August 2012 - Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

8/23/12, Spong: On Climbing Mountains at Age 81
by Ellie Stock 23 Aug '12

23 Aug '12

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR On Climbing Mountains at Age 81 For the past twelve years, my wife Christine and I have vacationed in the mountains of Western North Carolina, an area that once was a vital part of my childhood. We rent a house for a week, sometimes two, in the community around the High Hampton Inn and Golf Club. Neither of us plays golf so the primary activity of our time there is hiking. We climb a mountain almost every day. Within a very short distance, there are mountain trails to such peaks as Rock Mountain, Chimney Top, Whiteside Mountain (on which is located a large rock outcrop known as the Devil’s Courthouse) and Yellow Mountain. Rock Mountain and Chimney Top are our favorites. They rise to heights near 4600 feet. Rock Mountain can be approached from two sides. One is a gradual, but longer ascent to reach the spectacular views it offers at the top. The other side is a more vigorous climb across rock outcroppings where climbers are aided in four places by wire ropes that assist the navigation upward or downward, depending on which way one is going. Chimney Top is the more vigorous climb and there is only one way to reach the top with the last hundred yards being the scaling of a solid rock surface. We have climbed these mountains two or three times on each visit to this lovely place in the past and we wonder each year whether we are physically capable of making it to the top one more time. We passed the test last year when I was only 80. This year we hoped to pass the test at 81! The first day, we decided on a practice run. We would go up Rock Mountain from its base on the gradual incline side and return the same way. This would begin to get our mountain legs into readiness for the harder climbs to come. So armed with water, boots, hiking sticks and compact disc players on which we were both listening to (if you can believe it) the biography of Karl Rove entitled, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, we set out to make our first journey to the top of Rock Mountain. An hour and a half later, we sat on the crest at the top and surveyed the beauty of this area for miles in each direction. We met other hikers at the top, as we usually do, and exchanged pleasantries while enjoying our accomplishment for only about fifteen minutes. Then we gathered ourselves together and made the descent the same way we had come without any incidents. We had accomplished the first step. Pleased with ourselves, we planned to extend our hike on the next day. On our second day we walked from the High Hampton Inn to the foot of Rock Mountain, a trek that added about twenty minutes to our hiking time before we actually reached the mountain itself. We then began our ascent from the same gradually rising side. On this day, however, our plan was to return to the Inn by descending the much steeper, if slightly shorter, side. This obviously meant a more strenuous hike, but it was the next step in our projected climbing program. The trip up was beautiful and the ascent was smooth. We made it easily and within two hours. Again at the top we met other hikers, especially an attractive young couple and their three boys from Southwest Florida, near Clearwater. Catching Christine’s English accent the wife noted that her grandmother had come from England and, as it turned out, from a place near Christine’s childhood home, so they shared English stories. The family left and we watched admiringly as their youth allowed them to move at a much faster pace than we could safely manage. The first part of the descent was fairly easy until we approached the first of the four rock areas where those wire ropes were installed to help climbers navigate the rock slabs. When we were about five minutes from this initial testing area the sky turned quickly and ominously dark and out of that sky lightning flashed, thunder roared and a veritable deluge of water began to fall. This pelting rain made the rocks slippery and turned our climbing paths into veritable rivulets of water. We navigated carefully the first two difficult sloping rock areas; sometimes using our seats for locomotion as the wet surfaces were dangerously slick, all the while being practically drowned with heavy, heavy rain. During all this, the voice of Karl Rove kept extolling the virtues of the Bush Administration and Rove’s role in making sure that no mistakes were ever made during the eight years of the Bush presidency! The descent became increasingly difficult and dangerous. When we reached the third and most difficult challenge we were about to decide that it would be best just to sit in the woods, absorb the rain and wait for it to cease before going on. We would have had to wait a long time because this particular storm was destined to rage for almost two hours. To our surprise we then spotted another couple making their way up the mountain and we prepared to stand aside to let them pass, even as we wondered at their sanity in going to the top in this storm. The couple turned out to be the one we had met earlier at the top of Rock Mountain. They were coming back, not to make a second ascent, but because they thought we might need some help. We did. There was no let-up in the torrential rain and I had to remove my glasses because the rain had made seeing through them impossible. The Karl Rove disc I was reading had come to an end and I did not replace it. My concentration had to be on navigating the path down. At this third rock formation, where one of the wire ropes was installed, we discovered that the wire was broken. Aided by our angels of mercy and with the help of our walking