<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Does anyone else get the list in the digest form? If you look below you will find six to eight repeats of the original long post. Could I ask if people might do some deleting when responding?<div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div><br></div><div>Bud</div><div><br><div><div>On 20 Aug 2012, at 13:01, <a href="mailto:oe-request@lists.wedgeblade.net">oe-request@lists.wedgeblade.net</a> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Send OE mailing list submissions to<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><a href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net</a><br><br>To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br>or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>oe-request@lists.wedgeblade.net<br><br>You can reach the person managing the list at<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>oe-owner@lists.wedgeblade.net<br><br>When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific<br>than "Re: Contents of OE digest..."<br>Today's Topics:<br><br> 1. Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God (William Salmon)<br> 2. Re: Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God (Rod Rippel)<br> 3. Re: Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God (Jack Gilles)<br> 4. Re: Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God (David Walters)<br> 5. Re: From The Week: Hearing the voice of God (Del Morril)<br> 6. Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br> (LAURELCG@aol.com)<br> 7. Re: Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God<br> (Jaime R Vergara)<br> 8. Re: Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God (Jim Baumbach)<br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"William Salmon" <wsalmon@cox.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>[Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">19 August 2012 20:33:02 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Order Ecumenical Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>Jim and others--<br> On prayer, eh?<br> From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.<br> The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's; Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion," "The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life" we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.<br> The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?<br> Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet. Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.<br> Later!<br> Bill<br>PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be damned. wes<br>----- Original Message ----- From: "James Wiegel" <jfwiegel@yahoo.com><br>To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net>; "Order Ecumenical Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br>Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 10:02 AM<br>Subject: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br><br><br><blockquote type="cite">Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br><br>Hearing the voice of God<br><br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she came to a surprising realization.<br><br>On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man, got everyone settled and quiet.<br><br>“For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside.”<br><br>There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting lots of email about it.”<br><br>The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.<br><br>Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.<br><br>After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.<br><br>“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”<br><br>Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.<br><br>“I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more respect for the religious process...how private and precious the experience of God can be for people.”<br><br>She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”<br><br>Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a firm grasp on philosophy.<br><br>Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.” His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was.”<br><br>As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was “cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world. People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”<br><br>An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You can learn that?”<br><br>She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really batty dissertation on modern witches.”<br><br>The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced something directly.”<br><br>Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from your physical plane home to your ideal room.<br><br>What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”<br><br>In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus.<br><br>“I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them.”<br><br>The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.<br><br>This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.<br><br>It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.<br><br>While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about God.<br><br>“Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”<br><br>Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”<br><br>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University.<br><br><br><br>– Sent from The Week iPad edition –<br>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters<br>Download the app and try The Week for free: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus<br><br><br>Jim Wiegel<br>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<br><br>“One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” – Carl Jung<br><br>Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<br>ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<br>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<br>The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<br>Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012<br>See short video http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details.<br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br><br><br>-----<br>No virus found in this message.<br>Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<br>Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12<br></blockquote><br><br><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Rod Rippel" <rodrippel@cox.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">19 August 2012 21:10:56 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Order Ecumenical Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>Thanks Jim and Bill. It sounds like the old Positive Thinking of Norman Peale (circa. WW II)<br>Rod Rippel<br><br>-----Original Message----- From: William Salmon<br>Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 12:33 PM<br>To: Order Ecumenical Community<br>Subject: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God<br><br>Jim and others--<br> On prayer, eh?<br> From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this<br>topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical<br>pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So<br>much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.<br> The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's;<br>Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion,"<br>"The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life"<br>we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.<br> The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?<br> Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet.<br>Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS<br>GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE<br>IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.<br> Later!<br> Bill<br>PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be<br>damned. wes<br>----- Original Message ----- From: "James Wiegel" <jfwiegel@yahoo.com><br>To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net>; "Order Ecumenical<br>Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br>Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 10:02 AM<br>Subject: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br><br><br><blockquote type="cite">Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br><br>Hearing the voice of God<br><br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she came to a surprising realization.<br><br>On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man, got everyone settled and quiet.<br><br>“For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside.”<br><br>There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting lots of email about it.”<br><br>The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.<br><br>Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.<br><br>After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.<br><br>“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”<br><br>Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.<br><br>“I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more respect for the religious process...how private and precious the experience of God can be for people.”<br><br>She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”<br><br>Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a firm grasp on philosophy.<br><br>Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.” His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was.”<br><br>As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was “cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world. People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”<br><br>An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You can learn that?”<br><br>She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really batty dissertation on modern witches.”<br><br>The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced something directly.”<br><br>Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from your physical plane home to your ideal room.<br><br>What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”<br><br>In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus.<br><br>“I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them.”<br><br>The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.<br><br>This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.<br><br>It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.<br><br>While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about God.<br><br>“Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”<br><br>Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”<br><br>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University.<br><br><br><br>– Sent from The Week iPad edition –<br>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters<br>Download the app and try The Week for free: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus<br><br><br>Jim Wiegel<br>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<br><br>“One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” – Carl Jung<br><br>Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<br>ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<br>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<br>The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<br>Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012<br>See short video http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details.<br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br><br><br>-----<br>No virus found in this message.