Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Iain Provan: Convenient Myths and Seriously Dangerous Religion

‘Dr Iain Provan's new book Convenient Myths talks about how modern culture constructs myths to suit the temper of the time.

Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College since 1997. In this interview he takes on modern tendencies to re-write history and create myths to suit current thoughts and attitudes.’

I was surprised by how much this 30 min conversation engaged me. You can find the downloadable podcast here.

I have a number of his commentaries, but haven’t read Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was (pub. 2013), or his 2014 publication, which looks really interesting (but too expensive) Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters.

Who is my Neighbour? The Ethics of Global Relationships - September – November 2016

St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London UK, over the months of September, October and November 2016, has hosted a lecture series under the title: Who is my Neighbour? The Ethics of Global Relationships. The first lecture in the series was delivered by Rowan Williams. Following lectures were delivered by Stanley Hauerwas, Sarah Coakley, Michael Northcott, Sarah Teather, and Sam Wells, the Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, concludes the series on the 14^th November.

“With the UK voting to leave the European Union and with realisation of increasing division,
xenophobia, and confusion over future national and international relationships, the St Martin-in-the-Fields Autumn Lecture Series examines the crucial question: Who is my Neighbour?

What does the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself actually means for us today. Lectures by renowned theologians and practitioners will reflect on this subject in relation to issues of ecology, immigration, fear and discrimination, the present political climate both in UK, Europe and the USA and how that the lives of our poorest neighbours may in fact be God’s gift to us as a church and as a nation.”

You’ll find the list of the guest speakers and their (downloadable) talks here. You’ll also find a pre-lecture Things Unseen interview with Hauerwas here.

Brian McLaren in Conversation

Today a recent conversation between the lads at Nomad and Brian McLaren. I’ve had the privilege of briefly meeting Brian, and have heard him many times, either in person or by way of podcast. While is not now scratching where I’m itching, he continues to articulate things that many of us experience, and indeed, that many of us long for.

I commend the conversation and think it’s worth a listen, either because it will be new, or because it will be encouraging, or it will help provide a language to describe, imagine, and dream.

‘Brian McLaren has a knack for articulating what many of us are feeling. For a decade he has been the voice of those Christians who are concerned about, for example, the Church’s overemphasis on doctrinal belief, its lack of inclusivity, and its lack of concern for the many global issues we are facing.

In his latest book – The Great Spiritual Migration (pub. Sept. 2016) – he draws together all these themes into a manifesto for a new Christian movement, one that seeks nothing less than the healing of the world.’

You’ll find the podcast here.

Eastern Orthodox Priest & Scholar John Behr In Conversation.

While I have yet to set forth in an Orthodox Church (which I’d love to do) the Orthodox Christian tradition has long had a fascination for me. My earliest encounter with the tradition was by way of Metropolitan Kallistos Weir.

Today I want to feature a recently aired (9^th October 2016) conversation between Rachael Kohn (interviewer) and Orthodox Archpriest Behr on Australian radio show The Spirit of Things. There was much to think about as I drove north.

“British born, Father John Behr, the Dean of St Valdimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in NYC, argues that Orthodoxy is anything but rigid.

‘Our difference in practice’ he says, ‘confirms our unity in faith.’”

Behr is the author of the 2013 published and very well received Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image.

You’ll find the podcast here.

Paula Gooder: Biblical Spirituality for the Whole Person

Today a podcast from the lads at Nomad. It’s a subject that has long interested me, and it was really encouraging to listen to Paula. There’s such a lot of passivity when Christian’s gather to worship. You have the gathered congregation, the liturgical text (whether explicit or not), and the clergy. In sermons we’re talked at, and the only movement if often the (looped) sequence of standing-sitting-kneeling-standing-sitting…

I warmed to so-called Alt-worship and the whole multisensory contemplative experience, but it’s insights have never become mainstream within established congregational contexts.

Anyway, here’s the ‘blurb’ for the Paula Gooder conversation:

“Christianity can be quite a disembodied faith. Muslim’s have prayer positions, Hindu’s have yoga, Buddhists have Tai-Chi, whereas Christians tend to pray with little more than a bowed head. We ask theologian Paula Gooder why Christians have separated the spiritual from the physical, and what damage this has done for the faith. And we ask how our faith might be reshaped if we approached it in a more holistic and embodied way.”

You’ll find the podcast here.

Gooder had a new book published by SPCK in May (2016) titled Body: Biblical Spirituality for the Whole Person. I would also recommend Echo of the Soul: The Sacredness of the Human Body (2000) by J. Philip Newell.

Thomas Merton and the Communion of Love

As the 22^nd September 2016 approaches, I wanted to post this excerpt from an online article titled: Communion of Love: Thomas Merton and Liturgical Reform

“Alone in his hermitage on 22 September 1967 - a little over one year before his untimely death - Thomas Merton decided to make a recording. Because severe dermatitis in his hands hampered his ability to write, Merton used a tape recorder to dictate various things for a monk down at the monastery to type.

