belied its supposedly emanciatory claims. Of course, the emancipatory claims of the secular still continue today -- the books by Dawkins and Hitchens show the popularity of this mythology. But it was the work of persons like Hauerwas, Barth, Milbank, MacIntyre, Lindbeck and their friends and students who have helped me think the secular without reifying it. Of course, they have taught me that the ultimately capitulation to the secular would be to attempt to take control of the "secular apparatus" of the state as a Christian -- the futility of this strategy is seen in the utter moral, political, and intellectual wastage of the American political religious right at the end of the Bush administration. Instead of a strategy of control of the secular by making it 'sacred', the church must learn tactics of resistance to not let our life be colonialized by these forces. This colonial power runs straight through my body, the bodies of my students, and the bodies of my parishioners. I literally feel this in struggles of faith and doubt, allegiance to various groups, that we experience, all of us, because we live "in a secular age."

We must always remember that the "saeculum" is the time between the times of Christ's coming when the authority of a coercive "street gangs", the city of man in Augustinian terms, exists alongside the city of God. One of the key movements in modernist secularity is when this chronological understanding of the secular becomes a "space" so that a distinction might be drawn between the "secular" and the "sacred." The state becomes responsible for the secular, and grants, in its beneficence, a temporal amnesty over the "sacred" as long as the "sacred" capitulates ultimately to the power of the state. As a San Diego policemen once told me after arresting a person in one of our church services, "the church is ultimately just like K-Mart."

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Posted by johnwright at 3:38 PM | Comments (1)

A Swirl of Reading

I'm sitting in my eldest sons room, with stacks of books around me. I am reading these days to try and get a grasp of the cultural, philosophical, and theological undercurrents that have defined our contemporary scene, for pastoral, university teach and institutional, and writing reasons -- I continue to think about how to write the framing chapters for last winters interviews with Lindbeck, Burrell, and Hauerwas. It is quite a variety that provides a chance to see connections that I might otherwise miss.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:00 AM | Comments (0)

From Milbank to Zizek

I hope to get back to Milbank's preface to the Second Edition of Theology and Social Theory. Yet as I try to grasp the deep structure of thought and culture to which Milbank refers that has happened in the past 15 years, thinkers like Slavoj Zizek become both an ally in analysis, but problematic in solution. I think that I am understanding an intersecting project between Milbank and Zizek, even as they very deeply disagree with the nature of "the Real."

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Posted by johnwright at 8:48 PM | Comments (0)

Excellent Reflections on Mother Theresea

The soon-to-be published letters of Theresea of Calcutta have received some press. David Jones at ressourcement.blogspot.com linked to this excellent article by a preacher in the papal household. I found it, not only helpful, but moving

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Posted by johnwright at 1:01 PM | Comments (1)

Two Johns who Grew up Nazarene: Milbank and Wright

So the title of this post is a little pretentious -- okay, very pretentious, pretentious beyond irony to absurdity. This morning I spent some time reading a copy of the foreward to the second edition of Theology and Social Theory. As typical when I read Milbank, it will take me a couple of more times of reading the text to grasp it. Within the preface I find both clarifications about so-called "radical orthodoxy" and our contemporary intellectual-cultural situation and my dual thankfulness and reservations about the work. Of all Milbank's works, it is Theology and Social Theory that has helped me see better. The preface is a piece worthy of some sharing and reflection, I believe, because of the reflective and programmatic nature of the essay.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)

Intellectual Strength, Cultural Weakness

The fourteen public lectures are now over -- I learned much that I hope to someday turn into a book. I am confident, now, however, that the formation of the Christian Scriptures into a "book", what we call the Bible, was primary a move internal to the life of the church, not an apologetic response outside of it. The first three days of the week were taken up with the Center for Pastoral Leadership at PLNU and a meeting of district center educators in the region for the Church of the Nazarene. Dr. Norm Shoemaker very graciously distributed my book, Telling the Story, to the participants in the event. I also took the group to the Scrolls exhibit at the Museum.

This weekend has a third wedding at which to officiate in the past three weeks -- a great honor but fills the evenings. Sunday and Monday Prof. Gene Ulrich from the University of Notre Dame arrives in town. Gene was a major professor of mine and I am his "in-town" host. I will introduce him at his public lecture on Monday night at the SD Natural History Museum. So events continue to move at a typical pace.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:54 AM | Comments (1)

Hiding in Qumran Cave 4

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted. I've been hiding in the caves around Khirbet Qumran, trying to correlate the archaeological non-manuscript finds with manuscript finds. I've also tried to get on top of exactly what is present and when it was copied. The key instrument is Discoveries from the Judaean Desert, vol. 39: Indices and an Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series. Of course, the direct reason has been the lecture series to which I committed myself.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

Scripture and Tradition with Yves Congar

I've been working feverishly on the archives of scrolls found in the region of Khirbet Qumran in conjunction with a class that I begin teaching next week: "From Qumran to Codex Alexandrinus: The Material Formation of the Christian Book." Pt Loma is supporting the exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I am teaching the class with public lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from1:00-3:10 pm in the Fermanian Business Building 101 from June 18-July 19. Tomorrow I'll afix the class schedule here on the blog.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:47 AM | Comments (1)

"Whose 'Just' War? Which Peace?"

I have gone back lately to read Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular by Stanley Hauerwas (Duke University Press, 1994). I am not sure that I find Stanley's text more entertaining, more intellectually stimulating, or more spiritually moving for me. I had a colleague at PLNU who long ago noted that I read Stanley devotionally -- which is true and, for Stanley, probably very ironic.

I will share from several essays in the book over the next week or so -- it has some excellent exemplars of Hauerwas' theological high journalism. One essay stuck out as immensely relevant now: "Whose 'Just' War? Which Peace?" He wrote the essay after the first Gulf War (which he merely called "The Gulf War" not knowing at the time that it would be continuing over a decade later in mutated form. The essay is remarkably astute, even clairavoyant, about the events to follow.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:17 PM | Comments (7)

Barth and Post-Vatican II Evangelical Catholicism: Last Post

As I continue to read and contemplate on the life of the church catholic in the 20th century, I continue to find myself rethinking the categories that seem 'natural' to us. I continue to find ways that seem to me to make the crucial distinctions not within "evangelical Protestant," "mainline Protestant," or "Roman Catholic" (not to leave Orthodoxy out!), but within each of these larger socio-historical Christian movements. I am coming more and more to see the difference as the groups within each that either find the center of their faith in Jesus Christ or those who seek to make Jesus Christ an answer to the local context to which the church seeks to address. In the 20th century, this local context has been either been the individual as defined by the liberal nation-state or its inverse, the collective, as defined by a socialist nation-state (or some sort of synthesis between the two).

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Posted by johnwright at 7:24 PM | Comments (1)

Barth and Benedict XVI

After finishing the bulk of grading yesterday, I finished John Webster's book, Karl Barth (2nd edition). It is hard knowing whether to be more impressed with the analytic clarity and fairness of Webster's treatment or with the beauty of Barth's thought. It is, however, an outstanding introduction to Barth in only 175 pages!!

I also printed out Benedict XVI's opening address to the Roman Catholic Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean. I had glanced over it last week. A friend, Aaron Friberg, had sent me a NY Times article on it .

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Posted by johnwright at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

Post-Liberalism and Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Theology

I am making my way through finals -- slowly but surely. I hope that the next weeks will afford me the opportunity to share thoughts and readings with you on my blog. The intensity of life has been reflected on the limits of blogging that I've done.

It is no secret that I am interesting in the growing convergence between evangelical catholics and catholic evangelicals and the remnants of evangelical and orthodox mainline Protestants as a source of great hope for the future faithful unity of witness and mission of Christ's one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It is this particular convergence that produces (and shows the continual depths of division) in events such as when Francis Beckwith announced last week his return to the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems to me that what has been called "post-liberalism" provides a promising discourse to explore this new convergence as it is arising.

In some ways, I have no stake in the label "post-liberal". Obviously liberalism is still strong and vital in evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, and even within Roman Catholicism. The liberal nation-state still maintains its hegemonic stranglehold on what counts as "political action" in the world. Moreover if "post-liberal" is meant to represent one consumerist choice among various theological methodologies to provide a way to speak of God within today's culture, I have no interest in the term at all. Yet if "post-liberal" can name a way of returning to the sources of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox Christian tradition with a vitality to work for the unity of the church and its mission in the world, I'm all for it.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:09 PM | Comments (4)

It's a Book!