<br>Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<br>Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12<br><br></blockquote><br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net <br><br><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Jack Gilles <icabombay@igc.org><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">19 August 2012 21:12:47 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>Amen, brother Bill, Amen!<br><br>Jack<br>On Aug 19, 2012, at 2:33 PM, William Salmon wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">Jim and others--<br> On prayer, eh?<br> From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.<br> The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's; Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion," "The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life" we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.<br> The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?<br> Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet. Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.<br> Later!<br> Bill<br>PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be damned. wes<br>----- Original Message ----- From: "James Wiegel" <jfwiegel@yahoo.com><br>To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net>; "Order Ecumenical Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br>Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 10:02 AM<br>Subject: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br><br><br><blockquote type="cite">Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br><br>Hearing the voice of God<br><br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she came to a surprising realization.<br><br>On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man, got everyone settled and quiet.<br><br>“For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside.”<br><br>There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting lots of email about it.”<br><br>The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.<br><br>Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.<br><br>After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.<br><br>“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”<br><br>Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.<br><br>“I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more respect for the religious process...how private and precious the experience of God can be for people.”<br><br>She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”<br><br>Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a firm grasp on philosophy.<br><br>Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.” His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was.”<br><br>As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was “cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world. People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”<br><br>An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You can learn that?”<br><br>She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really batty dissertation on modern witches.”<br><br>The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced something directly.”<br><br>Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from your physical plane home to your ideal room.<br><br>What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”<br><br>In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus.<br><br>“I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them.”<br><br>The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.<br><br>This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.<br><br>It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.<br><br>While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about God.<br><br>“Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”<br><br>Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”<br><br>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University.<br><br><br><br>– Sent from The Week iPad edition –<br>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters<br>Download the app and try The Week for free: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus<br><br><br>Jim Wiegel<br>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<br><br>“One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” – Carl Jung<br><br>Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<br>ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<br>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<br>The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<br>Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012<br>See short video http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details.<br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br><br><br>-----<br>No virus found in this message.<br>Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<br>Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12<br></blockquote><br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br></blockquote><br><br><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"David Walters" <walters@alaweb.com><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">19 August 2012 22:08:42 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Order Ecumenical Community" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>Hold on there Rev. William Salmon. This article is about reflections of a anthropologist on her encounters with people of varied religious experiences. Non one in these groups nor the author ever had the experience of RS-1 or any of its kin. Nobody has told them that there is no three story universe or walked them thru the Tillich paper. <br><br>Tanya Luhrmann has attempted to document the experiences and practices of a faith community in California called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula. They may not worship pray like folks in your Methodist congregation in Salinas or what we used to do so early in morning in the Great Hall at Chicago: Centrum. One thing for sure, this CA congregation is definitely not your father's church. Nor is anything like Martin Luther or John Calvin's congregation.<br><br>The real question that needs to be asked is what can we learn from Tanya Luhrmann's book relative to how we can create new intentional communities that understand that life is good received, approved and open to the future. <br>-David Walters<br><br>--- wsalmon@cox.net wrote:<br>Jim and others--<br>On prayer, eh?<br>From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this <br>topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical <br>pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So <br>much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.<br>The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's; <br>Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion," <br>"The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life" <br>we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.<br>The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?<br>Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet. <br>Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS <br>GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE <br>IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.<br>Later!<br>Bill<br>PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be <br>damned. wes<br>----- Original Message ----- <br><br>From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br><blockquote type="cite">Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br>Hearing the voice of God<br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, <br>she came to a surprising realization.<br><br>On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the <br>Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room <br>above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the <br>conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the <br>heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness <br>of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem <br>of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man, <br>got everyone settled and quiet.<br><br>“For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” <br>Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking <br>coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come <br>inside.”<br><br>There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical <br>Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people <br>been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting <br>lots of email about it.”<br><br>The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American <br>Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. <br>On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, <br>who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at <br>a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.<br><br>Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and <br>raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home <br>prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them <br>directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and <br>“tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical <br>world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” <br>Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and <br>getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.<br><br>After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to <br>people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her <br>book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her <br>research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and <br>those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer <br>can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.<br><br>“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the <br>human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say <br>something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what <br>that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to <br>understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able <br>to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”<br><br>Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to <br>use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by <br>holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of <br>chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to <br>Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and <br>loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use <br>weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to <br>sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more <br>unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the <br>external voice of God.<br><br>“I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d <br>expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more <br>respect for the religious process...how private and precious the <br>experience of God can be for people.”<br><br>She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume <br>to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of <br>this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”<br><br>Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She <br>describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She <br>could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a <br>firm grasp on philosophy.<br><br>Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and <br>acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever <br>since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the <br>park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.” <br>His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form <br>Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian <br>Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a <br>psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban <br>New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a <br>shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on <br>the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this <br>background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down <br>on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no <br>dimension, but on who God was.”