Earlier this year a book that I contributed to was published by my friend, JR Woodward. This book was an Easter project in 2009. During the 50 days of Easter 50 authors wrote approximately 500 words each explaining what the Christian good news is about. The audience was our local city newspaper. In my case, I
wrote for the LA Times. The results is a book called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and Everything in Between). This book would be ideal for a devotional book or for a discussion group.
Above is a video that was recently created to promote the book, which you can buy on Amazon.com by clicking here. I also have some copies in my office to sell. Contact me directly if you're interested.
Spectrum and the re-church
network will together be hosting a summer reading group. We will be
blogging our way through Deep
Church by Jim Belcher. In this book, Belcher maps out, in a
very accessible way, the critiques made of the traditional church by
those in the emergent movement and the criticisms of the emergent
movement that has ensued from the traditionalists in response. He
attempts to articulate a third alternative between the two approaches to
being and doing church. We are hoping that reading this book together
will be a good way to come to a better understanding of the emergent
movement, but also to thoughtfully discuss the important issues that are
raised in it in the context of the Adventist community.
My dear friend, Samir Selmanovic, has just published his first book entitled, It's Really All About God (buy on Amazon) and what a way to start. This is not a review...that will be coming soon. But I will tell you that this is a radical, peaceful vision of the force for good that religion can and should be in the world, told through the intimate, personal lenses of someone who hase expereinced so much of the good and bad of religion.
There is a review at the Spectrum website by my friend, Brenton Reading. You can read that here.
The blurb I wrote for inside the front cover says this:
“Samir has written a book that reads like an extended poem; an ode to life. Where others see only the darkness and destructiveness of religion, Samir sees beauty and hope. Where others see only competition and violence, Samir sees synergy and life. And his vision is no simple syncretism; a blending of all religions into one inoffensive ‘smoothie’ of goodness and light. This book is a celebration of postmodern ‘otherness’ of the first order. It will inspire you, frustrate you, maybe even anger you. Samir will not answer all your questions or tell you exactly what to do next. But if you’ve ever felt that nagging deep in your soul that God is lurking just beneath the surface in places you have least expected, you need to read this book!”
I will write a review here after I get a chance to read it again.
Please go buy this book and read it. In the meantime, check out this short video of Samir talking about his book.
Part two of our 6-part blog series over at the re-church blog has been up for a couple of days and the conversation has begun. This week's essay is written by Samir Selmanovic, founder of Faith House Manhattan and the author of the forthcoming Jossey-Bass book, It's Really All About God.
I'd love to have you head over there and check it out. Especially those of you who have been reading along with us and know the subject of the chapter, your comments are especially helpful. I think Samir has posed some vitally important questions for us to consider, especially as pastors and Christian leaders in our world today. Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite.
I ask myself, why would I then take up this journey of
deconstruction? Why not turn the tools of deconstruction against itself
(deconstruct the deconstruction) and settle for something of substance?
Life is short. I want to die in one piece, constructed and whole, with
my family and friends around me, also constructed and whole. And my
hope within me, also constructed and whole.
Think of it. He describes people on this journey as “people who
crash-landed,” “frightened by the mysterious” and always partially
“lost.” We are supposed to live under “hauntological principle?” We are
invited to embrace “contingency” on a journey that has “teeth” and
“bite,” a path seeded with “interrupted passages and missteps,” maps
with “multiple tracks” and “counterpaths” on every turn. And to live in
the world where other people are “shores we will never reach!” He calls
this place, our very own lives (yes Christian lives too) “very spooky.”
He brings ghost back into the Holy Ghost. He summarizes the situation
we find ourselves in as the “postmodern condition.” It does not sound
like a journey or a path to me. It sounds like a chronic disease.
