In these days of pigeonholing and categorizing I come to the topic of “why my theology is public”. I honestly don’t know that it is public. Wow wasn’t that a short and sweet piece; done and finished in fewer than 30 words. And there is where the rub starts. If my theology isn’t public then…
The world needs more contemplatives, more prayerful action, more of us who are willing to say what is sacred and what is not.
We, the community that vets return to, don’t only need education about what moral injury is. We need the same spiritual solution that veterans need. If we think we don’t, if we separate out us from them, I fear we will all stay in the same denial, the same lies that keep us fighting our own demons, alone, separated from each other and from God.
Willson Lectures from Monday, February 17th. Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock speaking on the topic: When Does War End? Moral Injury and Soul Repair. You can view full event at our website here:
Are soldiers’ moral traumas more redeemable – or at least more publicly, institutionally urgent – than the sins of the rest of us?
“War is the foyer to hell; coming home is hell.”
– Tyler Boudreau, author of Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine
Native scholar Vine Deloria’s discussion (in his book of essays titled “Spirit and Reason”, published in 1999) of the inadequacy of traditional scientific methodology and the idea of a moral universe interjects a non-Western, non-fundamentalist view onto the recent Nye/Ham debate. The kind of holistic science Deloria describes below, and the collective moral responsibility seen…
“As gospel singers greet marchers who reach the state capitol, I see a woman holding a sign that says, “We are gentle, angry, and determined.” Nothing could better express the spirit of Tar Heel protesters, who can stare extremism in the eye and maintain an air of gentility while they do it.”
I was excited to find this critique of the Bill Nye/ Ken Ham debate. Danny Coleman has lots more to say, here.
“This side of eternity, we will not love perfectly. Our confessions will be halting and used as expressions of self-righteousness; our witness will be misguided and shaped by our various projects of self-justification; and our communion incomplete and caught up in projects of exclusion. As we believe aloud, we will make public our mis-belief because as we act in love we will also reveal just how disordered our loves are. But our response to our mis-beliefs cannot intelligibly be the refusal to believe or to speak for it is through belief and conversation that we are being transformed by a living God.” — Mark Douglas, “Believing Aloud”
Public Theology 