<br><br>As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many <br>ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was <br>“cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been <br>intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world. <br>People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their <br>logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to <br>folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come <br>to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”<br><br>An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the <br>University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard <br>bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you <br>how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You <br>can learn that?”<br><br>She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she <br>could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the <br>most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really <br>batty dissertation on modern witches.”<br><br>The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more <br>interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the <br>practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does <br>happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced <br>something directly.”<br><br>Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by <br>joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 <br>minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, <br>following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from <br>your physical plane home to your ideal room.<br><br>What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her <br>internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. <br>She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some <br>pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids <br>appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been <br>there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but <br>the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if <br>something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural <br>experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques <br>in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”<br><br>In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the <br>mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One <br>listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while <br>another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar <br>to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to <br>see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with <br>Jesus.<br><br>“I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid <br>mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They <br>used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual <br>attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, <br>they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered <br>how real that experience became for them.”<br><br>The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read <br>and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern <br>history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of <br>the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. <br>She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative <br>pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.<br><br>This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about <br>how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a <br>little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that <br>conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.<br><br>It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going <br>to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the <br>mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches <br>similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of <br>Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a <br>personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s <br>fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in <br>which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.<br><br>While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in <br>interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever <br>engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or <br>evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular <br>liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very <br>differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching <br>their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and <br>health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about <br>God.<br><br>“Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday <br>people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad <br>outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately <br>about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and <br>should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem <br>with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”<br><br>Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than <br>many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as <br>political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, <br>they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They <br>should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the <br>transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”<br><br>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford <br>Alumni Association, Stanford University.<br><br><br><br>– Sent from The Week iPad edition –<br>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters<br>Download the app and try The Week for free: <br>http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus<br><br><br>Jim Wiegel<br>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<br><br>“One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s <br>morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in <br>the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become <br>a lie.” – Carl Jung<br><br>Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<br>ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<br>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<br>The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<br>Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation <br>program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, <br>2012<br>See short video http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website <br>for further details.<br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br><br><br>-----<br>No virus found in this message.<br>Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<br>Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12<br><br></blockquote><br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br><br><br><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Del Morril" <delhmor@wamail.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">20 August 2012 00:53:02 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"'Order Ecumenical Community'" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>Wow & Wow! This comes at a really good time for me, who tends to respond,<br>when asked "what are you" (religiously, that is), "I guess I'm a Pentecostal<br>Methodist Hindu". Actually, I probably could add a couple of other things<br>where one "fills in the blanks" depending upon what day I'm thinking about<br>how I reconcile a "personal god" over against the realities of life around<br>this world, and my own personal experiences in the past, many of which can't<br>be explained from any rational viewpoint. This writer is amazing, coming<br>from such an interesting perspective, and fresh and open angle. I do thank<br>you, Jim, for sharing it with us.<br>Del<br><br><br><br>-----Original Message-----<br>From: oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>[mailto:oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of James Wiegel<br>Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 8:02 AM<br>To: Colleague Dialogue; Order Ecumenical Community<br>Subject: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God<br><br>Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br><br>Hearing the voice of God <br><br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she<br>came to a surprising realization. <br><br><br><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">LAURELCG@aol.com<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">20 August 2012 01:30:33 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net, Oe@wedgeblade.net<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 9.00.8112.16448">
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; " id="role_body" bottommargin="7" leftmargin="7" rightmargin="7" topmargin="7"><font id="role_document" size="2" face="Arial">
<div>Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or
sorts.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>After Fred died (1/31/08), I decided to simplify my life by going to church
with my mother. It was not easy to return to the fundamentalist Church of Christ
that I grew up in, but it was easier than trying to juggle dropping her off,
going to the Presbyterian church where I was a member, than picking her
up.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion
weekly and the <u>very</u> sweet people in the congregation. I couldn't stand
the theology, but was able to tune out the sermon and either meditate or read
scripture during that time. I was listed as a visitor in the bulletin every week
for at least 3 years.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>After Mother died in March, a friend and fellow D.Min. from
University of Creation Spirituality, came for Mother's memorial service,
which was on a Sunday afternoon. Mia, my friend, and I went to worship that
morning at the church of Christ. (We were borrowing chairs for the service
at Mother's apartment building later.) I was a little apprehensive. Mia
grew up in a wealthy Episcopalian family in Philadelphia, had never been to a
fundamentalist church. This would be very strange for her. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>After worship, she turned to me, her face glowing and said, "The energy
here was so sweet that I had a major breakthrough on an issue I've been
struggling with internally."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>That wouldn't have happened if she'd pre-judged it all a
"crock" because it wasn't post-modern theology. Open your heart just a little,
Wes. Go to your own experience of deep spirituality, not some chart from 40
years ago, if you want to understand why the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and
other congregations like it are bursting at the seams.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>My two cents:)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Grace and peace,</div>
<div>Jann McGuire</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
jfwiegel@yahoo.com writes:</div>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><font style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" size="2" face="Arial">Seems
quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<br><br>Hearing the voice of
God <br><br>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill
Wolfson, she came to a surprising realization. <br><br>On a Sunday evening in
Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of
the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before
the occasion got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix
of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S.
Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car
trouble, the problem of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal,
open-faced man, got everyone settled and quiet. <br><br>“For those of you who
haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” Van Riesen began
cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee, and talking.
Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside.” <br><br>There was a
burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience.
Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people been asking you about
the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting lots of email about it.”
<br><br>The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On
the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who
spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a
Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well. <br><br>Luhrmann
attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their
hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups
whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out,
participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as an
outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God
as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with
God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job
choice to what shampoo to buy. <br><br>After being introduced jokingly by Van
Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as
Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence
of God. Rather, her research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize
our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice
of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.
<br><br>“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the
human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something
about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person is
experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How
are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible
being in an environment of skepticism?” <br><br>Luhrmann’s provocative theory
is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than
they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in
their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with
their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and
imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their
thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church
encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or
more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these
internal cues as the external voice of God. <br><br>“I came in with a set of
stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d expect from someone in the
academy,” she said. “I came out with more respect for the religious
process...how private and precious the experience of God can be for people.”
<br><br>She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not
presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process
of this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.” <br><br>Luhrmann’s
work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She describes
herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She could easily add
that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a firm grasp on
philosophy. <br><br>Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the
book’s preface and acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking
about God ever since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked
across the park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God
was.” His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form
Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist
whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The
eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey
neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a
gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such
as turning on light switches. “I came from this background where I knew smart,
good people whom I loved, but who came down on very different positions on the
existence of God—not only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was.”
<br><br>As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in
many ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was
“cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been
intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world.
People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their logical
sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was
just so curious about people and about the way they come to hold their
beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.” <br><br>An academic
mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago,
but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard bookstore sent her in a
different direction. “It was a book that told you how to be a witch,” she
recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You can learn that?” <br><br>She
headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she could go
“hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the most part
educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really batty
dissertation on modern witches.” <br><br>The goal was not to rule on the
validity of magic. Luhrmann was more interested in the magical process, in
what happened in the minds of the practitioners. “I was really taken by my
observation that something does happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about
it, but they experienced something directly.” <br><br>Luhrmann did “what
anthropologists do” and participated in their world by joining their groups,
reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 minutes a day for nine
months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, following instructions such
as: Build up in imagination a journey from your physical plane home to your
ideal room. <br><br>What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training
worked. Her internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and
alert. She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done
some pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids
appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been
there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but the
vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if something
about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural experiences
more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques in experiential
evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.” <br><br>In 2007, to
better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the mind, Luhrmann
randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One listened on iPods for
30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while another participated in a
more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to the prayer style of
Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch God in
the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus. <br><br>“I found that after
a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid mental imagery than
those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They used mental imagery more
readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and they reported more
unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience
more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them.”
<br><br>The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she
read and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern
history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of the
1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. She
talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative pull, people
whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined. <br><br>This was an
entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how people who
talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a little more
measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that conservative evangelicals
are having on the country’s political landscape. <br><br>It is not a small
impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to churches, half have
returned to religious practices, but not to the mainstream services of their
childhood. They have flocked to churches similar to the Vineyard. A recent
study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that the main reason they
practice religion was “to forge a personal relationship with God.” Some call
this movement the country’s fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras
in American history in which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.
