Sublime

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

Yet Taylor has taught us that the good life (whether subjective or objective, personal or cultural) demands narrative. You need a story about what makes life good to have an identity.

Because now that the whole world has been disenchanted and we have been encased in a flattened “nature,” I expect it will be forms of reenchanted Christianity that will actually have a future.

For Paul’s song of faith formation to be transformational, its ethos and content must encompass his understanding of faith. This seems so logical it almost need not be said. But oddly, for many of our faith-formation programs today, there is a great divide between our processes of faith formation (the methods and approaches we use to pass on faith)

Because of the shadow of Secular 2, faith formation has too often been thought of as a process that commits people to the religious (it is solely an act of the will). But for Paul, faith formation is nothing more than being conformed to (taking the very form of) Christ himself. The process of being invited into the form of Christ (of finding union

Such an intellectualist model of the human person—one that reduces us to mere intellect—assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers.

that this obsession with youthfulness is a vice (which I believe is the condition that brings on the disease of MTD itself). The obsession with youthfulness often goes unquestioned because no institution, collective, or movement has a future without up-and-coming new members to attend to its ideas, structures, and interests.

Rest

from the land of Jordan