Two of my current heroes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, the six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel, and Michael Silverblatt, the brilliant and super-humane host of the public radio show “Bookworm,” recently sat down for a conversation that indirectly but powerfully cuts to the heart of why Root and Branch was created.
church
What Would Jesus Conceal and Carry?
I’ve been thinking about guns. Not the ones I wish I had instead of the stick-like things that emerge from my upper torso, but the ones that have been facilitating all the shootings that have been the subject of grisly news reports and impassioned Facebook pleas for gun control lately. Not just the shootings in recent months. Over half of the deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. in the last 50 years have happened in the past decade.
I have to make a confession: the killings reported in the news have not disturbed me enough. What I mean is that I don’t always feel shocked, the stories don’t necessarily stop me in my tracks or make me unable to go about my daily routine. These things happen, it’s horrible and tragic, but that’s just part of this sort of messed up but ultimately not-that-bad world. True, people are killed in Chicago all the time, some very close to where I live, but even that fact is crazily easy to ignore and distance myself from.
A Christmas Meditation and Invitation
Whether its because we’re excitedly making plans to be with family, or unexcitedly making plans to be with family, Christmas is a time when home is on the brain.
But Christmas is also an opportunity to home in on what it means to feel “at home,” because the Christmas story itself is really about the possibility of feeling at home in what can be a harsh world.
We all know about the couple on the brink of childbirth, far from home, being turned away because there was “no room.” Those glowing plastic nativity scenes don’t do a great job at conveying what it would mean to actually give birth in a stinking, drafty, dirty barn.
But the Christmas story makes the crazy proposition that this was the perfect place for sacredness to be born. Far from home, in a structure not meant for human shelter, a baby is born who will grow up to bring the radical message that everyone is worthy of being at home in this world.
It turns out that the way to be at home in this world is the same way this baby went on to live: by being unafraid to let go of the easy comforts of home, lovingly asking others to do the same, all in the service of giving the socially, spiritually, and literally homeless the news that they—we—deserve to be here just as much as anyone else.
We have been invited as a church to participate in a celebration of the traditional Mexican celebration of Las Posadas to remember both the timeless message of finding home in the midst of what can seem like an inhospitable world, but also to honor and bear witness to a place where people are at risk of losing their chance at having a decent, affordable place to call home. Lathrop Homes is one of the few remaining affordable housing complexes on the North Side of Chicago, and there is a proposal to convert much of it to more expensive housing. On Saturday, December 21, from 2-4pm, we will have the opportunity to stand (and walk) with other members of our community to support the radical, and utterly common sense proposal that everyone deserves a home.
And then we’ll have a party!
We’ll be meeting at the Cotter Boys and Girls Club at 2pm. Event is until 4. Learn more and sign up here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/226225527552782
And feel free to email neil@rootandbranchchurch.org with questions.
-Neil
Decline to Discovery
Martin Marty reflects on the decline of the “mainline Protestant” church:
Historians who mark their work with enduring attention to the signs of finitude, contingency and transience may not join the front rank of strategists for the once-mainline. But they can provide perspective and contribute to the search for wisdom in bewildering times—if they are not surprised, paralyzed or distracted by obsessive talk of mainline decline. Over my shoulder as I write is a framed phrase in Chinese calligraphy. It once was on the office wall of Charles Huggins, a Nobelist in science. It translates: “Discovery is our business.” True for the scientists, it also informs the vocation of humanists and theologians who are mining the past for the purposes of discovery.
I suspect that the time for lament is coming to an end. Church attendance is down, cultural influence is dwindling, buildings are crumbling. =’(. ITS A SIGN! So lets go from there and see what we can do.
For some reason tumblr is being whack and won’t let me hyperlink within the text. Here is the link below:
http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-08/declinism-discovery
Dude You Have No Audience
Post by R&B Co-founder Neil Ellingson:
Franklin Graham, son of famous evangelical mega-preacher Billy, was invited to speak at the Festival of Hope in Iceland, but he may be looking out into an empty auditorium after an ingenious mass protest of the event in which people claimed all the free online tickets with no intention of going. Graham claimed that God grieved the day Obama came out in favor of gay marriage; Iceland had the first lesbian head of government in history. He’s also scheduled to speak the day before Pride, which is a big deal in Iceland. He’s also said a ridiculous number of ridiculous things about Islam.
The Icelandic protest is kind of like the tactic employed by my hero, Jacob Isom, the guy who took the Quran from the conservative Christian activist who was going to burn it, except with maybe a bit more coordination and a sense of playfully serious mischief worthy of the land where more than half the population claims to believe in Huldufolk (elves or hidden people).
Source: International Business Times and PRI’s The World