<br><br>While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up
in interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever
engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or
evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular liberals
are at such odds politically because they think about life very differently.
If political progressives really want to stop scratching their heads over why
evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and health-care reform, they
need to understand how evangelicals think about God. <br><br>“Secular liberals
want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the
way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes,” she says. “When
evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they
are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they
are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in
when people fall short.” <br><br>Hanging out with believers—whom she found
“smarter and more varied than many liberals realize”—has given her some
insight that could double as political advice. “If Democrats want to reach
more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that
evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming
to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”
<br><br>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by
Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University. <br><br><br><br>– Sent from
The Week iPad edition – <br>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters
<br>Download the app and try The Week for free:
http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus <br><br><br>Jim
Wiegel<br>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<br><br>“One cannot live in the afternoon of life
according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning
will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true
will at evening have become a lie.” – Carl Jung<br><br>Partners in
Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<br>ToP Facilitation
Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<br>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<br>The AZ
Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<br>Facilitation
Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available
in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012 <br>See short video
http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further
details.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Dialogue
mailing
list<br>Dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net<br></font></blockquote></div></font></div><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Jaime R Vergara <svesjaime@aol.com><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">20 August 2012 07:25:24 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">oe@lists.wedgeblade.net<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><font size="4" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; ">Anthropologist, my foot. Looks more to me like a voyeur justifying a research paper.</font>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4">David, one does not need to be in RS-I grad to understand life as it comes. I knew my uniqueness (received in the bosom of Abraham) because a gynecologist bothered to explain to me that out of 200 million sperms from my father to my mother, only one made it inside the ovum to join in the conception process. One out of 200 million chances beat any casino odds on the impossible side. </font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4">Not only that, the ovum did not have to allow the first sperm that reached its wall entry. It "chose" one out of possible 50k that made the journey. Now, that is an incredible act of freedom. I do not know what the criteria was, but I was at once my freedom and chosen-ness. Sounds like the reality that the metaphor of holy spirit is pointing to?</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Together, ovum and sperm, cooperatively and collaboratively, created a bone and muscle structure, a digestive and respiratory system, and other complex processes, not the least of which, is the neural system that is way beyond anything US-Japan-German technology can put together. That took nine months. Who said I was not creative? Sounds to me like the consciousness of those who understood themselves to be Team <i>Ecclesia, </i>in the manner of the <i>κριστοσ, </i>before we started singing the glories to JC Superstar.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Bill's point is about the reality in life that the word and practice of 'prayer' illuminates. Unless the evangelical group in prayer refers to "speaking to God" as "speaking to the way life is, YHWH," then we really do not care if the group happens to care for each other, build a community, and serve the world. Even Aryans with swastikas can do that!</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">My point is, I knew this before I heard of RS-I.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">No offense to Tanya Luhrman, but as delightfully light-hearted curmudgeon Bill phrases it, the treatment of this subject is a crock.<br>
</font></font><br>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; clear: both; ">j'aime la vie</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; clear: both; "><font size="4">aka, The Reverend Jaime R. Vergara, MTh, self-defrocked,</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; clear: both; "><font size="4">in China</font></div>
<br>
<br>
<div style="font-family: helvetica, arial; font-size: 10pt; ">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: David Walters <walters@alaweb.com><br>
To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br>
Sent: Mon, Aug 20, 2012 5:09 am<br>
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God<br>
<br>
<div id="AOLMsgPart_0_4014a5d9-f32b-4e4e-8576-60d60cc8f0ea" style="margin: 0px; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<pre style="font-size: 9pt;"><tt>Hold on there Rev. William Salmon. This article is about reflections of a
anthropologist on her encounters with people of varied religious experiences.
Non one in these groups nor the author ever had the experience of RS-1 or any of
its kin. Nobody has told them that there is no three story universe or walked
them thru the Tillich paper.
Tanya Luhrmann has attempted to document the experiences and practices of a
faith community in California called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the
Peninsula. They may not worship pray like folks in your Methodist congregation
in Salinas or what we used to do so early in morning in the Great Hall at
Chicago: Centrum. One thing for sure, this CA congregation is definitely not
your father's church. Nor is anything like Martin Luther or John Calvin's
congregation.
The real question that needs to be asked is what can we learn from Tanya
Luhrmann's book relative to how we can create new intentional communities that
understand that life is good received, approved and open to the future.
-David Walters
--- <a href="mailto:wsalmon@cox.net">wsalmon@cox.net</a> wrote:
Jim and others--
On prayer, eh?
>From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this
topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical
pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So
much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.
The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's;
Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion,"
"The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life"
we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.