sticks, trees to whose branches we could cling and roots on which to plant our feet we slid down these rocks as if we were on a sliding board. Three down, we then moved on to conquer the fourth obstacle. We made it, while the relentless rain continued. When we finally got to the “T” in the trail where one path goes up Rock Mountain and the other goes up to Chimney Top, we bade our rescuers farewell, confidant that we could negotiate the remaining hour or so back to the Inn. This homeward path has hills and valleys, but no treacherous steep rock formations to master. We were now only walking in ankle deep water that was rushing down from the mountains with a relentless fury. On this part of the journey, we once again met other hikers going up, but this time equipped with appropriate yellow slickers. It was so unusual in this weather that we enquired of them as to their purpose or even whether they had lost their minds! They turned out to be workers from the local emergency rescue squad responding to a report that a man at the crest of Chimney Top had suffered a heart attack. Helicopters could not come to his rescue in this rain so these emergency workers were going up by foot, leaving their ambulance and most of their equipment at the foot of the mountain. I had to admire their commitment to the rescue process even though I could not imagine a worse place or a worse climate in which to suffer a heart attack. We continued our walk, looking like two drowned rats until finally we were back at the Inn. We then walked to our car, which we now discovered was parked in water half-way up the side of the tires. It nonetheless worked and soon we were back at our cottage. Neither of us could remember ever having been so thoroughly drenched. We literally peeled our wet clothes off, toweled ourselves dry, redressed in fresh clothing , put on new shoes and drove back to the Inn for lunch, which fortunately for us they served until 2:30 p.m., and where we saw our “angels of mercy” again. Now we discovered their names, Ann and Clark Lea, and met other members of their large family gathering. We also discovered they were part of our “tribe,” that is, they were Episcopalians! It is a small world. We were then greeted with the startling and sad news that the man with the heart attack had died. Even more surprising and disturbing we discovered that he was only 35 years old and with no previous health concerns. He was on vacation with his wife and two young children. His wife had spent that morning in the spa and his children had been in the children’s program having a wonderful time. Life is strange and uneven. We had made it safely home because of a younger couple who came back up the mountain to assist us. The heart attack victim had not survived even though the rescue squad had braved the elements to climb Chimney Top in an heroic effort to save him. Both of these actions were random acts of kindness performed by people who had been complete strangers up until that very moment. Each of them made us aware of just how deeply interdependent all human life really is. It was a new context in which to hear the biblical question that the book of Genesis suggests that Cain framed when God asked him about the whereabouts of his brother Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Christine and I both realized anew that the essence of humanity is that we are responsible to and for one another. Our experience in that storm on Rock Mountain had made this lesson indelible. Perhaps it was the reading of Karl Rove’s book that made me begin to yearn for a less selfish, more compassionate approach to this nation’s common problems on the part of the Congress of the United States. We are one people, one nation and in that one nation we will rise or fall together. We are the keepers of the dream that makes brothers and sisters of us all. The next day, our boots being too wet to put on again, we climbed Whiteside Mountain instead of those a little closer. It is an easier path and sneakers were sufficient for the purpose. Chimney Top remained for the end of the week. What a way to live at age 81! (Please note that Christine is only 73). ~John Shelby Spong P.S. Chimney Top was conquered two days later and a photograph of us at the top as proof of this accomplishment will adorn our 2012 Christmas card! Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Dr. Gabriel Andrade of the University del Zulia in Venezuela writes: Question: Can you tell me the precise moment when, according to you, the Church began to twist the original message and interpreted literally the tales of miracles, resurrections, etc? Answer: Dear Dr. Andrade, No, and neither can anyone else! We see the changes beginning in the New Testament. There is a vast difference between Paul and the gospels; a vast difference between the first gospel, Mark, and the last gospel, John. I‘m not sure Paul would have been able to say the Nicene Creed with integrity. Christianity did not separate itself from Judaism until between 50-60 years after the crucifixion. Miracles do not attach themselves to Jesus until the 8th decade. Paul knew of no miracles. The miraculous birth of Jesus did not enter the tradition until the 9th decade. The story of the ascension of Jesus was a 10th decade addition to the story. It would take hours and even books to put your question into a context where we could begin to address it competently. I hope we might have the opportunity to meet and discuss this more thoroughly at some point. Thank you for writing. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2012 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at our website. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 4916 Pt Fosdick Dr, NW #148 Gig Harbor, WA 98335 Add us to your address book

