3 months since the last blog post?! Time to get back in the saddle.
The past few months have been packed with finishing my final courses for seminary, travels around the country, a week at Duke Divinity School's Summer Institute in Reconciliation, moving to Berkeley, CA and an 11 day backpacking trip in the Sierras.
It has been a full yet surprisingly refilling time. God has been hard at work rejuvenating my spirit. After two years of seminary, two years in a strange city/state, and two years of long distance from my fiancee Libbey, it was some much needed rejuvenation. My heart feels lighter and my passion is restoked for the work of the Kingdom!
Looking Forward
From now until I graduate next May, I will be working on my grad school thesis. The working title at the moment is Urban, Rural, Wild: Place and the Mission of God. At the very least, that subtitle will change. Some alternatives I'm playing were are "Landscapes of Life and Imagination"; "Landscapes of Oppression, Landscapes of Justice"; "Cultivating the Shalom Imagination"; "Shalom and the Community of Creation." We'll see :)
It is a wide ranging, interdisciplinary project that is attempting to situation cities in their geographic, ecological, historical, structural, and philosophical contexts. The basic point is that you can't understand a city by just thinking about the city. You have to see it in its relationship to the other primary "placial regions" (as I refer to them): rural/agrarian areas and the wilderness. Systems thinking and the science of ecology (as well as biblical/Hebraic thought, I might add) emphasize that you understand something best not by studying it in isolation, but by observing its relationships with the surrounding environment. Furthermore, we have to see the way that these distinctions are all things humans create. We impose a landscape of civilization on top of the Land: the ecological world of soil, water, plants, animals, and atmosphere. The way we humans make the world emerges from our worldviews.
My goal is to try to understand the underlying philosophies behind the way urban, rural and wild places have been formed through American history and assess to what degree this construction aligns with the ways of God. The trick to a good analysis, however, is not just looking at how the system has worked but paying close attention to the glitches, the casualties of our history and our present. This has led me to prioritize two primary perspectives in my research: 1) the marginalized and 2) the ecological. Indisputably, many people have been oppressed--enslaved, impoverished, displaced, dismissed, and even killed--through the manner the US pursues its corporate life. Their perspectives on our history and on the problematic elements of our worldview are therefore essential for uncovering our base problems. Secondly, creation has been altered and destroyed more rapaciously in the history of this country than anywhere else in the world. So, strange though it may sound to most modern ears, I will also be listening to what the land has to say.
In the end, I hope to be able to offer some theological convictions and fairly concrete political and missional advice for Christians in this country whose allegiance is more to Jesus than any economic theory or political party.
Since these are the things I will be thinking about, these are the things I plan to write about. Hopefully I can use this blog to hash through the ideas I want to unpack in my thesis. I'm told that it's bad blog etiquette to not stick to a niche, but too bad. If you are following along over the next year, expect to read posts on stuff like:
- the history of urban development in the US
- alternatives in farming, agricultural life and food systems
- the idea of wilderness and its function in American life
- a theology of creation far more related to its present than its origin
- the nature of "whiteness" and how it jacks up everything/everybody
- theories of modernity and postmodernity
- economics as if the poor and the planet mattered
- and a lot more!
My commitment is to make a post every two weeks at a minimum. That said, God is up to remarkable things and my brain is on fire, so it could be a lot more! To keep from pinning myself down, I won't necessarily proceed in any logical order, but will wander through subjects as they flow.
My prayer is that as you read, you find your imagination whipped up around topics you've never thought about before, that you discover God cares immensely about those things, and that through the "transforming of your mind" you find your self gradually caught up in a new, more beautiful, more Christlike way of being-in-the-world. Let us turn a blind eye toward the victims of our world no more. Instead, let us begin to dream and enact together a world designed for shalom.
Looking Back
For the two people who have been reading along from the beginning (thanks Mom and Libbey), I thought I would also briefly look back to tie up some loose ends.
In the very first post, I claimed that I was going to focus on leadership, and I even introduced something with a silly title called "12 Non-Exhaustive Principles for Leading to Shalom." When I started this blog, I had just finished a class called Leading Multicultural Communities. My mind was all wrapped up in the thoughts of my final paper, and I thought this blog would be a place to keep exploring them. Well, it was for the first couple months, but we all have to move on. I never came back to the "12 Principles," and honestly at this point I don't think they're that great, so I never will. And that's that.
Tied to those thought processes back at the genesis of this thing, there's another problem that's been chewing at me about this blog: the name. Since leadership was on my brain, I called this blog "Leading to Shalom." What nags at me are how many connotations--many starkly unChristian--the language of leadership dredges up. This blog is not supposed to be about how great a leader I am, or even about forming really amazing people into leaders for the Kingdom. Those images are too self-focused, too top down, too individualistic, too powerful in the ways of the world, too lacking the servant-hearted, sacrificial spirit of Jesus on the cross.
If there is an aspect of "leading" I hope to conjure, I would rather it be that God is leading all of history toward shalom. That is the central reality behind everything. And as the followers of God, we get to come alongside him in this effort. It is not we who will make his Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven, but our Father. So, that said, I might change the name/address of this blog down the road.
The other unfinished mini-series started back at the beginning of March and flowed out of this model for shalom-oriented life I tried to draw up. Content wise there's a lot I still like about it. However, as I kept thinking about it over the past few months, problems kept cropping up.
First, it was too static. I knew there were things that weren't explicitly represented and I couldn't figure out an elegant way to solve that problem. Second, even though it wasn't meant to, the diagram felt to linear. Each layer was only connected to the pieces right above and below it. There was no room for circling around through the different elements, for moving back and forth, for all the nonlinear complexities of real life. On this side of eternity, seeking shalom is always a process and a journey of approximations--there is no one formula. That was obscured by my straight edged drawing. Third, though following Jesus was the bedrock, it still didn't feel Christocentric/Theocentric enough for me. While God was everywhere in all of it, that didn't seem to permeate the picture enough. Finally, any image carries with it symbolic, metaphoric meaning. My fairly happenstance choice of classic Greek architecture really had nothing to do with the deeper meanings I wanted to convey, and so was a distraction and detraction from my goal. Christian thought has been entangled with Platonic and Aristotelian ideas quite enough without me bringing in their subliminal messaging, thank you very much!
As I've fiddled with ecological thought, I see a lot of potential there to rework my model. Organic systems have the ability to intake and discharge elements while maintaining the equilibrium and health of the whole (something that wouldn't work so well if you yanked one of my pillars out of the old version). I think some kind of network, web or flow-diagram might be a better way to arrange my ideas (picture charts of a food web or the water cycle). But we'll see. If I come up with anything, I'll post it here. So, while I thought was going to unpack all the different elements and subelements of that picture for quite some time, I'm going to leave it to behind for the moment.
Thanks for engaging, and looking forward to wrestling through a lot more with you in the days ahead! Shalom, friends.