The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?
Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet.
Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS
GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE
IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.
Later!
Bill
PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be
damned. wes
----- Original Message -----
>From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
> Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?
> Hearing the voice of God
> When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson,
> she came to a surprising realization.
>
> On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the
> Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room
> above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the
> conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the
> heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness
> of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem
> of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man,
> got everyone settled and quiet.
>
> “For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,”
> Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking
> coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come
> inside.”
>
> There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical
> Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people
> been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting
> lots of email about it.”
>
> The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
> Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room.
> On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann,
> who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at
> a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.
>
> Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and
> raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home
> prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them
> directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and
> “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical
> world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.”
> Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and
> getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.
>
> After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to
> people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her
> book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her
> research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and
> those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer
> can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.
>
> “I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the
> human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say
> something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what
> that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to
> understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able
> to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”
>
> Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to
> use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by
> holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of
> chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to
> Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and
> loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use
> weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to
> sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more
> unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the
> external voice of God.
>
> “I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d
> expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more
> respect for the religious process...how private and precious the
> experience of God can be for people.”
>
> She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume
> to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of
> this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”
>
> Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She
> describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She
> could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a
> firm grasp on philosophy.
>
> Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and
> acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever
> since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the
> park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.”
> His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form
> Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian
> Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a
> psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban
> New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a
> shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on
> the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this
> background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down
> on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no
> dimension, but on who God was.”
>
> As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many
> ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was
> “cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been
> intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world.
> People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their
> logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to
> folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come
> to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
>
> An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the
> University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard
> bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you
> how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You
> can learn that?”
>
> She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she
> could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the
> most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really
> batty dissertation on modern witches.”
>
> The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more
> interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the
> practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does
> happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced
> something directly.”
>
> Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by
> joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30
> minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye,
> following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from
> your physical plane home to your ideal room.
>
> What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her
> internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert.
> She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some
> pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids
> appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been
> there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but
> the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if
> something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural
> experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques
> in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”
>
> In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the
> mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One
> listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while
> another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar
> to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to
> see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with
> Jesus.
>
> “I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid
> mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They
> used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual
> attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short,
> they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered
> how real that experience became for them.”
>
> The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read
> and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern
> history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of
> the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state.
> She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative
> pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.
>
> This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about
> how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a
> little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that
> conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.
>
> It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going
> to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the
> mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches
> similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of
> Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a
> personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s
> fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in
> which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.
>
> While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in
> interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever
> engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or
> evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular
> liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very
> differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching
> their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and
> health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about
> God.
>
> “Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday
> people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad
> outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately
> about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and
> should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem
> with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”
>
> Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than
> many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as
> political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters,
> they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They
> should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the
> transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”
>
> Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford
> Alumni Association, Stanford University.
>
>
>
> – Sent from The Week iPad edition –
> All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters
> Download the app and try The Week for free:
> <a href="http://itunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus" target="_blank">http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus</a>
>
>
> Jim Wiegel
> <a href="mailto:Jfwiegel@yahoo.com">Jfwiegel@yahoo.com</a>
>
> “One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s
> morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in
> the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become
> a lie.” – Carl Jung
>
> Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:
> ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012
> ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012
> The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012
> Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation
> program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16,
> 2012
> See short video <a href="http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55" target="_blank">http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55</a> and website
> for further details.
> _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
> <a href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
> <a href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - <a href="http://www.avg.com/" target="_blank">www.avg.com</a>
> Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12
>
_______________________________________________
OE mailing list
<a href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
<a href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
_______________________________________________
OE mailing list
<a href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
<a href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
</tt></pre>
</div>
<!-- end of AOLMsgPart_0_4014a5d9-f32b-4e4e-8576-60d60cc8f0ea -->
</div>
</div>
</font><br><br><br><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Jim Baumbach <wtw0bl@new.rr.com><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">20 August 2012 12:59:17 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net><br></span></div><br><br>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Oh Jaime, there is something we should clarify about the probability
of your being you! You were in everyone of those 200 million sperm
that reached that one egg. You may have been a girl depending on
which part of you got there but you would have been you
nevertheless. Now if there was more than one egg being impregnated
then those others might look and act like you much as twins do but
you would be in two different places. So you were you unless your
daddy was someone else or your mommy was...<br>
<br>
We like to talk about winning the lottery by being "chosen" but that
probability was "1" that you would be here no matter which one of
those wiggly things migrated from here to there.<br>
<br>
As to hearing the voice of god--I worry that whoever hears it may be
up to radical activities. The Manson Family, People's Temple (Jim
Jones), Father Divine (who actually claimed to be God), as well as
some of the recent mass murders that have occurred all claimed to
have heard the voice of God. I'm sure that not everybody who claims
to hear the voice of God is cruel and unusual but I wouldn't bet the
farm on it!<br>
<br>
Jim Baumbach<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 8/20/2012 1:25 AM, Jaime R Vergara
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:8CF4CB3B7636053-17A4-8C3A@Webmail-m105.sysops.aol.com" type="cite"><font face="Times New Roman, Times,
serif" size="4"><font style="" size="4">Anthropologist, my foot.