Last Friday Kathy received a FedEx package at home. She delivered it to me in the afternoon in my BibTheo class. It was what we expected -- my book, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (IVP Academic, 2007)!! IVP has done a marvelous job producing the book. Copies are available at IVP's customer service number: 1-800-843-9487. It is posted for pre-order here.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:53 AM | Comments (6)

More Reflections Hauerwas as a Catholic Theologian: On Reforming Yoder through Catholicity

Thom Stark wrote a second, important, well reasoned and correctly questioning response to my post on Hauerwas as a Catholic theologian. He rightfully notes that “As we've learned from Nation, catholicity is one of the distinctive marks of Yoder's theology . . . the way you write it, it sounds like you're pitting catholicity against radical reformation, which both Yoder and Hauerwas would argue is a big mistake.” Thom is exactly correct in what I am doing and very correct in cautioning me. What I want to claim is that Yoder’s retrieval of the Radical Reformation has a selective catholicity, is more determined by the Enlightenment than often recognized, and that there is an area of discontinuity in Hauerwas’ adoption of Yoder that Hauerwas’s rhetoric often obscures. This does not annul Thom’s observation that “the biggest difference between Hauerwas and MacIntyre is not the place they want to give to philosophy and theology in hierarchal order, but Yoder.” Thom is exactly correct here. But there is a richer catholicity that I believe we must retrieve to sustain Yoder’s catholic commitments. Yoder himself needs reformed by his own notion of catholicity.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:34 AM | Comments (1)

More Reflections Hauerwas as a Catholic Theologian: Community and Congregation

I can’t believe how quickly time has passed since I last blogged. Board meeting Monday night; Tuesday was a 16 hour day as I was involved in interview candidates for licensing and ordination on our district in the Church of the Nazarene – a moving, but exhausting day. Wednesday and Thursday night had pastoral tasks, with final grades still waiting for my Intro to OT class. I wanted to spend some time today responding to two excellent responses to my previous post. It is a joy to think through issues with those through a dialectic that the blog provides – its own type of medieval “questionis”-format. So I’d like to highlight and respond to Eric Lee today, and hopefully Thom Starke tomorrow, possibly without the full care that their questions deserve, but at least with a little more care than would afford a quick two sentence response.

Since I began this post, our congregation member and Eric’s good friend, David Overholt, has been stricken with a serious illness (for David’s adventures and giftedness, see streamdavid.com). Eric and his wife Tiana and other members of the congregation, spent yesterday in the hospital emergency room and ICU unit with David. It was a long and scary day. In some ways it makes the response to Eric’s question more existentially real. I am extremely humbled by the strength, wisdom, compassion, prudence, and love that Eric and others showed for David. They were a real, authentic, profound Christian community.

We are still awaiting word on the full diagnosis and prognosis for David. Here was a living, breathing witness to friendship and the type of community that Eric, if I am hearing correctly, rightly wants to keep as part of the church, coming together in a time of intense need, hours of friendship behind it, joint wisdom in decision making. I want to affirm those involved in their care of David, their support for each other during this time. If you could have seen the faithfulness to Christ and the body of Christ in the sick body of their friend David that Eric and others showed for David and each other, it would have humbled you concerning the depths of their participation in the Love that is God revealed to us in Christ by the Spirit. It is in this context of admiration, honor, and love for Eric and those who gathered in the hospital, over the phones, weaving a web of prayer, love, and support, and in prayer for David, that I want to frame my post.

Continue reading "More Reflections Hauerwas as a Catholic Theologian: Community and Congregation"

Posted by johnwright at 1:32 PM | Comments (4)

Stanley Hauerwas as a Catholic Theologian

I have spent some time this week reading Samuel Well's book, Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas. I never formally studied under Stanley, but I met him during my first semester at Notre Dame in 1983 and have read him ever sense. In many ways Professor Hauerwas has been the single most theological influence on my life and thought. That probably is no secret for those who know me.

As I have reflected, however, it seems to me that I have read Prof. Hauerwas different from others -- and this difference has come to provide tensions within the congregation at Mid-City over times. I often have not recognized these differences because of the subtlety of the differences. Yet these subtle differences make significant practical differences as they have gotten run through Southern Californian culture. Samuel Wells has helped me see shifts in the Hauerwas text over time.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:36 PM | Comments (5)

Thankfulness and Shameless Self-Promotion

I'm just getting back from the Wesleyan Theological Society meeting in Kankakee, Illinois where the weather was down right ugly -- bringing back repressed memories of 25 degree temperatures and 30 mph winds from an earlier life -- but the friendship and collegiality was beautiful. Steve Long gave three outstanding papers in conjunction with the Wesleyan Philosophical Society, and Frances Young's lecture at the beginning of the Wesleyan Theological Society was profoundly moving. Perhaps later this week I can share some more reflections on the program. The panel in which I participated seemed to have been well received, and brought out, I think, some important issues within the Wesleyan tradition. Tom Oord did a very fine job responding to my paper, highlighting the issues and showing where I need to revise some.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)

Catholicity versus Nihilism

We just finished a four week Epiphany series on the mission of the church -- both our congregation in Mid-City and the mission of all congregations amidst the church catholic. While each congregation participates in a very concrete, local context, this context does not define the mission of the congregation -- all congregations, in so far as that they are the body of Christ, live from the Gospel, the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. In the church locality and catholicity are not opposed, but coincide much like individuality and community [you (pl) are the body of Christ and individually members of it] and freedom and authority.

In light of the Transfiguration, a sign of the importance of history now in light of the age that is to come, the age of the resurrection, I couldn't help noticing the difference the catholic Christian convictions proclaim concerning the significance of human life, indeed of all creation, from the deepest convictions of the Western culture in which I live. Yesterday it was announced in Great Britain that "women who go through the medical procedure to harvest the eggs from their ovaries, which doctors describe as 'invasive' and possibly dangerous, will be paid £250 plus travel expenses" [source]. The commodification of human life proceeds apace, with nothing outside the realm of values that determines worth. What is Good, True, and Beautiful has dissipated into what is valued, ie., transformed into a commodity by human will that could be traded in a stock exchange -- neo-liberal economics that reduces all things to the competitive dynamics of the marketplace. All things become nothing except as assigned "value" by the "general" or "individual" will of humans. Transcendence is lost; all competes in a singular realm of pure immanence. Nihilism reigns, both on the neo-liberal right and the post-Marxist, post-colonial left.

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Posted by johnwright at 3:19 PM | Comments (1)

Transfigured!

Sunday is the last Sunday of Epiphany, its culmination in the reading from Luke of the transfiguration. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us of the importance of the Transfiguration: “the Transfiguration "is the sacrament of the second regeneration": our own Resurrection. From now on we share in the Lord's Resurrection through the Spirit who acts in the sacraments of the Body of Christ. The Transfiguration gives us a foretaste of Christ's glorious coming, when he "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body." But it also recalls that "it is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God".”

The Gospel reading from Luke is profoundly shaped by stories from the OT, with many layers of meaning. Maybe the best way to enter the texts is to begin with the Epistle reading and then move to the Exodus passage and then to the Gospel.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:32 AM | Comments (2)

Hans Kung, George Lindbeck, and Benedict XVI

A week from today Nazarene Theological Seminary will host "A Conversation Between Friends: George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas." I hope that we can begin to overlap a type of catholic evangelicalism with an evangelical catholicism. I believe that this overlap is possible today because of the profound changes arising from Vatican II, and the work of persons such as George Lindbeck. Vatican II, particularly as interpreted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, has fundamentally changed the landscape of the relationship between Roman Catholics and us protestors. Particularly those who trace the distinct form of our protest to John Wesley recognize that we have the necessity of committing to the unity of the church catholic.

I thought that as a bit of a "teaser," I would explore some parallel thoughts on Jesus Christ by Lindbeck and Benedict XVI. The fact that both have interacted deeply with the thought Hans Kung makes this more interesting. Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung's friendship and controversies, of course, are well known. Lindbeck, however, spent a year in Germany in the late 1950's and interacted with Kung's work for over twenty or more years -- Kung's early work on Barth and Justification particularly caught Lindbeck's attention.

Yet by the 1970's, Kung and Lindbeck had traveled different paths, even as Kung's and Ratzinger's had. Two essays particularly stand out of interest to show the closeness between Benedict and Lindbeck -- the new Preface to the upcoming book, Jesus of Nazareth, by Benedict XVI, already released (cf. www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=98747);and a brief 1980 essay from Lindbeck, "The Bible as Realistic Narrative" in Consensus in Theology? A Dialogue with Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx (pp. 81-85). Benedict's Preface gives no direct evidence of direct dependence upon Professor Lindbeck's essay. Yet the underlying parrallel structures of thought are interesting.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

On the Fifth Day of Christmas

Five golden rings? No, but reflections on the Incarnation that arise out of the experiences of my life.

I finally turned in all final grades (except for one upon which I'm still waiting to receive the work!) yesterday. I'm humbled and thankful for my students. I probably need to be "meaner" to make sure that students get their work done and submitted on time. Too many other pressures jump in and distract from the primary end of university student life these days. Still the depth of reflection, the connections made, the seriousness with which many take my work with them -- it is very humbling.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:34 AM | Comments (2)

On the Second Day of Christmas

The Christmas season is a wonderful time to read the beginning of Barth's Church Dogmatics. If persons would take the beginning of the Church Dogmatics seriously, misrepresentations of Barth and his fundamental wisdom would become very apparent for us. For instance, he clearly writes that "it is indeed unfortunate that the question of the truth of talk about God should be handled as a question apart by a special faculty, and . . . we cannot find any final reasons to justify it" (p. 5). For Barth there is no final chasm between grace and nature. Indeed, "secular science generally do not have to be secular or pagan. There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana. . . o contest this principle is to combine despair of the world with over-valuation of the Christian world in a way which is incompatible either with Christian hope or Christian humility" (p. 5). Here Barth engages in subtle reference that was going on in Roman Catholic thought during this period, and ending up on the "Catholic side."

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Posted by johnwright at 4:34 PM | Comments (0)

Christmas Reflection by Bonhoeffer

My good friend, Rev. Dr. Bob Smith read me a quote from Bonhoeffer this week, embedded in a book on Bonhoeffer that he was reading. I've saved it for today to share with you as Bob shared it with me. Bonhoeffer's elegance is matched only by his truthfulness. Merry Christmas!

