BL&T: In place of (non-sacraments): Re-enchanting the Brethren

Over at the Brethren Life and Thought blog, I just posted my contribution to a three-part series of posts on James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom. Here's the link and the first bit of the post...

In place of (non-)sacraments: Re-enchanting the Brethren

While the Schwarzenau Brethren have long practiced the beautiful biblical-mimetic ritual we call “Love Feast,” there’s been the insistence that such practices – like baptism – are “ordinances” from Jesus. So we do them primarily because Jesus told us to, not because they have some “mystical” or “magical” power. Combined with a free church “priesthood of all believers” ecclesiology and liturgical practices, Vernard Eller could look at high church sacramental traditions in his book, In Place of Sacraments, and pejoratively describe them as “commissaries,” dispensing with mystical goods and services. Better than all that, Eller described the (surprise!) free church model which he called the “caravan” approach to practices like the Lord’s Supper and baptism. 

While honoring the good historical reasons that Anabaptists opted out of sacramental traditions (to their own peril, initially), appreciating much of Eller’s positive work in In Place of Sacraments, and being happy in our contemporary circumstances as a believers church tradition, still I wonder: Should we reconsider our bad attitude about the sacraments? In our desire to avoid magic-thinking, is there a way in which we’ve swung too far the other direction and depleted our social imagination as Anabaptists worshipping and serving a crucified and resurrected, therefore living, God? Have we thrown the genius of narrative-shaped ritual out with the sacramental bathwater? Read the rest...

Tales from the Enlightenment: "religious freedom"

Gather 'round, kids; grandpappy Kant has a story to tell!

For a few weeks now I've been avoiding any news media outlets - which for me are entirely online. As election season has ramped up, I noticed how even my go-to-guys - Stewart and Colbert - have become almost exclusively fixated on the ugly vetting process for the Republican presidential candidate. It's become a sort of interpretive black hole, whereby all issues are sucked into its inescapable pull and "read" in light of that incredibly nasty public spectacle. So I've switched off...kind of.

I'm still regularly on Facebook, so I continue to hear about this stuff through the various news pages that I "like" and from my friends who are following the news. A decent number of my friends are leftish peaceniks, so last week I heard a collective liberal wail of moral outrage against Rush Limbaugh for some reason or another (I happily don't know why). And the week before that it was Catholics, insurance companies, and birth control, with pictures posted of a bunch of men on a congressional panel talking about women's reproductive rights (the ironical outrage!). This issue was connected to a particular contemporary Catholic candidate for the Republican ticket and references back to a speech from an earlier Catholic candidate seeking the Democratic ticket in the early 1960s, each having various things to say about "religious freedom."

So it's that notion - religious freedom - that I want to talk about, particularly how it gets used in modern political discourse and processes. I'm riffing off a fantastic post from Saba Mahmood at the Immanent Frame blog - Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics (part of a whole series of posts they have running about religious freedom) - but mostly my current reading project, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and past reading of William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence. With these folks, I'll argue that "religious freedom" is a particular story told this side of the Enlightenment, with particular definitions given to the constituent terms "religion"and "freedom." Much like I argued last fall about the creation myth of human rights, things such as "religious freedom" and "human rights" are far from self-evident, timeless truths available to all people in all places for all times. They are, rather, contingent constructs that purport to provide something that current, dominant forms of geopolitical ordering and organizing (nation-states) are ultimately unable to deliver.

Update on the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle thing

Apparently Farmer Joe here is Joel Salatin

Last fall when I was bellyaching about the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle video that sucked me in hook, line, and sinker...it had been some time since I'd actually eaten at a Chipotle. And that continued...until last night. After my family went to a movie we swung by the Chipote here in Harrisonburg, Virginia. As I approached the counter to order, there was a sign posted that the pork being served was sourced from nearby Polyface Farms, run by Joel Salatin, somewhat of a local celebrity and hero of the local food movement.

So I said "mmmm..."and ordered a burrito w/ the local pork. Holy cow (sic)! The pork tasted fantastic, and I was trying to be objective and not think it was great just because it was local. It actually did taste great.