Looks more to me like a voyeur justifying a research paper.</font>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4">David, one does not need to be in RS-I
grad to understand life as it comes. I knew my uniqueness
(received in the bosom of Abraham) because a gynecologist
bothered to explain to me that out of 200 million sperms
from my father to my mother, only one made it inside the
ovum to join in the conception process. One out of 200
million chances beat any casino odds on the impossible side.
</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4">Not only that, the ovum did not have
to allow the first sperm that reached its wall entry. It
"chose" one out of possible 50k that made the journey. Now,
that is an incredible act of freedom. I do not know what
the criteria was, but I was at once my freedom and
chosen-ness. Sounds like the reality that the metaphor of
holy spirit is pointing to?</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; "><font size="4"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Together,
ovum and sperm, cooperatively and collaboratively, created
a bone and muscle structure, a digestive and respiratory
system, and other complex processes, not the least of
which, is the neural system that is way beyond anything
US-Japan-German technology can put together. That took
nine months. Who said I was not creative? Sounds to me
like the consciousness of those who understood themselves
to be Team <i>Ecclesia, </i>in the manner of the <i>κριστοσ,
</i>before we started singing the glories to JC Superstar.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Bill's
point is about the reality in life that the word and
practice of 'prayer' illuminates. Unless the evangelical
group in prayer refers to "speaking to God" as "speaking
to the way life is, YHWH," then we really do not care if
the group happens to care for each other, build a
community, and serve the world. Even Aryans with
swastikas can do that!</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">My
point is, I knew this before I heard of RS-I.</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></font></div>
<div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">No
offense to Tanya Luhrman, but as delightfully
light-hearted curmudgeon Bill phrases it, the treatment of
this subject is a crock.<br>
</font></font><br>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; clear: both; ">j'aime la vie</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; clear: both; "><font size="4">aka, The
Reverend Jaime R. Vergara, MTh, self-defrocked,</font></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; clear: both; "><font size="4">in China</font></div>
<br>
<br>
<div style="font-family: helvetica, arial; font-size: 10pt; ">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: David Walters <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:walters@alaweb.com"><walters@alaweb.com></a><br>
To: Order Ecumenical Community
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net"><oe@lists.wedgeblade.net></a><br>
Sent: Mon, Aug 20, 2012 5:09 am<br>
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the
voice of God<br>
<br>
<div id="AOLMsgPart_0_4014a5d9-f32b-4e4e-8576-60d60cc8f0ea" style="margin: 0px; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
<pre style="font-size: 9pt;"><tt>Hold on there Rev. William Salmon. This article is about reflections of a
anthropologist on her encounters with people of varied religious experiences.
Non one in these groups nor the author ever had the experience of RS-1 or any of
its kin. Nobody has told them that there is no three story universe or walked
them thru the Tillich paper.
Tanya Luhrmann has attempted to document the experiences and practices of a
faith community in California called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the
Peninsula. They may not worship pray like folks in your Methodist congregation
in Salinas or what we used to do so early in morning in the Great Hall at
Chicago: Centrum. One thing for sure, this CA congregation is definitely not
your father's church. Nor is anything like Martin Luther or John Calvin's
congregation.
The real question that needs to be asked is what can we learn from Tanya
Luhrmann's book relative to how we can create new intentional communities that
understand that life is good received, approved and open to the future.
-David Walters
--- <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:wsalmon@cox.net">wsalmon@cox.net</a> wrote:
Jim and others--
On prayer, eh?
>From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this
topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical
pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So
much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.
The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's;
Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion,"
"The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life"
we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.
The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?
Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet.
Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS
GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE
IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.
Later!
Bill
PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be
damned. wes
----- Original Message -----
>From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
> Seems quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?
> Hearing the voice of God
> When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson,
> she came to a surprising realization.
>
> On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the
> Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room
> above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the
> conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the
> heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness
> of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone’s car trouble, the problem
> of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man,
> got everyone settled and quiet.
>
> “For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,”
> Van Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking
> coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come
> inside.”