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Posted by johnwright at 6:55 PM | Comments (4)

I'm Back

The fall semester is over (although I admittedly still have one class yet to grade). Unfortunately blogging has taken a hit amidst the trials, work, strains, and joys of this past fall. I have not had opportunity to respond to comments even as I would like. As we come to the end of the Advent season and soon begin Christmas, I hope to blog consistency over the next several weeks.

Last night I turned to reading Church Dogmaticsby Karl Barth, Vol. 1.1. Barth's text helps me; I find myself in it. Reading Barth is a form of prayer and contemplation for me. I hear Barth's text as if it was written today; yet this volume was written in 1932. One finds in it warnings about what is to come in Germany and Europe, warnings about the church's complicity, the underlying intellectual commitments that made such complicity possible -- not only in Nazi Germany, but also in the atrocities of the Soviet bloc and those of the liberal regimes of those "victorious" in WWII.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:03 AM | Comments (3)

Eucharistic (Thanksgiving) Reflections

The United States government has declared tomorrow "Thanksgiving Day" -- and I am thankful to take a little break from the arduous fall through which we have moved. It is my understanding that Bible Studies won't be meeting this week -- after I missed blogging for them last week because of the duress of my schedule. I wanted to take opportunity to reflect some on the Christian Thanksgiving -- the Eucharist or Lord's Supper -- which the United State's Thanksgiving both parodies yet points to.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:15 AM | Comments (2)

More on Lindbeck and the Movement towards a Visible Catholicity of the Church

By Thursday nights I'm usually pretty exhausted from the bulk of my teaching and activities. So last night I went home and laid on my mat in front of my bed and read articles by George Lindbeck that had come in earlier in the day from other libraries. Interestingly, there is an essay on Aquinas that brings out his use of "illumination" language argued for by Milbank and Pickstock -- and puts Aquinas within an Augustinian tradition. One senses an early movement towards an "Augustinian Thomism" already here.

Yet one essay really stood out to me from 1970, "The Future of Dialogue: Pluralism or an Eventual Synthesis of Doctrine" from a book called Christian Action and Openness to the World. One senses here a difference already emerging that Lindbeck noticed in moving out of the 60's. He sensed the increasing irrelevance of classical Christian convictions for the life of the church already occuring in the light of commitment to a "secular ecumenism" which sees doctrine as an unnecessary hindrance to what really matters -- "What counts is Christian participation in revolutionary action or, if one insists on being theological, how to talk about God in a secular age" (p. 39). Yet he insists upon the practical importance to doctrinal dialogue for the future of the church -- a future that is coming upon us much quicker now. Ashe wrote, "Because activism, theological pluralism and the speed of change are now increasing, they assume that it will always be so. But most processes, whether physical, psychological, or social, are incapable of infinite extension. At some point they must stop or reverse themselves" (p. 39).

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Posted by johnwright at 8:39 AM | Comments (3)

George Lindbeck on the Future of Roman Catholicism

I have spent much time the past seven months working on a project to bring together George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas to discuss how the "back to the sources" movement that led to Vatican II has influenced so-called "postliberalism" or the "Yale School." I have many reasons to want to listen carefully to such a discussion. Largely, I must confess, I have committed myself to such a task because I see profound parallels between Roman Catholicism and the life of the Methodist-holiness movement, in particular the Church of the Nazarene in the 20th century. I see the contests within pre- and post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism as extremely enlightening even to understand the often contested mission of the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:33 AM | Comments (5)

Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox

A recent article in The Christian Century ("Going Catholic: Six Journeys to Rome," 8/21/06) noted six prominent theologians who have recently become Roman Catholic. It is interesting because, as the articles author, Jason Byassee notes, "They are also relatively young, poised to influence students and congregations for several decades. They more or less fit the description of 'postliberal' in that they accept such mainline practices as historical criticism and women's ordination while wanting the church to exhibit more robust dogmatic commitments. All of them embrace what Mattox describes as an 'evangelical, catholic, and orthodox' vision of the church. They could not see a way to be all those things within mainline denominations" -- including Gerald Schlabach, who became a Roman Catholic from his Mennonite tradition. In some ways this is an outcome of the profound changes in Roman Catholicism in recovering its Christological moorings as a result of Vatican II and the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:05 AM | Comments (4)

Pastoring and Resident Aliens -- Part Deux

I heartily confess that one of the themes of my blogs and my life is to blur the distinction between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, not merely intellectually, but pastorally. I pray to overcome in the United States what the sociologist Will Hersberg called the three religious communities in the United States of Catholic-Protestant-Jew at the point of blurring the distinction between the first two on the basis of the Jewish origins of the church in Jesus Christ. I have undertaken this out of my heritage and membership in the Church of the Nazarene as a group devoted to preserving the faith given to the saints and cooperation with all members of the body of Christ (see the Foreward to the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene), standing as we do, in the Methodist tradition beginning with John Wesley -- a "ressourcement theologian" if there ever was one.

After I wrote my jeremiad on the contemporary pastorate on Saturday (which, interestingly, has received no comments!!), I found that Benedict XVI had some comments up on Zenit.org/english concerning this very issue. In Roman Catholicism, because of the "shortage of priests", the issues are even more acute. Yet independently, it seems to me that both the awareness of the issues and the direction of pastoral response is similar. I'd like to share quotes from these addresses, and see how we can learn together. Benedict's first interview comes from Aug. 31 in an interview at the Papal Summer Residence, called "Some problems for priests." The second is from September 24, 2006 on Benedict XVI on Integrated Pastoral Care.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:48 PM | Comments (3)

Pastoring in the United States and "Resident Aliens"

I haven't had opportunity to blog much recently. Several projects, along with the typical business of teaching and pastoring, have occupied my time. I continue to read, talk, and think about the relationship between the so-called "Yale School" or "postliberal" theology and theological currents that led up to, deeply formed, and came out of Vatican II.

In light of recent experiences in the pastorate, this relationship has become more interesting. American culture places such an emphasis on the person of the pastor to personally and organizationall meet needs so that the office of the elder or priest as primarily about preaching the Word and conducting the Sacraments becomes relatively insignificant. Focusing on the correct demographics, democratic "inclusive" administration, administrative expertise of balancing the needs of those within the congregation with the needs that the congregation is attempting to meet, being a therapeutic helping professional to aid people cope with, adjust to, and heal from the psychological hurts and wounds, all become the crucial concerns of the laity -- and not without reason. Pastoring becomes hard work that is always vulnerable to profound criticism. Of course, such dynamics also encourage the flip side -- pastors who become authoritarian and demeaning to congregations so that it is the congregation members who become abused.

Pastoral authority is very difficult to exercise in a liberal culture that denies the legitimacy of authority except for the authority of the experiences of the individual or communal self. What persons "experience" (experiences always embedded in prior experiences) become determinative of naming how the pastor is perceived. As all pastors know, in the pastorate perception is reality -- and not without reason. This is our experience in the particular cultural formation that arises from liberalism's distinction of the private from the public, the therapeutic from the managerial, the realm of 'meaning' from the realm of 'bureaucracy.'

But what happens to the pastoral role in a congregation that is the "pilgrim-people of God" or "resident aliens"? My daughter, Tasha, picked up Willimon and Hauerwas's minor classic, Resident Aliens. It has an outstanding analysis of the contemporary pastorate in it that I've picked up and thumbed through as she had the book out. I'd like to share some quotes from it.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:24 AM | Comments (0)

The Peaceableness of Reason

Earlier this week I read Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg. I was deeply impressed. Slowly this lecture filtered into the public media, though in a profoundly distorting manner. Some respondents have publicly stated that Benedict seeks to return to the crusades. The irony of this is that Benedict's lecture has a fundamental commitment to non-violence embedded within it. I'd like to spend some time analyzing this speech for what the lecture has to teach it because it reaches to the intersection of the academy and the church, nature and the supernatural. He adopts historical analysis very parallel to such works as David Burrell, Etionne Gilson, and recent Radical Orthodox thinkers. The response indicates the type of hard distinction between "faith" and "reason" that Benedict seeks to challenge.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:59 AM | Comments (6)

Transfiguration and the Eucharist

I have found it fascinating that Transfiguration Sunday is followed by three straight Sundays with readings around John 6 -- the Johanine Eucharistic passages. Eucharistic teaching is difficult today. Any teaching is difficult because the liberal democratic society that has shaped us collapses all Christian teaching into the subjectivity of individuals or the collective subjectivity of a "community." To make normative claims sounds absolutist, totalitarian or at best a market-option for the consumptions of "personal beliefs" or "values." Of course, such a position masks the totalitarian claims of the categories of the liberal society that reduces Christian teachings to expressions of personal subjectivities. The post-Reformation differences in the teachings of various churches, of course, do not help the matter, nor does the Protestant revivalist tradition that shapes much of conservative Protestant evangelicalism in the US today.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:58 AM | Comments (4)

Hope for the Future: Balthasar and Barth

I've spent much of my summer reading to fill a massive hole in my theological education. Much of my education and work has taken place within the institutions of the Church of the Nazarene -- an evangelical "denomination" that has looked to become "mainline Protestant" in the past forty years by looking back to Wesley as Lutherans look to Luther and Reformed Christians look back to Calvin, all the while trying to accomodate his thought to categories given by modern world. Not only did this perspective influence what material was seen as important to read (Tillich over Barth, and if Barth, a Barth who was called a "dialectical, existential theologian"), but it also determined how certain events were presented to me: for instance, the Augustinian and the Thomistic as two fundamentally different types of Christian theology (drawn from an essay on "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion" by Tillich). Whereas I've recognized these inadequacies for years now, this summer has allowed me to begin to fill in the pieces in much more thorough ways through readings on Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, 20th century Roman Catholic thought, Vatican II, and Communio theologians, particularly as they related to those who first opened up the inadequacy, intellectual and ecclesial, of the categories given to me: persons like George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Wilken, and even John Howard Yoder.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:29 AM | Comments (2)

Vacation and War

We've snuck away for a few days as a family -- a welcome respite from the constant demands of the parish and the academy. Sure, I have some books with me -- but included in them is the science fiction book, Eragon. Of course, we made sure the hotel had "free" wireless internet. But my cell phone is off, and I'm listening to Johnny's, Tony's, and Carl's beautiful laughs in the background as they watch some stupid movie. Tasha and Kathy are out at a book store -- what more can one ask? I may be back asleep for a nap within a half hour.

