Heated Discussions

Religion and Violence Webcast Begins Today

Trinity Wall Street's conference on Religion and Violence begins today. The speakers include James Carroll, Tariq Ramadan, Susannah Heschel and James Cone. Most of the presentations will be webcast live over the next three days.

I produced the interview videos on the site as well as the bio segments that will run before each speaker. During the edit sessions last week, I noticed that much of the stock photos we had of the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests etc., were pretty much interchangeable among the speakers segments. It made me wonder if anything new has happened within Progressive Christianity since 1968. Perhaps a topic for another day? Early tomorrow morning, I'm leaving for Florida to shoot the proceedings at a satellite location for the conference.

On this day when we remember a religious man of non-violence, take some time to watch the interviews online and the presentations as they come up. The players may be different today, but we still face the same challenges as we seek to live lives of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness.

Spending Time with the Order of St. Luke

Yesterday, Pam and I had the privilege of spending the day with a NJ chapter of the Order of St. Luke. The Order is a liturgical renewal group. This chapter was predominantly United Methodist. Since they were reading Gibbs & Bolger's book on Emerging Churches, they invited us to come and talk about Vision, how we do church, how we started etc..

As we sat in the beautiful sun room at St John the Baptist Retreat Center, I couldn't help but think how improbable this whole conversation would have once been. Here we were, two people in our forties leading a church that has a video screen and rock band, sitting with a group that was mostly a generation older than us whose passion is liturgy and the sacraments, finding commonality in one another. While many church subcultures are still mired in "worship wars" here we had come full circle to find ourselves beyond category.

We discovered how real the sacramental life is and I think they saw how liturgical we are. We had vibrant conversation, a shared meal and sacred mysterious worship together. It made we wonder if all the things we now seek to call "emerging" were just latently there all along.

Pam and I are thankful to have been invited to share time with these wonderful, gracious and wise people.