>
> There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical
> Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people
> been asking you about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting
> lots of email about it.”
>
> The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
> Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room.
> On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann,
> who spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at
> a Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well.
>
> Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and
> raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home
> prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them
> directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and
> “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical
> world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.”
> Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and
> getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.
>
> After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to
> people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her
> book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her
> research focuses on “theory of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and
> those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer
> can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.
>
> “I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the
> human mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say
> something about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what
> that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to
> understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able
> to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”
>
> Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to
> use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by
> holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of
> chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to
> Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and
> loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use
> weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to
> sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more
> unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the
> external voice of God.
>
> “I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d
> expect from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more
> respect for the religious process...how private and precious the
> experience of God can be for people.”
>
> She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume
> to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of
> this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.”
>
> Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She
> describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She
> could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a
> firm grasp on philosophy.
>
> Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and
> acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever
> since her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the
> park with me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.”
> His daughter—Luhrmann’s mother—took her children to the more free-form
> Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s paternal grandfather was a Christian
> Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s father—became a medical doctor, a
> psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban
> New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a
> shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with activities that are restricted on
> the Sabbath, such as turning on light switches. “I came from this
> background where I knew smart, good people whom I loved, but who came down
> on very different positions on the existence of God—not only on the yes-no
> dimension, but on who God was.”
>
> As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many
> ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was
> “cheating” when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been
> intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world.
> People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their
> logical sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to
> folklore....I was just so curious about people and about the way they come
> to hold their beliefs—even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
>
> An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the
> University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard
> bookstore sent her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you
> how to be a witch,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You
> can learn that?”
>
> She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she
> could go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the
> most part educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really
> batty dissertation on modern witches.”
>
> The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more
> interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the
> practitioners. “I was really taken by my observation that something does
> happen. I didn’t quite know how to think about it, but they experienced
> something directly.”
>
> Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by
> joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30
> minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye,
> following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from
> your physical plane home to your ideal room.
>
> What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her
> internal awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert.
> She had her own supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some
> pleasurable and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids
> appeared outside her window and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been
> there in the flesh? I thought not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but
> the vivid, singular experience led her to wonder “for many years if
> something about the practice associated with magic made these supernatural
> experiences more common. When I encountered the same spiritual techniques
> in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was determined to find out.”
>
> In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the
> mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One
> listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while
> another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar
> to the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to
> see, hear, and touch God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with
> Jesus.
>
> “I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid
> mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They
> used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual
> attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short,
> they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered
> how real that experience became for them.”
>
> The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read
> and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern
> history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of
> the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state.
> She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative
> pull, people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined.
>
> This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about
> how people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a
> little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that
> conservative evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape.
>
> It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going
> to churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the
> mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches
> similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of
> Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was “to forge a
> personal relationship with God.” Some call this movement the country’s
> fourth Great Awakening—a reference to other eras in American history in
> which religious fervor shaped the national agenda.
>
> While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in
> interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever
> engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or
> evolution.” Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular
> liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very
> differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching
> their heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and
> health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about
> God.
>
> “Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday
> people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad
> outcomes,” she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately
> about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and
> should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem
> with government is that it steps in when people fall short.”
>
> Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than
> many liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as
> political advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters,
> they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They
> should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the
> transformational journey that any choice will take us on.”
>
> Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford
> Alumni Association, Stanford University.
>
>
>
> – Sent from The Week iPad edition –
> All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters
> Download the app and try The Week for free:
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://itunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus" target="_blank">http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus</a>
>
>
> Jim Wiegel
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:Jfwiegel@yahoo.com">Jfwiegel@yahoo.com</a>
>
> “One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s
> morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in
> the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become
> a lie.” – Carl Jung
>
> Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:
> ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012
> ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012
> The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012
> Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation
> program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16,
> 2012
> See short video <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55" target="_blank">http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55</a> and website
> for further details.
> _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.avg.com/" target="_blank">www.avg.com</a>
> Version: 2012.0.2197 / Virus Database: 2437/5208 - Release Date: 08/18/12
>
_______________________________________________
OE mailing list
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
_______________________________________________
OE mailing list
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net" target="_blank">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
</tt></pre>
</div>
<!-- end of AOLMsgPart_0_4014a5d9-f32b-4e4e-8576-60d60cc8f0ea -->
</div>
</div>
</font>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<br>
<pre wrap="">_______________________________________________
OE mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net">OE@lists.wedgeblade.net</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net">http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div>
<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>OE mailing list<br>OE@lists.wedgeblade.net<br>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>