As I'm reading back through Lesslie Newbigin's classic, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, I am a struck by how my own ideas have been shaped by Newbigin to such a degree that I forget where I originally learned these things. For this reason (and many others) I highly recommend reading again the most important books in your life. Here's a sample for today:
Hopeful action means having something to which one can confidently look forward. It means having a horizon. As I said earlier, apart from what has been done in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are shut up to only two possibilities. One possible horizon for our action is a vision for the future of the human race, a future in which we shall have no part. The other possible horizon is a personal future for me beyond death. From that future the world in which I now seek to serve God is absent. Its future is not part of my future. The one possibility gives meaning to my participation in the public life of neighborhood, nation, and world at the cost of marginalizing the human person. The other provides meaning for the individual human person at the cost of marginalizing our shared public life. What is made possible through the gospel is a life looking toward a horizon which is different from either of these. That horizon is defined in the words "He shall come again." For a Christian the horizon for all action is this. It is advent rather than future. He is coming to meet us, and whatever we do -- whether it is our most private prayers or our most public political action -- is simply offered to him for whatever place it may have in his blessed kingdom. Here is the clue to meaningful action in a meaningful history: it is the translation into action of the prayer: "Your kingdom come, your will be done, as in heaven so on earth" (101-102, emphasis mine).
A few weeks ago I announced a Summer Reading Group though the re-church network, a collective of emerging, missional Adventist
leaders that I co-founded back in 2000. The book I chose is What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, by John D. Caputo.
Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Humanities at Syracuse
University and is known for his work on Derrida and deconstruction (a
quick look at his faculty page at the Syracuse website makes we want to
drop everything and enroll to study with him).
What Would Jesus Deconstruct? is the winner of the ForeWord Magazine Best Philosophy Book of 2007 award.
The book discussion is taking place at the re-church blog and starts today with a post by me on the first chapter.
Here is an excerpt from the first post which went up today.
It’s hard to believe…but, summer is here. And with summer comes time spent with great books. So, re-church is announcing a Summer Reading Group. We will be blogging through What Would Jesus Deconstruct?,
by John D. Caputo. This is an enjoyable and challenge jaunt into
postmodernism, Derridian deconstruction and the gospel. Caputo has a
playful, sharp and ironic style that is sure to rub us the wrong way
and spark some great conversation.
There are 6 chapters and we will blog one chapter a week for six
weeks, starting July 13, so you have time to get the book and start
reading. Our bloggers will be:
Please drop a comment at the re-church blog
if you plan to read along with us. The blogs will be posted there and
we invite your comments, questions, challenges and insights. This will
be a much more enjoyable experience if you participate in the comments.
Please invite anyone you know that might be interested in this group and lets have some fun this summer reading together.
I'm quickly reading through Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier's founder of the L'Arche communities around the world. In the first chapter entitled "Loneliness." I ran across this amazing statement. He is talking about the movement of our lives from order to chaos and back to order again as a necessary and inevitably movement of human evolution or maturity. He is describing the unhealthy tendency to resist this movement and preserve order because we don't want to go to that uncertain place. This change always engenders loneliness but we try to stop this process at our peril. This statement contains vital lessons for anyone who leads or aspires to be a leader.
To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new.
Those who have the eyes to see this new order, as it arises, will often be considered too revolutionary, too modern, too liberal. Dictators everywhere have clamped down on movements for liberation; those who lead are always so certain that anarchy will arise if they do not govern with a firm hand. In reality, leaders are frightened of sharing or losing power. They too are frightened of change. They want to control everything. Those who see the coming of a new order will frequently be alone, persecuted (13-14).
------- For more about Jean Vanier and the L'Arche communities check out these resources:
There's a new book out from Pacific Press that I highly recommend. I had the chance to review the manuscript before it was published and write a blurb for it. Here's what I wrote:
Charles Scriven's The Promise of Peace will give hope to a new generation of Adventists who desperately long to re-appropriate their faith and traditions in a way that gives meaning to their lives and helps them shape a more peaceful and just world. I will be using this book with all my new members.
I just got my copy in the mail, but I plan to order a bunch more. After all, I have to make good on my promise!
My friend and intern on our church staff, Scott Arany, sent me this quote. It's perfection! This is exactly how I feel about my library, estimated at around 1,000 - 1,200 books (not 30,000!).
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are
encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large
personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates
visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore
Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?"
and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a
private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should
contain as much of what you do not know as your financial
means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow
you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as
you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves
will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the
rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
From the introduction to The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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