Yet I remain in prayer and plagued by the escalations of war and how the current United States governing regime and their support from US conservative protestant Christians continues to diminish the significance of human life for their geo-political-economic agenda. Congregations of the Church of the Nazarene in Lebanon continue to suffer. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries has means of living in solidarity with these congregations that we have to take up -- as do some persons at the American University in Beirut --now cut off by Israeli bombings. Hezbollah as well has escalated the situation by the numbers of missiles sent off. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to be a place of mayhem of death, as the numbers of US troops there rises.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:07 AM | Comments (30)

Communio within Creation

After various stops and starts, I finished David L. Schindler's book, Heart of the World, Center of the Church last night. Schindler develops a devastating intellectual and cultural critique of Christian accomodation to political liberalism from within the "Communio" movement. The book, written in 1996, draws deeply upon the interpretation of Vatican II given by John Paul II, and especially applies the thought of Hans Urs van Balthasar to an American context.

In its central Christological commitment and anti-liberalism, Schindler's work reminds me of the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Yet in its Catholic background, Schindler devotes much more time to speculative metaphysical arguments than Hauerwas and develops a doctrine of analogy in a way that softens some of Hauerwas' analysis, which is intentionally more polemic as the Hauerwas text comes from within mainline American Protestantism. A reader might find great benefit in reading the two theologians in tandem.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:24 AM | Comments (7)

Long Post: On Christian Protest Activism in a Liberal Democratic Society

I have struggled for years with the issue of Christian protest activism within a liberal-democratic regime such as ours. The injustice and evil, encoded within institutions and structures of our society, seem to call forth challenge from the depths of the church – a church much too often in acquiescence with the evil, or which responds with a blind eye and a shrug of the shoulders – after all, the task of the church, we are told, is not political, but spiritual.

What became early apparent to me that such responses are already embedded in the politics of liberalism – acquiescence obviously so; the complete distinction between the political and the spiritual accepting the liberal democratic distinction between the public and the private. Church-based political activism to transform the unjust, sinful structures seemed the only other response. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day seem models for such activity.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:31 AM | Comments (4)

War -- What is it good for -- nothing, absolutely nothing

I have yet to comment on the mindless violence in Lebanon and Northern Israel. I had planned a rant this morning, but instead, found something much more profound. First, to follow the affairs, juancole.com is downright excellent. Professor Cole has personal connections in Lebanon; was recently there; and has a masterly command of the whole situation. His perspective is very different than the mainstream media and the US governments. The Israelis have planned this war for over a year, and when Hezbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers -- a string of kidnapping that began with Israeli soldiers taking two persons from Gaza, whose whereabouts is still unknown, the Israelis, with the full backing of the US, began their bombing. Though the media has not reported it, bombing raids have included Christian churches. Israel is conducting the raids to try to cut off the "Shia Cresent" from the Mediterranean Sea.

Second, this is related to Iraq. According to Juan Cole, the Dawa party, in exile from Iraq in the '90s, helped begin Hezbollah. With the rise of Shia power in Iraq, all the Sunnis in the Mideast who have controlled political processes in this region for the past half century, are very afraid of the rising coaltion of Shia power stretching from Iran through Iraq in to Syrian and Southern Lebanon.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:02 AM | Comments (5)

The Agenda of the Church: A Preview of my Book

Today I finally have gotten around to working on the conclusion of my upcoming book for Intervarsity Press, now officially titled, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation. The book will soon be proceeding to the copy editor as soon as I write the conclusion. I waited to write the conclusion once the body had passed through all editorial stages.

I thought that I would post the draft of the introduction to my last chapter today -- since I've been working on it amidst the heat today. I do so, not only to elicit comments, but because it comes to the core of the mission of, not only my work, but local congregations, particularly our congregation at Mid-City. I think that it describes some of the tensions we sometimes experience because of our commitment to the poor and because, unlike so many Nazarene and evangelical churches, we refuse to allow the social, political, and even theological agenda of the conservative evangelicals guide us.

We harken back to a much older Christian tradition than that which divides so much of the contemporary North American Christianity, a division that is based actually on a much deeper commonality that rends the difference in certain ways. Thus, we just as distant from Jim Dobson as we are from Jim Wallis; from Pat Robinson as we are from Michael Lerner. If we are just as distant, we are also just as close to each as well. Yet the goal is never to react to these various poles determined by presuppositions that they share in common, but to act from the presupposition of the Triune God's creation of all things good in the very image of the Triune God and the restoration of this creation through Jesus Christ and the on-going life of the church.

I have found myself recently drawn to Augustine, both as a theologian, biblical scholar, and pastor, because he was profoundly all three, even as he was only one person. He provides a model of the unity of these vocations, that have become split by modernist institutions. Of course I cannot simply return to these days -- nor do I so desire. Yet there is something crucial in his life and witness for us to recover today. It is thus to him that I am looking for the conclusion of my book.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:26 PM | Comments (9)

More (or is it less?) on Freedom

In North American society, whenever you hear the word "freedom", the term carries with it massive theological and moral presuppositions that shape us in ways that make Christian discipleship more difficult. How the term functions within a liberal democratic political order such as the United States makes the world more violent and concentrates the world's material goods more and more in the hands of the wealthy. The word as used brings forth deep positive emotions in Americans, and has been used to justify war in the 20th century and now in the early 21st century.

To challenge "freedom" might end one up with the NSA listening to phone conversations. It is exactly what Zizek helped me see in the last post. Yet we know that we live in strange, yet wonderful days, when we can find nearly an identical thoughts shared between an atheist, post-Freudian, post-Marxist Eastern European nihilistic philosopher and a "conservative" Roman Catholic theologian who works as an expositor of John Paul II and Vatican II. What I'd like to share is some comments on David L. Schindler's interaction with the liberal concept of "freedom" in his excellent and important book, Heart of the World, Center of the Church.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

The Empty Promises of Liberal Freedom

I think that I am finally coming up for air after my Scotland trip. I have much to blog on in the coming weeks -- I hope that I can post over other day or so. I imagine that I've lost readership -- and rightly so. But I will try to write some reflections on readings and experiences especially as they interact with faithfulness in Christian witness amidst the contemporary culture of the United States for our congregation and through it, to others.

On the plane going over to Scotland, I read a little book by Slavoj Zizek -- a post-Marxist, post-Freudian Eastern Europian philosopher. I find his writings a bit random, yet filled with insight at certain times. He is an atheist, a type of nihilist that sees transcendence as excrement -- yet his cultural analysis, particular his critique of types of purportedly avant-garde post-modernity and post-modern "spirituality" is very good. He is also particularly acute in his criticism of the political and ideological liberalism that seems "natural" in todays world.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:34 AM | Comments (4)

Wisdom from Henri De Lubac

I've spent much of my summer reading and teaching from Henri de Lubac. John Milbank calls his book, Surnaturel, one of the three most important texts in the twentieth century, along with Heidegger's Being and Time and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Yet unlike the high visibility of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the significance of de Lubac's work remains largely subterranean, especially to those outside the Roman Catholicism in which he lived and flourished -- though at times painfully. Moreover, whereas Wittgenstein and Heidegger's publications are all highly abstract and inaccessible except to those initiated into the mysteries of their text, de Lubac, able to write obscure and learned prose, also exercised a pastoral task in his writing. His volumes on Paradoxes of Faith are little clips, vignettes, that provide profound insight into the Christian tradition and the concrete Christian life to which we are called. On this Saturday night, I'd like to post a couple of quotations from his work, Paradoxes of Faith, originally written in 1945, but translated and published (and inexpensive) from Ignatius Press in 1987.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:06 PM | Comments (3)

District Report and Deus Caritas Est

My computer melted down over the weekend; the hard disk more corrupt than Duke Cunningham. Today, however, I finally feel like I'm crawling out of the past several months of finals, ending the church year, and just a lot of 'stuff.'

Last week we had our District Assembly for the Southern California District of the Church of the Nazarene. In good Methodist tradition, pastors have to report to the district concerning the past year. Yet to make things move, we now videotape our reports with pictures in the background. Maybe Eric can teach me how to do this, because the slides were wonderful. Yet I did have a 60 second report to give.

I'll place this brief report in the extended entry. I don't know if a report in the Church of the Nazarene has previously quoted an encyclical from an encyclical of the Bishop of Rome before, but there has been one now!