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response to Jim Weigel
by Bud Tillinghast 22 Aug '12

22 Aug '12

Yes, Jim, Kath is my wife and produces the blog 'readingmater' (sp, 'mater' is, of course, Latin for mother, her user name.) http://readingmater.wordpress.com/author/readingmater/ And thanks for shortening long emails by deleting old posts. . Bud On 22 Aug 2012, at 18:10, dialogue-request(a)lists.wedgeblade.net wrote: > From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com> > Subject: Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God > Date: 22 August 2012 12:24:36 BST > To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> > Cc: Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> > Reply-To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> > > > So, I am assuming, from the conversation so far, that no one on the list haws read the book. If nothing else, I am heeding Bud's injunction to delete the old posts. > > By the way, Bud, is Kath your wife? I liked the blog post. > > Jim Wiegel

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Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
by LAURELCG＠aol.com 22 Aug '12

22 Aug '12

Thank you, Del. I'm struggling to learn to communicate from the heart level rather than head. It's difficult and I often don't succeed, but it's delicious when the magic works. >From my 75-year-old brain cloud, I said "Wes" in my e-mail. Was thinking of Rev. Bill. Where do those things come from? Blessings, Jann In a message dated 8/20/2012 11:57:35 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, delhmor(a)wamail.net writes: I really appreciated this Jann. One of the best experiences a few years ago was visiting the church Eileen and George have been active in, in which the people are from all walks of life and all types of theological backgrounds, and using an amazing variety of vocabulary to describe their experiences. The common denominators were joy within themselves, acceptance of one another and their great diversity, and a care for their community. I’m sure there were other “denominators”, but these were the most evident to a one-time visitor and observer. Wouldn’t it be nice to “view” this, and participate in it, in most any gathering. Frankly, I was rather surprised at the quick, dogmatic responses and judgment elicited by this latest writing from The Week (which is a great mag, if you haven’t ever read it). Granted, it wasn’t a ton of correspondence, but it came to me as quite “old-fashioned”. Responses that seem to come before getting more information or even asking a simple question or two before making such judgments, seem, to me, to be as close-minded as the same persons probably accuse those of more conservative religious views. What happened to the days when we felt strongly that you should not critique a writer until you have read through thoroughly and tried to be in their shoes as that writer? I guess some of us have forgotten this. I’ve been learning in these past years to at least attempt to listen for what a person is trying to say to me, rather than getting blocked by the words used or the philosophy out of which one speaks. Is there a new perspective? Is there a different slant being taken on an old perspective? Is there an attempt to help the reader understand where someone else is coming from, or why they have chosen the route they have taken? etc. etc.??? Personally, I rather appreciate trying to understand just why someone might think the way they do or act they way they act. Maybe it’s just that I’m so much older than when I thought I knew everything! Del

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Jeju Island
by LAURELCG＠aol.com 21 Aug '12