On occasion, however, he used the recorder for his own purposes, and on this day Merton recorded himself chanting in Latin the entirety of the Cistercian mass for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost.

His journal entry for the day gives no clue as to why he did this, nor does he explain himself on the tape. But as one listens to Merton chant a liturgy with which he was deeply familiar after more than 25 years as a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, one hears his love for the traditional liturgy, both in the brief explanations he provides about certain parts of the liturgy as well as in the passion with which he sings it.

This is seemingly odd behaviour for someone often embraced or dismissed as a "progressive," yet it's characteristic of a man whose thought often transcends easy labelling.

The latter years of Merton's life coincided with the liturgical reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and he commented often on the reforms happening in the monastery and throughout the world. Merton's initial enthusiasm for the constitution was tempered by the shape the reform came to take, but despite his misgivings about the reforms, he advocated for an openness to both progressives and conservatives, arguing that a liturgical renewal rooted in an ecclesiology of communion necessitated, above all, love for the other…”

You can read the complete article, by Gregory K. Hillis here.

Padraig O'Tuama: pain is a poem

“In-between the Irish Catholic and Protestant divide, with friends in both camps, Padraig O'Tuama's role as head of Corrymeela Community in Belfast is a perfect fit.

Specialising in reconciliation, Corrymeela draws on Padraig's gifts as poet and theologian, and his experience of being a gay man, which informs his sensitivity to exile. 

Padraig was in Australia as poet in residence of the Uniting Church of Australia and a special guest of the Sacred Edge Festival in Queenscliff, Victoria”, Australia.

You’ll find the podcast here.

Karen Ward: Many Years Ago

When I first started blogging over 13-years ago (or maybe longer), I had a real hope that the types of creative, risk-taking, and imaginative conversations (and consequent experimentation) that the content of Karen’s article (and her experience at the Church of the Apostles) represents would also occur within a NZ Anglican context, as indeed it was in the CofE (Mission-Shaped / Mixed-Economy / Fresh Expressions / Nu-Monastisicism etc.)

At that time, in NZ, Baptists had been, or were, at the forefront of experimentation and risk-taking, not in their entirety, but in pockets. There were experiments in Alt-Worship (for example, Mike Riddell, and Mark Pierson @ Cityside) and church planting (Steve Taylor, Graceway), all of which stimulated my imagination while at the same-time nourished my own commitment to a sacramental Jesus-following journey.

Baptist’s in NZ were also at the forefront of important research into Church Leavers. Alan Jamieson published a book-length distillation of his PhD (in Sociology) thesis that was called A Churchless Faith: Faith Journey’s Beyond the Churches (the NZ edition had a slightly different subtitle. Here is an article which summarises some of Alan’s key findings. His complete PhD thesis can be found here).

Alan followed this up a few years later with Church Leavers: Faith Journey’s Five Years On, which was co-written by fellow Baptist Minister Jenny McIntosh, and one of their then congregation, Adrienne Thompson who was and is a practising Spiritual Director. Wellington Central Baptist (while Alan and Jenny were its Ministers) also sponsored Spirited Exchanges.

While it could have been happening, I was (and largely remain) completely unaware (it never came onto my radar) of any similar outpouring of research, creativity and experimentation within a NZ Anglican context.

In those years, I found stories from NZ (Baptist), Australia, the UK and the USA deeply exciting and hopeful. Feelings that bubbled up as I reflected following a conversation with Len Hjalmarson a couple of weekends ago. Feelings now tinged with sadness, all these years later.

When I started blogging Karen was similarly blogging and sharing something of her journey and the journey of the Church of the Apostles. It was inspiring, and I found pioneering stories and experiments from Karen, and others in Australia, the UK and USA, for example Kevin Rains was experimenting, within a Vineyard context, with a more sacramental approach to being church in downtown Cincinnati (Vineyard Central). The story of that experiment was told in a 2001 issue of Vineyard USA’s excellent but now defunct publication Cutting Edge, pages 2-7. That issue was themed around “Churches Outside of the Box” and also featured another big influence on me, Church of the Saviour which was then pastored by its founding-pastor Gordon Cosby, pages 10-17 & 20.

I have lost touch with where Karen Ward is, or what in fact has happened to the Church of the Apostles, but I re-read the attached and linked to article this morning, and the content still resonated, written as it is out of an Episcopalian context. The article was first published in the Winter 2010 issue of the Anglican Theological Review, and it still gives voice to the hope I once had.