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Posted by johnwright at 7:48 PM | Comments (0)

Backblogging

I have these profound mixed feelings about Memorial Day weekend. Of course, it is a parody of of the church's "All Saints Day"; any Christian must know that Christ died for them, a death participated in directly by the martyrs. There is no saving significance for the death of a solderier who has died in war. Yet there is merit in Christians pausing in mourning about the futility of war, and inability of war to bring peace. It is also important to remember the victims of war, including the soldiers and their families who bear in their bodies the wages of sin as a result of their engagement in battle.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)

Specialists and/or Generalists: The Professor in the Christian Liberal Arts

I receive emails from a post called "The Wesleyan Theological Discussuion" group. Today I took some time to participate in a series of posts on the academic calling of theology in Christian liberal arts colleges and universities. The issue was one of the disciplinary work versus generalist work. I'll thought that I might as well attach it to my blog.

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Posted by johnwright at 5:11 PM | Comments (2)

Prayer for a Conscientious Objector to War

Tomorrow, April 6, an ex-student, friend, and a parishioner when she is in town, Lauren Crepeau, faces a military hearing in her application for status as a conscientious objector to war. The past six months she has worked within the military system for her application and I have traveled with her through the process from afar. The Catholic Peace Fellowship has been much closer and wonderful in her assistance. Her hearing is at 12:30 pm, west coast time, in El Paso, Texas. Please pray for Lauren as she continues her courageous stand for peace amidst a nation-state and regime that seems deeply committed to war.

Lauren has given me permission to post from her application for her status as a conscientious objector. In it she quotes the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. She has faced the challenges with integrity and courage and faithfulness. She has humbled me with the strength of her faithfulness and convictions, and I really desire to honor her. Her story needs told. The following is the application and Lauren's response in certain sections.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:23 PM | Comments (6)

March 25,2006

I want to share a section from Wesley's sermon "The New Birth" this morning. It uses much of the same language that we have seen throughout this week. Yet I am impressed, over and over, how Wesley consistently reminds us that the whole Christian life must arise out of an awareness of God's love in Christ for each and every human being in our own particularity, indeed, all of creation in its particularity. Experiencing the love for human beings, the Love that is nothing less than God's Spirit, the Love that binds eternally the Father and the Son, is nothing less than participating in God. The whole Christian life is anchored in Christ's life, death, and resurrection, experienced as for me by faith in the forgiveness of my sins.

This awareness of the utter graciousness of God and participating in the Love that is the Spirit becomes "breathed into" our lives in Christ. The experience of forgiveness of our sins by God become the primary point of living all our life, the perspective that provides the basis for our inner and outer moral reworking by God. This is the new birth.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)

The Witness of the Congregation

Yesterday morning and today have been very interesting. Sometimes it's hard to relate what goes on in and around the congregation in Mid-City because of the holy chaos and concerns to sustain the honor of those whom God gathers to us . Yet I think that I would like to write a little bit about yesterday. It is good just to get a feel of what goes on in and around the building, both for those whom God gathers in that place on Sunday mornings and for those who travel with me in this "cyber space".

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Posted by johnwright at 12:29 PM | Comments (1)

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. We will begin our journey to Easter Sunday morning this evening at 7:00 for the imposition of Ashes, and the enrollment of baptismal candidates into our catechumenate.

As part of our Lenten observation, I also am going to post every morning at 4:00 am Pacific time brief quotes from the Standard Sermons of John Wesley for our congregation in Mid-City, and others. In the Wesleyan Theological Journal, William Abraham rightfully spoke of Wesley as a "spiritual father" within the wider canonical history of the church catholic. I hope that these reflections push us deeper in the love of God and neighbor through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit's power.

Posted by johnwright at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

Sunday night musings

Among other things, my summer school teaching schedule came out next week. I am going to teach a The490 seminar on "The Theology of Henri de Lubac" -- an interesting foray for me. I have to order my books. At this point, I am planning to begin with the secondary source on him by Balthasar, and then read three works: The Drama of Atheistic Humanism; The Mystery of the Supernatural; and Catholicism. After those, I believe we will read Milbank's new book. Any comments about such a program would be helpful. Among other things, it is to start work on a project on Vatican II and the Wesleyan.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:55 PM | Comments (3)

What Kathy Has Learned This Week

This week has been another grueling week. We are filling two positions in the School of Theology at PLNU and the intellectual and relational work has been incredibly intense in interviewing candidates and mulling things over as a department. Last night we didn't get out of meetings until after 6:00 pm -- and when academics go that late on Friday night, you know that people are working hard!

So I haven't had time nor energy to blog. I still hope to get caught up. But Pastor Kathy, my wife, typed some wonderful things out this week that I'd like to share with you. Enjoy what she has learned this week. Names have been changed to protect the "guilty"!

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Posted by johnwright at 7:12 PM | Comments (1)

Eucharist, the Church of the Nazarene, and Benedict XVI

I have been asked from without and within about my conviction concerning Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, and the importance that I place on it for the life and witness of the church -- both our local congregation in Mid-City and the church catholic throughout the world. There have been times when it has been insinuated that I violate the discipline of the Church of the Nazarene in this conviction. The social implications, it's horizontal embracement of believers throughout the world and therefore, the potential to embrace all humanity, is wanted to be embraced without individual participation in Christ. The social meaning is set off against the real personal participation in Christ. In reading some historical documents from our local history in Mid-City, I can see that this has been an issue throughout our life together.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:09 PM | Comments (8)

What You Won't Hear on CNN

I quickly check juancole.com every day to keep up on the affairs in Iraq. He does emphasize the negative, but his command of Arabic allows him to read papers that I cannot access.

This morning I saw a reference to this Reuters report. Among other things it helps us see what the American invasion and occupation of Iraq continues to do to the Christian witness among non-Christians, and why Muslims believe that the American church is a religion of violence. Such activities demand that somehow we discover some way to distinguish an authentic Christian witness from these profoundly misguided brothers and sisters, or unbelievers who seek to use the cross as an offense, not only to Muslims, but to Christians as well.

How profound a difference from our reading from Acts 10:34=38 this morning about God sending a message to Israel when Jesus came preaching peace.

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Posted by johnwright at 4:59 PM | Comments (1)

The Last Day of Christmas: Toynbee, Benedict XVI, and George Lindbeck

'Tis finally the last day of Christmas -- tomorrow is Epiphany, the celebration of the revelation of God to the Gentiles in Jesus. There is much that could be discussed about this scene from the Gospel of Matthew -- but perhaps we could see the magi as they wandered into the hostile territory of the Roman empire under Caesar's Jewish minion Herod in light of Benedict XVI's recent First Things article on "Europe and its Discontents."

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Posted by johnwright at 9:20 AM | Comments (1)

The Feast of the Nativity and Capitalism

In a few days we will finally begin the Christmas season. I kind of like the fact that the 25th falls on a Sunday, as we will gather as a church for the First Christmas service (which we call the Christmas eve service). The Christian year harkens back to earlier Jewish time systems in which the day begins at nightfall. Thus what we call Christmas eve is really Christmas I. When we gather on Christmas morn, the Gospel readings differ. The narrative of Luke melds into the Gospel of John. The babe born in a manger is the Word made flesh. One encounters in the dual gospel readings the full wonder of the Incarnation.

Of course, between those services other practices will unfold in our household. We will celebrate the Feast of the Nativity through a meal together in the evening, and a sharing of gifts in the morning. Yes, we are completely and unabashedly and unashamedly bourgeois in this exchange of gifts. As I age, I understand the depth of this practice as a celebration of Christ's nativity, as well as it's dangers. I am very thankful for the time to be together as a family, and share in a material exchange of gifts in honor of our Lord. Amidst a society that would fragment and individuate us even as a family into different market groups, the economics of gifts come to us appropriately in honor of our Lord. I am particularly thankful about this year, as the time will be wedged between the times when we gather as a congregation in observance of the Nativity of the Word of God.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:40 AM | Comments (2)

After Finals -- Towards the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord

I got caught up with my grading today, and have all grades in except for my Christian Tradition class, that, as usual, seems to think due dates are human constructions, and not ontologically real. Imagine that.

I hope to get caught up in some blogging. Between my Society of Biblical Literature trip, the program on the Psalms by Luigi Giussani, finals, the beginning of Tasha's and Carl's high school soccer, time has been sparse. I hope to blog daily as we head into this weekend and throughout all twelve days of Christmas.

To renew I am reading Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II in the Radical Orthodoxy series. Her work has an extreme analytic and constructive importance, not merely for Roman Catholics, but for both mainline and evangelical Protestants as well. I'd just like to leave you with a little quote that seems so important for congregations to embrace:

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Posted by johnwright at 8:12 PM | Comments (2)

'The Lord's Style of Language'

Robert Wilken, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, wrote a wonderful article in the September issue of First Things called "The Church's Way of Speaking". Professor Wilken was the first one to introduce me to the work of George Lindbeck when his Nature of Doctrine came out in Spring of 1984. I was in a PhD seminar with Professor Wilken at the time, a class on "Early Christian Interpretations of Romans." I read the book in one evening. Suddenly options that I did not know existed theologically opened in front of me.