21 Aug '12

Thought you all would want to know. Jann McGuire ____________________________________ From: info(a)rootsaction.org To: laurelcg(a)aol.com Sent: 8/21/2012 8:43:59 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time Subj: Today We Save an Island _Jeju Island is under attack. "Touch not one stone, not one flower," is its residents' battle cry. Let's help!_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=8DdtyyDHB6n9Cy5ygCsq3qG…) (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0IE+kLz2CqvLgvIfi7fjr6G…) (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=oCVJITYp223q++thAzuwXaG…) _ Share this action on Facebook_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=UFBDUSOM4AAVapxc5dwLqaG…) _ Share this action on Twitter_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=CJghkhYja5xq5b5VXjpI0KG…) A coordinated international campaign this week will try to save South Korea's beautiful Jeju Island from destruction. We have the chance to participate, and in so doing to help form a badly needed partnership between the environmental and antiwar movements. The World Conservation Congress 2012 is being held on Jeju Island in two weeks -- while just four miles away, in the island's Gangjeong Village, construction is beginning on a massive new naval base to be used by the U.S. Dredging of the seabed and coral has already begun. _Help put a stop to it now._ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=KFkiaZGhDdQwyRCMJ8XS2aG…) The extraordinary biological diversity, unique volcanic topography, and the culture of Jeju Island attract many tourists. The Sea of Gangjeong is a national cultural treasure adjacent to a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Only 114 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins remain, and they live here -- one of many species threatened by base construction. The damage will be devastating. But Samsung, the primary contractor for base construction, is sponsoring the World Conservation Congress (WCC), which is pretending all is well. _Let them know we aren't fooled. Demand that Samsung halt construction and the WCC oppose the base._ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=5khY79euWQPQXguz1pROQaG…) 94% of the residents of Jeju Island have voted against construction of the base. If the base is constructed, it will host nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as Aegis missile-carrying warships. U.S. taxpayers will pay the cost of the Obama administration "pivot" into the Asia-Pacific, while Jeju Islanders pay with a damaged home. Ultimately, the cost to the earth and the risk of war will belong to all of us. Villagers have been arrested during nonviolent protests. Police and construction workers have assaulted elderly members of the community, who represent a large portion of the activists. Raising our voices in solidarity is the least we can do. _"Touch not one stone, not one flower."_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=MIL8tvbKtyT97cAQGi6Y26G…) Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends. --The RootsAction team P.S. Our small staff is supported by contributions from people like you; _your donations are greatly appreciated_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=xrDKWK6OEUWcjugf/gBHpKG…) . P.P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Coleen Rowley, and many others. Allies:_ Save Jeju Island_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=H+pJg7XTw6nt43SL1FAQA6G…) _Jeju Island, South Korea_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qg8r0JBfPtDIh7cBGaZoLHX…) _Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=PXe1SpF/Ll0HfjuyZSfERaG…) Veterans For Peace _Voices for Creative Nonviolence_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=/4bEV7ofIjxQ+wqb1DaZN3X…) _Fellowship of Reconciliation_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JGLl1hLkR411LNY118vmT6G…) _Environmentalists Against War_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=XAO4ImWUW1sgY9eI0+nehXX…) (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=fomRPRhJHwrvB+inUYuc46G…) (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JGLl1hLkR434MsHeyW7E8KG…) (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=bAlBgSTH+N/BMTmmLo6k3HX… TTaGE) _Click here_ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=tv1LF9EkEvNRMVkX9tiy66G…) to unsubscribe and stop ALL email from RootsAction. To modify your email communication preferences or update your personal profile, visit your subscription management page at: _http://hq-salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6503/profile/ _ (http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=s3cYCxqk4QJSm3tCTsLIt6G…) (http://www.salsalabs.com/?email)

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Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
by Del Morril 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

I really appreciated this Jann. One of the best experiences a few years ago was visiting the church Eileen and George have been active in, in which the people are from all walks of life and all types of theological backgrounds, and using an amazing variety of vocabulary to describe their experiences. The common denominators were joy within themselves, acceptance of one another and their great diversity, and a care for their community. I'm sure there were other "denominators", but these were the most evident to a one-time visitor and observer. Wouldn't it be nice to "view" this, and participate in it, in most any gathering. Frankly, I was rather surprised at the quick, dogmatic responses and judgment elicited by this latest writing from The Week (which is a great mag, if you haven't ever read it). Granted, it wasn't a ton of correspondence, but it came to me as quite "old-fashioned". Responses that seem to come before getting more information or even asking a simple question or two before making such judgments, seem, to me, to be as close-minded as the same persons probably accuse those of more conservative religious views. What happened to the days when we felt strongly that you should not critique a writer until you have read through thoroughly and tried to be in their shoes as that writer? I guess some of us have forgotten this. I've been learning in these past years to at least attempt to listen for what a person is trying to say to me, rather than getting blocked by the words used or the philosophy out of which one speaks. Is there a new perspective? Is there a different slant being taken on an old perspective? Is there an attempt to help the reader understand where someone else is coming from, or why they have chosen the route they have taken? etc. etc.??? Personally, I rather appreciate trying to understand just why someone might think the way they do or act they way they act. Maybe it's just that I'm so much older than when I thought I knew everything! Del _____ From: dialogue-bounces(a)lists.wedgeblade.net [mailto:dialogue-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of LAURELCG(a)aol.com Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 5:31 PM To: dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net; Oe(a)wedgeblade.net Subject: Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or sorts. 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. I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion weekly and the very 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. 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. 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." 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. My two cents:) Grace and peace, Jann McGuire In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com writes: 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: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus Jim Wiegel Jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com "