Here’s an excerpt:

“…My name is Karen Ward and I’m the Abbess and Vicar at Church of the Apostles, Seattle, a six-year-old mission of the Diocese of Olympia, Washington. Because around 70 percent of our church membership are people in their twenties, we are often called an “emerging church” or “young adult church.” When we describe ourselves we say we are “an intentional, sacramental community in the way of Jesus Christ.”

There is no mention of young adults, and nowhere on our website or in any of our literature do the words “young adult” appear. The Episcopal Church is at a missional crossroads, which Brian McLaren calls “the Episcopal moment.” If we can embrace missional change and renew our identity, purpose, and participation in God’s mission, many more young adults will join with us, and perhaps in droves…”

You’ll find the link to the online article (PDF) here.

Download Karen M. Ward - Back to the Future

For the Life of the World: Jesus Christ and the Church in the Theologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Stanley Hauerwas

My kind of theology book. Newly published (Pickwick / 302 pages) in May 2016, this new book (title above) from Robert J. Dean (ThD, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto) who is an Adjunct Professor of Theology at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto and formerly a pastor of Good Shepherd Community Church, Toronto.

Here’s the publishers blurb:

“What is the church? What is its mission in the world? Modern Protestantism's inability to provide a clear answer to these seemingly simple questions has resulted in vast confusion amongst pastors about the nature of their calling and has left congregations languishing without a clear reason for existence.

Many of the voices and allegiances competing for the churches' attention have rushed in to fill the void, with the result that the church in modernity has frequently found itself captive to the prevailing culture. Yet from within the belly of highly culturally accommodated churches, both the German pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the American theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas were able to articulate compelling visions of churches freed from their cultural captivity in order to truly and freely serve God and neighbor. Against the complex and confusing backdrops of Nazi Germany and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America respectively, Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas sought to recover the ethical and political character of the Christian faith through recalling the church back to the christological center of its faith.

Together they provide a rich set of complementary, and at times mutually correcting, resources for the contemporary church as it seeks to faithfully bear witness to Christ amidst the ruins of Christendom.”

From Liquid to Social: Bauman, Bergoglio, and Wiesel

Yesterday I featured Professor Emeritus of Sociology (Leeds University) Zygmunt Bauman (born in Poland on the 19th November 1925).

One of the online interviews I drew attention to was No More Walls In Europe: Tear them down! In that interview Bauman drew attention to a speech delivered by Pope Francis to mark the conferral of the Charlemagne Prize (Friday 6th May 2016). Bauman highlighted Pope Francis’ “impeccable insights” Earlier on he commented that we “need to study, memorize, and do our best to draw practical conclusions from Pope Francis’ analysis”.

And so, after reading Bauman’s interview, I read Pope Francis’ speech, and it is indeed worthy of wider discussion and engagement. So, today, I want to highlight that speech, while at the same time belatedly marking the passing of Elie Wiesel, whom Pope Francis mentions in his speech.

I want to draw an explicit line between the three of them, juxtaposing each of their individual contributions upon that of the others, i.e. I want to create an ever widening and profoundly needed conversation between the living and the dead – these three, plus the many others of good will who have been, or are, committed to the tasks of construction, reformation, and renewal; those committed to the difficult and deep work of moving from what Pope Francis calls [the] “liquid” (economies – but it’s not just economics. Its every level of, discipline (all the constituent elements of a deeply humane and just society), and practice within the contemporary local, national, and international) to the “social”.

Here’s the concluding section of Pope Francis’ May 2016 speech (you will find the complete speech here):

“With mind and heart, with hope and without vain nostalgia, like a son who rediscovers in Mother Europe his roots of life and faith, I dream of a new European humanism, one that involves “a constant work of humanization” and calls for “memory, courage, [and] a sound and humane utopian vision”. I dream of a Europe that is young, still capable of being a mother: a mother who has life because she respects life and offers hope for life. I dream of a Europe that cares for children, that offers fraternal help to the poor and those newcomers seeking acceptance because they have lost everything and need shelter. I dream of a Europe that is attentive to and concerned for the infirm and the elderly, lest they be simply set aside as useless. I dream of a Europe where being a migrant is not a crime but a summons to greater commitment on behalf of the dignity of every human being. I dream of a Europe where young people breathe the pure air of honesty, where they love the beauty of a culture and a simple life undefiled by the insatiable needs of consumerism, where getting married and having children is a responsibility and a great joy, not a problem due to the lack of stable employment. I dream of a Europe of families, with truly effective policies concentrated on faces rather than numbers, on birth rates more than rates of consumption. I dream of a Europe that promotes and protects the rights of everyone, without neglecting its duties towards all. I dream of a Europe of which it will not be said that its commitment to human rights was its last utopia.”

While the focus of the Pope's speech is Europe, it could easily apply to the UK, USA, and indeed to us here in NZ.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor, writer, and Nobel Peace prizewinner died this month (2nd July 2016) at the age of 87.