I mention this because Wilken shows in this article indirectly that Lindbeck's "cultural-linguistic model" is not a form of modernist apologetic translation of Christian theology into Wittgensteinian language-games, but instead, represents a ressourcement, a return to the sources, from the early Christian mothers and fathers. He shows in this article, in the wonderfully accessible way that Professor Wilken writes, that Augustine noted that Christian language cannot be "translated" into another language without severe loss. As Wilken writes, "Augustine called Isaiah’s language 'the Lord’s style of language,' and he recognized that if he were to enter the Church he would have to learn this new tongue, hear it spoken, grow accustomed to its sounds, read the books that use it, learn its idioms, and finally speak it himself. He had to embark on a journey to acquaint himself with the mores of a new country. Becoming a Christian meant entering a strange and often alien world." I mention this because we are now entering a time of year when we, as Christians, are in severe danger of losing the church's language, 'the Lord's style of language'.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:47 PM | Comments (4)

Thanksgiving is the Eucharist

I'm finally back after two weeks of preparation for travel, travel, and recovery from travel. First Kathy flew to Kansas City to participate in a children's bible study program. On the way home, however, she got stranded in Phoenix at midnight because of fog (it actually cleared here when American West canceled the flight, but they had already sent the crew home). Then I took an all-night flight to Philadelphia for the Society of Biblical Literature meeting (more on that at a later time). When we arrived, our luggage did not (again, compliments of American West). I chaired a session with a University of Oxford professor (H.G.M. Williamson) and others, such as my friend Gary Knoppers, on Oded Lipschits new book, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem, in a long sleeved t-shirt and jeans, not to mention, big glasses with lenses that occasionally fall out (like when I was talking for the first time with Jamie Smith on Sunday night). It was quite the fashion statement.

But that was then. Today is thanksgiving.

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Posted by johnwright at 4:58 PM | Comments (1)

War is an Atrocity

I am not a pacificist; I am a Christian. I do not want any other label to override my commitment. Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that God wants those who are followers of God's Son to kill. I believe that the New Testament prohibits returning evil for evil -- and killing is an evil. The kingdom of God will not come in its fullness by violence. I don't know why I'm so dull, but today I noticed in Matthew 5 that love of enemy directly leads to the command to be perfect as our Father in heaven in perfect. Come to think of it, Augustine had noticed that in On Christian Doctrine. To be committed to the doctrine of Christian perfection, perfect love, it seems to me that one must embrace Christ's teaching of enemy love.

Modern warfare is especially atrocious. Technology and strategy do not allow a proper distinction between civilians and military force. Such blurring of lines make it impossible to apply without moving to a Clinton-esque distinction of terms that ultimately show the moral bankruptcy of the position.

One case of this has been the use of chemical weapons in Iraq, particularly white phosphorous incidenary weapons in Fallujah (we could talk about napalm in Baghdad as well). During the punitive massacre and destruction of Fallujah, I was aware that these had been used -- ignored by the American press. But the story is slowly coming out -- in Europe, and ever so slowly in the US. Below is an editorial from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1642575,00.html) -- whose coverage of the US aggressions in Iraq has been among the best in the English language. Barry Venable, after long denial by the US military that such weapons had been used, admitted that they had. Note his justification: "We use them primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases. However, it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants."
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051115/pl_afp/usiraqbritainitaly_051115220512). If you read below, you can see the moral/legal Clintonesque reasoning -- it is not listed as a chemical weapon when used in a certain way; however, as employed, it must certainly functioned as a chemical weapon. If one searches, one can find pictures of the incinerated human bodies from these weapons. Warning: they are obscene, but perhaps we need to see the atrocity that is war. Perhaps Christians can then understand why it is so important to follow the words of Jesus, rather than engage in cycles of violence to establish a human 'justice' today.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:11 PM | Comments (15)

Catholicity and Totalitarianism

I have tried to keep away from discussions about the politics of the contemporary liberal nation-state called the United States. First, I don't want to get sucked into the left-right dynamics in living and thinking as a Christian. Second, I don't think that the United States is 'real' -- I've never met the United States; I've never even seen it. It is a projection of human imagination that helps authorize certain individuals to control violence in a certain geographical area without fear of sanction. It's reality is only what we give it -- unlike the church which is real, the bodies of the poor are real, Christ's presence in the Eucharist is real. This is why I don't understand immigration issues because it presupposes that there are real lines on the earth called 'borders' that divide one part of humanity from another. I understand migration, mind you, just not immigration. The contemporary nation-state is merely a projection of human imagination, upheld by certain interests who benefit from such an imaginary construct.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:58 AM | Comments (17)

Eucharist and Peace

Recent months have found me nourished by many of the reflections at the "Traditional Catholic Review" (www.tcrnews2.com). Perhaps that sounds a bit curious for a Nazarene pastor and professor at a university of the Church of the Nazarene. Yet what I find here is a commitment to the full gospel that avoids the right/left dichotomy that shapes so much of American Protestant and Catholic life.

The following is a small piece from some reflections begun from a quote from Benedict XVI. Here's a quote that really struck out for me, something that I've come to think is very true:

"Christians represent to the world the alternative humanism which alone has the spiritual foundation to sustain the work of peace."

Of course, this also means that we have to learn to get along with each other in our local congregations as well! Enjoy the reflections!

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Posted by johnwright at 2:41 PM | Comments (1)

Brief Reflections on the Criminalization of Marijuana

A friend of our congregation was arrested last Friday for selling marijuana. The authorities must have been watching for awhile, because by arresting on Friday, the police can hold someone for five days without charges being formally filed. Today, however, he has his initial hearing. I have yet to get to see him.

Our friend lives on Social Security disability -- a very small amount, almost impossible to live on in San Diego. Perhaps he was trying to engage in a commercial activity as the month came to an end and his funds for living where running out.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)

Reading

Life per usual has been very full. I'm working with classes and trying to prepare for the Society of Biblical Literature meetings, where I'm on a panel to discuss two new commentaries on Chronicles. In the meantime, I've been reading some of Karl Barth and James K. A. Smith, both that I hope to share along the way. I hope also to share some posts from other sites that I've found very interesting and helpful.

Yet David Jones, my friend at ressourcement.blogspot.com, graciously sent me some books from the founder of Communion and Liberation, an Italian priest named Luigi Giussani. He wrote a trilogy, and I've been reading the second book, "At the Origin of the Christian Claim". It's very excellent. I've been speaking of it to colleagues for use at our university at several levels. I hope also some of us in the parish might get together and read it as well.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:33 AM | Comments (2)

Sickness and after effects

It's been a long time since I've posted. Last Sunday afternoon it seems that I got some type of food poisoning that knocked me out for about 36 hours. I'll save you from the gory details. But it's put me behind the rest of the week. Monday I missed my first day of classes due to illness ever. I've taught with viral pneumonia and a 103 temp, within a week after an appendectomy, and 36 hours after dislocating my knee cap, sometimes without much of a voice. So Monday was a bit of a mile marker for me.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:24 AM | Comments (2)

One is only a person if you are a citizen

One of the underlying issues that God has brought to our local congregation is fifteen young men from Haiti, who were able to flee Haiti for their lives after the US-led "coup" of the democratically elected government. The pastor of our French-speaking congregation has looked to us for aide to try and find a way to secure a sustainable, stable life for these friends -- one of whom is an elder in the Church of the Nazarene.

We have tried many frustrating avenues -- visas, asylum. I have communicated with the Prime Minister and UN representatives by email. Brian Becker of our congregation has done yoeman's work in phone conversations, talking to lawyers and agencies here. Yet the ace in the hole that we had finally accomplished was contact with the Church of the Nazarene in Dominica! At least we could work with them to ameliorate their condition until we can work on legal means on this end -- or, in last resort, to find some illegal means of helping our brothers find a secure life here.

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Posted by johnwright at 12:41 PM | Comments (3)

Friends along the journey

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"?

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Posted by johnwright at 9:32 AM | Comments (1)

Saturday -- in memoriam

Saturday started early with a 1-0 victory for my girls rec soccer team, The Return of the Tropical Lawnmowers. The victory moves us to 3-0 -- we've won more already than in the past four years combined!!

Much more significant, however, was the funeral of John Kang. John was a friend, a refugee from the genocide in the Sudan. We had worked together for the benefit of his people here in San Diego as they adjusted to a foreign land. He sat in an ESL ministerial studies class that I and Kevin Timpe taught most recently. I was reminded that John had participated directly in the peace talks that has resulted in a peace agreement between the South Sudan and the Islamic government. It is a fragile peace, but better then the long civil war. Ironically, the government was established the week that John died.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:37 AM | Comments (1)

Health Care with the Poor

It seems that the past few weeks have brought me into extensive interaction with the "health care industry" in San Diego. While I need to blog more on what I've learned through interaction with the San Diego Health and Faith Alliance, I want to share two other experiences from the week.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)

Another interesting day

Just quick updates for your prayers and reflections. Last night I went to Bread of Life. I was humbled as Shadow asked me to witness and bless his marriage as the officiating clergy. Of course, this raises certain issues that come to light with the nature of marriage and catechesis and Shadow. But I never will forget his love and concern for me when I fell and dislocated my knee 18 months ago at the church.