I've been a fan of Polyface since I discovered them in the film, Food, Inc., and I've noticed that the farm has inspired some folks here at EMU. One EMU alum from Iowa did a college internship at Polyface and then moved back to Iowa to put the farming practices to use, which is thrilling, considering my home state is practically ground zero for corporate and industrial-scale ag in this country.

So I guess Willie Nelson and Coldplay were on to something by doing this track for Chipotle's Cultivate Foundation...

EMU News: Young Anabaptists Consider Mission in an "Occupied" World

Occupy robots! (Photo by Howard Zehr)

EMU News has a nice press release up about our upcoming conference, #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission. Here it is...

Young Anabaptists Consider Mission in an “Occupied” World

by Laura Amstutz

Kauffman and Gumm wanted to play on and challenge the “occupy” language made popular in the last year by protesters around the country. “We wanted to reinterpret that word,” said Gumm. “We were thinking about it theologically as part of the incarnation. How can we faithfully inhabit the empire as Christians?” “We also wanted to turn it [occupy] on its head,” Kauffman added. “We are asking how God’s kingdom occupies us.”

Thanks, Laura, for a nice write-up!

Wringing Out Saturated Selves: Christian Education in a Secular Age

This morning I gave my senior capstone presentation at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which was based on a paper I wrote with the same name as this post. I've embedded the paper below, but let me make a few comments about the concerns animating this paper/presentation, the paper's major flow and points, and where it leads from here. I take the upcoming #Occupy Empire conference I'm helping organize as one particular project within my broader process of ministerial-vocational discernment.

In some ways, this paper and presentation marks the "philosophical turn" in my graduate studies.  This turn was precipitated by the existential and intellectual angst of being the first dual degree student at EMU's seminary and its Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Philosophy eventually became extremely helpful in trying to adjudicate - both in terms of overlap and difference - the distinct "embodied rationalities" in those two programs. This led me to the philosophy of Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, and most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre.

But I've also been compelled by the biblical hermeneutic of John Howard Yoder as a way to keep me grounded in the biblical narrative as the primary "script" for my life as a ministering Christian in the body of Christ.

In my ministerial-vocational discernment these past years at grad school, I've come sense the call to being an educator in/for the church, putting the intellectual gifts which God has imbued within me to work for the sake of God's reconciling mission in the world. In testing this, I've been able to teach the same class in two radically different cultural contexts. In this paper, I try to weave all these threads together in a very short space (12 pages, 20 minute presentation). No small task.

In responding to my presentation this morning, my advisor, Mark Thiessen Nation, quipped: "What you've really done here, Brian, is lay out a research agenda for yourself." Likewise, my district executive in the Church of the Brethren described this as the start of a life-long journey. I think those assessments exactly right. There are hints in this paper to most of the influential work I've picked up and how I've been starting to assemble that toward a constructive vision for my developing vocation as a ministerial educator.

[Cross-post]: Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Mirrored digital Koru
(Adapated from J. Colman via Flickr)

One of the joys of being a tech and web nerd in my part-time job at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been getting in on the planning and implementation of the first-ever online class offered by the center, which just started on the first of this month but has been a year in the making. So I just posted this piece over at the Peacebuilder Online blog, telling the story of how it all came together and the challenges we had to overcome...

Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

#Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission

Scrub that dirty ol' empire away!

I hinted at it a few weeks ago. So now I'm very excited to announce that registration is now open for a mini-conference that my friend, Aaron Kauffman, and I are organizing as part of our senior capstone project at Eastern Mennonite Seminary...

#Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission
April 13-14, 2012 - Eastern Mennonite Seminary

Anabaptism at its best has been a series of attempts both to live into God's in-breaking occupation and to faithfully occupy the empires of this fallen age, signaling the shalom to come. Anabaptists have gone about this work by imaginatively patterning their worship and witness after the New Testament communities of Jesus.

Come explore ways in which the Anabaptist tradition can help inspire faithful occupation in today's world. Interdisciplinary academic presentations will be infused with worship and testimonies to open our minds and spirits to where God is calling us into mission in the midst of empire.

Keynote speakers: Isaac Villegas, Chris Haw, Nekeisha Alexis-Baker, and Janna Hunter-Bowman. (See full list of speakers.)