As mentioned a bit ago, I’ve had the honor of being named a contributing scholar for an exciting new interfaith dialogue (diablogue?) venture called State of Formation.
The beta preview version is now live, and already stoked with a handful of fascinating thoughts. Though I’m the lightest degree-carrier of my fellow scholars, I’m really happy to be working alongside such diverse, learned thinkers.
My first post is called, “Rattling the (Rib)Cage” (and yes, part of it was inspired by this older post. I think we can go ahead and just call this one of my overarching tropes–it sounds better than ‘repetitive’). Here’s a snippet:
A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that I’ve been obsessed with lately: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
While the use of “intelligence” smacks of a pretension I don’t cling to, there is something to this notion of retaining forward movement in the midst of cognitive dissonance that seems central to the addition of my voice to State of Formation.
From K-College, I attended one nondenominational Christian educational institution after another. There were many times over those eighteen years that I was asked to share the story of my journey to faith—my “testimony”—with peers and teachers. It frightened me, and always inserted a sharp pain in the center of my sternum, just right of the heart. It was as if a burr or thorny stem was caught in the darkness of my throat, keeping me from forming the words that would define who I was in the Christian tradition… Read More
wake, sleeper 