Then I went to see Bill Hatcher whom Deron had taken to the emergency room at Mercy Hospital in the afternoon. It was a little after 8:00 pm, and he was still in the emergency room. He still had not seen a doctor. I have yet to get today's update, but I'm sure he waited for hours before getting a room. The emergency room was full with sick and hurt people of all ages -- from geriatrics to an infant. As he was suffering no trauma and had no private insurance, I'm sure he was low on the triage scale. It was a depressing place to be -- I wonder how much longer such a slow system can exist in its care for the sick.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)

New Orleans and the False Soteriology of the modern nation-state

Soteriology is a big, fancy word for the doctrine of salvation -- how salvation is wrought for whom by whom. For Christians, salvation takes place by the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through faith, sealed in baptism into the people of God, the church -- always a particular local congregation that is simultaneously one throughout the world. Yet this understanding of salvation is contested today through the soteriology of the modern nation-state. The state is willing to offer the church the realm of the salvation of souls, but its ideology articulates the responsibility for the salvation of its citizenry in the body. It takes on this responsibility through monopolizing coercion and violence in the bounded territory over which it claims authority. The most obvious example is the language that soldiers take the saving role of Jesus Christ in "sacrificing their lives so that we might live." The soteriology of the state is a parody of that provided by God through Christ by the power of Spirit that has engrafted us, Jew or Gentile, into the church.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:27 PM | Comments (6)

The Funeral of Michael Patterson

I'd like to post the liturgy for our brother Mike Patterson's funeral. The words do not substitute adequately for those gathered -- those who live on the beach, the various members of the congregation, Mike's brother, Liz, who cared for him, Laura and Ryan who took on legal responsibilities and the weight of making decisions. I don't have the beautiful words of Patrick, who though a bit inebriated at the time, shared his love and thankfulness of Mike, how he and Mike inverted an obscene gesture that they so often felt from the world around them to become a gesture of friendship and love. I don't have the words of "Hankster the Prankster" who now kind of oversees those who live on the beach in care, who models his life on Mike's care. I don't have the anonymous poem read by Sandy, and I don't have Liz's words of Mike's love for all of us.

I can't describe the finality as Pastor Kathy turned Mike's picture over at the Commitall. And I can't describe the peace when we shared food on the beach following the service, as the sun set over the waves.

But I can share with you the order of the service, and the words spoken. And I can elicit your prayers for Mike and the rest of us as we learn to go on remembering his life to call us to a more faithful life in the world.

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Posted by johnwright at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

Distributed Today after Worship

We have a policy of "benign neglect" in our congregation concerning observing the calendar that the American government and society embraces. Honestly, pastorally one learns to dread "holiday weekends," for the congregation scatters to visit family (a good thing) or take advantage of the extra time for "leisure activities" (no comment). Thus on "Hallmark Days" we have made a habit of recognition following our worship, but not within the liturgy.

The issue came up last week for Labor Day, and the involvement of members within our congregation for the cause of labor -- a major issue in San Diego, where wages and benefits can often be exploitative. How do we call attention appropriately to the need for just wages without falling into the conflictual background of the contemporary labor movement as necessary to balance out competing self-interests? How do we observe Labor Day, without diminishing our commitment to the Truine God who has revealed God's own Self in Jesus Christ?

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Posted by johnwright at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)

Rest in Peace

Tonight around 9:45 pm, Michael Patterson left this life for life eternal. Mike had managed to get up and move around a little in the morning. As the day had worn on, Mike's breathing became more and more labored, though he was able to speak some with those around him through Friday afternoon. By Friday evening, his breathing had grown shallow and he was no longer able to communicate. He died surrounded by Liz, who had done such a wonderful job caring for him, Buddy, his brother, and with a cell phone connection to Sharon, his sister.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:01 AM | Comments (0)

Friends Passing Through -- Mike and Dave

Our Sunday reading spoke of our "exit" and "return" to God that is our life -- from God, through God, and to God are all things. We are sojourners in this world, just passing through. In some sense I think that culture teaches us that we belong here. Thus we want to deny our transience, look to accumulate goods, experiences, relationships, whatever, like we can build a permanent dwelling here.

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Posted by johnwright at 5:12 AM | Comments (0)

"Psycho Christians!"

Last Friday I had a conversation with a colleague in the School of Theology. In the midst he asked me, somewhat seriously, how long would it take until I was arrested. I replied that I never seek to be provoke the authorities; as a matter of fact, it had been a long time since I had been directly threatened with arrest. I guess some police were leery last December when the city shut down feeding the hungry from the Salvation Army for awhile, and we decided to go to the streets to distribute food. I'm not sure if our actions were legal or not -- I do know that Christ was present there. But it had been awhile since I had been directly threatened -- last time was at an inactive bus stop by 13th and Broadway while praying with some friends from the Bread of Life when we were outdoors. I stayed with those with whom I had just prayed as the police wrote them tickets for the open cans of alcohol that were at the stop -- even though they were not on my friends. When I didn't leave, I was told to leave or they would arrest me for interference with the police. But that was over a year ago.

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Posted by johnwright at 1:40 PM | Comments (1)

A Long Week

This has been a long, difficult week in some ways. But it also shows the blessings and goodness of God to me for which I must be thankful. Next week on Thursday I fly to Germany to participate in an international conference on "Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century BCE". It's an honor to receive an invitation to present a paper there, but, of course, it means I have to write my paper. I've tried to devote time to finishing it this week. I've almost made it.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:23 AM | Comments (2)

Resident Aliens: The Apostolic Fathers and Congregations in Liberal Cultures

I've been reading the Apostolic Fathers recently -- largely on Sunday afternoons after gathering for worship. It provides a good context for me to read to understand our gathering in line with those who have gathered before, and stretches me in praying with/for our congregation and our mission together. There is a concreteness in these immediately post-NT (some earlier than some NT documents) that helps envision our life together in Mid-City as a very local, particular body of Christ. It also helps me to think faithfully in light of the role of the church within the United States and the liberal political society that we live within.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:56 PM | Comments (1)

More Aidan Nichol's on Benedict

Evangelical Protestants have no real doctrine of the church in the United States -- if not throughout the world. Salvation is exclusively a "personal affair" of a "personal relationship with Jesus". It is this "exclusively" that provides the problem -- although "personal relationship with Jesus" language is neither Scriptural nor within the tradition. With no ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, "faith" and "forgiveness of sins" and "sanctification" drop out of evangelical language and experience of salvation, not to mention baptism and Eucharist as significant practices. Worship becomes a means of therapeutic personal experience to help cope with the psychological struggles of the week that comes from competing in a capitalistic market of conflicting personal interests.

The lack of ecclesiology has also made evangelical prone to cooptation by partisan political groupings in the United States. By use of marketing technology for partisan ends, evangelicals have seen their personal moral concerns for abortion and the nature of Christian marriage incorporated into a much wider agenda of the neo-liberal American right that blatantly goes against the gospel; it also invites a backlash to try and Christianize the American left to make it the "litmus test" for gathering with a specific congregation. These things are communicated very, very subtly, but effectively when a congregation gathers.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:28 AM | Comments (3)

Rowland Interview: Part II Excerpt

The Zenit.org interview with Tracey Rowland continues today. I want to post an excerpt from it because it has an important point that links the dynamics of contemporary American evangelicalism to two different Thomisms within Catholicism. She describes this as the main theological battle of the church. After the excerpt, I'd like to analyze how the same dynamic is found within evangelicalism. The difference is, whereas in Catholicism, the "Whigs" have not taken over the "teaching office of the church," largely due to the "back to the past, ressourcement movement behind Vatican II, American evangelicalism has had only a small ressourcement movement, if at all, within its ecclesiastical leadership, and is dominated by a "Whig" visions. Here's the excerpt (emphases added by me):

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Posted by johnwright at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)

More on Benedict from Radical Orthodoxy series author

I just found the following interview, published on Zenit.org. It overlaps with yesterday's posting on an analysis of Benedict XVI and his doctrine of the church. I am not merely interested in Benedict because of some Roman Catholic nostalgia, but because I honestly believe that there is some real wisdom here for our witness at Mid-City. I am fascinated by the overlap between Hauerwas and Benedict as seen in this interview -- particularly in the critique of modernity and an accomodated church to liberal democracies. I don't think that this is an accident, as George Lindbeck, with whom Hauerwas studied, not to mention David Burrell, the Holy Cross priest who brought Stanley to Notre Dame, both were at Vatican II and influenced especially by the initial discussions, before the document on the "Church in the Modern World" was released. Also the interview is with one of the authors within the Radical Orthodoxy series -- and the overlap again is obvious.

I find the vision compelling, intellectually and pastorally. I believe that there is "gospel" here, a guide to the visible witness of the church in the world, as well as an intellectual resources to sustain Christian higher education. Yet I also recognize the need for the Spirit to call people into such a life amidst such a church. I'm fully cognizant that an American-laced, consumerist (modernist/post-modernist) privatization of the church, collapsing Jesus into a subjective, personal experience, rather than objectively found in the Lord's Supper, is much better to generate crowds and finances today.

I hope that you find the interview interesting:

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Posted by johnwright at 8:02 PM | Comments (3)

The Thought of Benedict XVI

I just finished the book by Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger. It is a book originally published in 1988, that was reissued with a new title after Ratzinger's election as pope. I got it to try and understand the differences between the impressions that I had of Ratzinger from my days at Notre Dame and what I had read of him during John Paul II's funeral and after his election. The book is a pretty straightforward description of Ratzinger's publications, unfolded in a chronological fashion.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:22 PM | Comments (0)

Ressourcement: More than Thinking Old Theology Anew

As I've been reading and thinking and praying this past year, the writings of what has been called the "Ressourcement" has beckoned me to them. "Ressourcement" is a French word that has become a technical term even in English to represent a movement in Christian theology that the way forward for the church theologically comes in re-capturing anew the thought of the past. These theologians and historians were behind Vatican II, and unbeknownst to me at the time, behind those who influenced me at Notre Dame.