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Passover Between Secular<->Religious
by steve har 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

I think the author Tanya Luhrmann says in the quoted article:"I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality". Curious why she says she doesn't "presume to know ultimate reality" Doesn't know "ultimate reality" in one community but does the other? She feels free to presume in one community not the other? Doesn't feel free to presume in either community? Admire her apparent willingness to "passover" from one life understanding to another and returning to express her experience. Malachi Martin or Done Done talked "passover"?. Can't remember which.

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Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
by LAURELCG＠aol.com 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or sorts. 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. I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion weekly and the very 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. 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. 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." 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. My two cents:) Grace and peace, Jann McGuire In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com writes: 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: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus Jim Wiegel Jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com “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 http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details. _______________________________________________ Dialogue mailing list Dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net

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Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
by David Walters 19 Aug '12

19 Aug '12

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 --- jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com wrote: From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com> To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net>, Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Subject: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:02:06 -0300 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: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus Jim Wiegel Jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com “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 http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details. _______________________________________________ Dialogue mailing list Dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net

2 1

From The Week: Hearing the voice of God
by James Wiegel 19 Aug '12

19 Aug '12

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: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus Jim Wiegel Jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com “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 http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further details.

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Re: [Dialogue] Interesting [to me] weekly Global Read
by jlepps＠pc.jaring.my 18 Aug '12

18 Aug '12

Steve: Never under-estimate Singapore John At 07:33 AM 8/17/2012, you wrote: >FridayGlobalist Read from Singapore >webpage and email subscription here: http://www.theglobalist.com/ > >Nothing is quite so bracing as an informed view of your own country >from someone else's country. > >When I live in USofA Costa Rica is invisible >When I live in Costa Rica I'm continually astonished what they know, >see, love and pray for re my home country. > >Here's this weeks Globalist [from Singapore] content > >America, Enjoy the Downward Slide >Michael Lind recently worried in The Globalist about the British seeds >of America's decline. > >Meghnad Desai, an Indian-born economist and member of Britain's House >of Lords, responds by calling on Americans to relax and enjoy shedding >the burdens of its far-flung and expensive empire. > >The Danger of More Financial Concentration >The financial industry has witnessed a wave of mergers and >acquisitions in recent decades, leading to too-big-to-fail >conglomerates. This trend has not improved the economic function of >finance, writes Henry Kaufman. In fact, its reversal is one of the >keys to creating a robust economic recovery. > >and... > >The India-Brazil Axis >There has been plenty of talk in recent years about the parallels >between India and China. In his book "Breakout Nations," Ruchir Sharma >finds more compelling similarities to India in an emerging market half >a world away. > >Can Central Bankers Cope With the Crisis? >What sets the current financial crisis apart from past ones is not >just the huge overhang of sovereign debt, but where it resides. >Formerly confined mainly to the developing world, sovereign debt >problems are now endemic throughout the West, writes Henry Kaufman. > >China's Development-First Approach to Africa >Stephan Richter's op-ed appeared in the English-language edition of >the China Daily, on August 14. A Portuguese version appeared in >Brazil's Valor Econômico (PDF), on August 9. > >-- >Steve >_______________________________________________ >Dialogue mailing list >Dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net >http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net

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