Yet more, Ressourcement has become a means of understanding and embracing the heritage of John Wesley from which the Church of the Nazarene springs, and, I am convinced, were fed by the same springs as H. Orton Wiley -- the main theologian of the Church of the Nazarene. I have found them instrumental in the commitment to "post-modern critical Augustinianism" that one finds in Radical Orthodoxy.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:19 PM | Comments (2)

Acts 4:32-37: Economics 101 -- The End of the Healing of the Lame Man

Acts 4:32-37 provides the "end" of the story of the healing of the Jew born blind -- the final goal to which the story moves. The passage therefore parallels Acts 2:42-47. As a matter of fact, this parallel shows Acts 1-2 in the grand movement of the story of Pentecost parallels Acts 3-4 in the grand movement of the story of the healing of the lame man. To begin, it might be good to discuss the parallel movement in the two stories and re-read together 2:42-47. How is it the same and how does it differ from Acts 2:42-47? What is the significance between what is in common and how they differ?

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Posted by johnwright at 9:43 AM | Comments (2)

Wisdom from Wendell Berry in honor of Patrick Allen

Patrick Allen, PLNU Provost, has been my friend for ten years since we both migrated out to San Diego from Indiana within ten months to each other. He is wise, and taught me much about administration.

I am getting ready to go to his "departure reception" this afternoon before he leaves for a new assignment at Southern Nazarene University. In his honor, I wanted to post something I found last night on ressourcement.blogspot.com: Excerpts from a 1973 interview of Wendell Berry. Patrick was the one who introduced Berry to me, for which I am thankful.

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Posted by johnwright at 2:36 PM | Comments (3)

Church of the Nazarene General Assembly, Internationalization, and Catholicity

I think that these will probably wind up my reflections on the Church of the Nazarene General Assembly. I've listened to some friends who were there during the legislative sessions, read limited actions of the Assembly, and tried to think why I have the particular perspective that I do. As I've thought, I think that a little of my biography in its relationship to internationalization makes a difference to me.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:52 PM | Comments (8)

General Assembly and General Superintendents -- After the Trip

We arrived home yesterday about 12:00 pm after 29 straight hours in the van (with small breaks). It was a wonderful trip. I lost track of the goings-on in Indianapolis while on the road. When I came back, Kevin Modesto, elder,church-member, friend, met me as I ran to campus to get some Inter-Library Loan books with news of the General Superintendency news. I've been chewing this over since then. Here's my nickel analysis, for what it's worth.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:31 PM | Comments (6)

Sunday at the General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene: A Trying Church

I've withdrawn to my room after the three days here in Indianapolis. The highlight of the day had to be meeting with our Mid-City folk after this afternoon's service -- the Zumwalts, Kelly Tirrill, Brian Becker, Cheryl LaRue. As I process today's services after the fact, I experience a certain melancholy. It seems that the Church of the Nazarene at the level of its highest leadership is "trying" -- in at least two different ways.

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Posted by johnwright at 5:47 PM | Comments (3)

Saturday at Nazarene General Assembly: Conversations

For those who might not know, the historical origins of Nazarene General Assemblies are found within an 18th century practice of John Wesley's methodists. Annual Conferences were held to have the lay preachers and class leaders and leadership of the whole Methodist movement meet together to review their teaching, attend to any organizational problems, and any disciplinary issues.

Such meetings had become part -- though I don't know the precise history -- of Christian monastic movements. I think that the Franciscans, for instance, developed such a practice. I believe that such meetings continue today among Christian "religious" -- those who live under monastic disciplines -- today within the church catholic.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

General Assembly -- Friday Night: NYI service

Last night I attended the NYI service at the Nazarene General Assembly in Indianapolis. Four years ago this was the best service in the Assembly, as the NYI had internalized the internationalization of the Church, and thus, de-centered it from its American political and cultural colonial existence to the church's Christological center. Last night, however, the General Church "took back" some of the service. Thus, the service was really two in one. I think that it is important to understand the promise of the church and where we must faithfully go, and why it is going to be difficult for it to get there.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:33 AM | Comments (2)

Starting Year 46

I turned 46 today -- it's interesting sliding downhill towards 50. Aging is interesting. I don't feel any older, on one hand; on the other hand, I have a whole lot more experience and my body sure isn't the same one that once ran a 2:26:52 marathon.

We're getting ready to jump in a rented van and begin a road trip to Chicago. Kathy's sister just had a baby. We're stopping by there on the way to the General Assembly of the International Church of the Nazarene.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:32 PM | Comments (5)

How Sin Becomes "Natural" -- Lessons from Harry Potter

I finished re-reading volume one of the Harry Potter series this morning. I'm not sure if I'll make it through all five before the new one comes out, but I'm going to try so that I can read the new volume with a slight percentage of the insight that my daughter Tasha possesses when it comes out (midnight, July 16th). As I read the beginning of the book, I was delighted with the figure of Dudley Dursley. Rowling does an excellent example of narrating how sin becomes natural. It reminds me so much of how the war in Iraq became started so that "war" just seems natural today. But war is sin -- it is the absence of peace and harmony, the absence of life. War is not "in God" because God, as Father, Son, and Spirit, IS Peace, Harmony, Life, Love -- analogically speaking!

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Posted by johnwright at 10:34 AM | Comments (1)

What Do You Remember?

Our memories are very fasinating phenomena. We are what we remember. Yet our memories are not exactly "mine"; they happen to us. Memories are socially constructed. We remember what we are tolds. We share life in its deepest nature with those with whom we remember. Memories are fundamentally political in nature, rather than what we've come to understand as 'psychological'.

So today I thought I'd share with you a sermon on remembering. It's interesting the fundamentally different type of memory recorded here amidst a society that is observing a day of memories. It includes remembering those who died -- but not while trying to take life. They died for a different cause. The church is constituted by very different memories than the nation-state's in which we live.

The sermon was preached in Germany yesterday by Benedict XVI. I must admit that I'm becoming a bit of a "Rome watcher" again. Yet pastorally and theologically, I found this a wonderful and moving sermon. It was presented at a National Eucharistic conference. Of course, a "national Eucharistic conference" is an oxymorom. Yet it is interesting how the homily undercuts the name of the conference in which it was presented. Good memories tend to do that. I found it on Zenit.org/English.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:06 PM | Comments (2)

M. Scott Peck and A Road Well Traveled

I can tell that the end of the semester is quickly coming upon me. The nights are now filled with grading, and the days with assorted other work. I'm also trying to finish a 1600 page book (2 volumes) on Early Christian Mission for a book review I've been assigned. It's amazing how little can be said in so long a book! I find myself a bit fragmented, but trying to press on. I'm not sure if I've had a coherent thought in the past week. I haven't had much to blog on, though I still have the Fallujah rant building within!

The other week I read Scott Peck's "The Road Less Traveled." Many of my congregation have read the book. I wrote some responses to Peck's comments, and thought that I'd post them now to keep the blog moving while I go through this time. I find Peck to be very culturally conservative, though I'm sure this would surprise him. Indeed, it is ironic that many corporations have found that the "road less traveled" can help produce more productive, more subservient employees for the sake of shareholders. My comments, and people I favorably quote, are in bold print. Tell me what you think! Warning, it's a bit long.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:54 AM | Comments (9)

Reflections on a New Pope

I was surprised and both concerned and excited yesterday with the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. To speak only slightly hyperbolically, Ratzinger's name was used as an obscenity while I was at Notre Dame in the '80s -- "You Ratzinger!" Many theologians, committed to Western liberal democracy more than their catholicity, saw him as a turn-coat from their heady days at Vatican II. Yet yesterday I think that I've come to see this assessment as wrong -- and Ratzinger himself becomes very important to maintaining the witness of our congregation in Mid-City.

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Posted by johnwright at 6:49 AM | Comments (18)

Brief Reflections on John Paul II

This morning I spent some time while getting ready listening to CNN's coverage of John Paul's funeral (I started the tape at midnight last night to watch and listen to the whole thing). It was interesting to hear the commentators struggle over language. Their only language was one of emotions, subjective response to what went on -- what was most moving, the personal experiences of those who watched. It shows the lack of language of our world to describe events. They knew something profound had happened; they could describe the event, but knew no one of assessing except language of subjectivity.

I would call the events a foretaste of what Christ will bring over all creation. The gathering of the nations before the resurrected Christ, with peace, hospitality, veneration, a call for the saints as models of human life -- it was an event of the end times, breaking remarkably into our world today. We saw true catholicity. We saw the insignificance of the rulers of this age, made small, their temporality for all to see, in light of the voluntary gathering of the nations around a learned Polish philosopher-priest who had spent his life witness to Christ.

That is why it was so moving. That is why the crowds cheered and applauded as the coffin slowly spun towards them one last time before entering the kingdom, the basilica. John Paul's funeral was a time of great hope and anticipation for that day when God's kingdom comes in its fullness on earth as it is in heaven. It was not a memorial of John Paul; it was a sign of that which is to come. It was a Christian funeral in the best sense of the term.

Posted by johnwright at 8:18 AM | Comments (1)