This thoughtful post arrived this morning. Well worth the read regardless of whether one is a photographer. Once again, thank you, Dennis and PJ for the beautiful photography and thoughtful commentary.
We get requests from many photographers, both experienced and novices, who want to understand what it takes to shoot at these churches. We have provided technical explanations already – we have discussed our camera gear, the lenses that we use and our procedures on a shooting trip.
We always stress the importance of preparation; to have an idea of what is important in a church; whether or not it will be crowded, the time of day you might be shooting, the time of year, and whether special permission will be required. It is also important to know something about what is unique or distinctive in the church. We once shot at the Cathédrale Saint Etienne in Cahors without realizing that the most remarkable feature of the church was the magnificent north portal in an alley on the opposite side of the main entrance. It was a good excuse to…
“Woodbine Willie” is a strange name for an Anglican priest. The nickname was given to
G. A. Studdert Kennedy (1883 – 1929)
G. A. Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929) by the battered troops of the British forces to whom he ministered in World War I.
The name came from the “Woodbine” cigarettes he gave to the troops. Woodbine Willie grew up among the desperately poor. He had two great passions: the church and social reform. He never winced and, oh, how he was loved by what were then known as “the common people.” He was a fighter for social justice and human rights, but he also advocated civil conversation, what he called “a plane” upon which people of differing views and good conscience would come together to resolve a problem. Think about the current national debate in the wake of the tragedy at Newtown.
“There is, and there must be, a plane upon which we can think and reason together upon questions arising out of our wider human relations, social questions, that is, apart from and above party prejudice and sectional interest. If it is not so, and there is no such plane, and we can not think of these big questions outside the prejudices and passions that arise in party strife, then it is safe to assert that there will never be any solution of the problems whatsoever. The idea that politics in the true sense – that is, the art of managing our human relationships on a large scale – must remain a separate department of life, distinct from morals and religion, is ultimately irrational and absurd, and is an idea with which no responsible teacher ought to have anything to do. – Sermon, “The Church in Politics: a Defense”
Tomorrow night, Tuesday, Feb. 5, Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska will do its best to provide “a plane” for reasonable discussion of the epidemic of gun violence in America. 7:00 – 8:30 PM. Hope and pray that it be an evening where we step back to discuss “the big questions outside the prejudices and passions that arise in party strife.”
The blues struck this week. A sense of longing. You might even say a kind of fainting.
Psalm 84 leaped up for attention, quite by accident. It’s a psalm of enormous contrasts, almost bi-polar in its highs and lows. Joy and longing sit right beside each other like first-born and second-born twins. No sooner is Praise born (“How lovely is Thy dwelling place!”) than faith’s twin, Longing, is born – the longing, the sense of estrangement that yearns to be united with the lovely dwelling place: “My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the LORD….” It is this Psalm that inspired Johannes Brahms’ Requiem, sung here by a combined choir in a lovely place in Atlanta, Georgia. Bring the blues to the music of the Psalm and see what happens.
Thanks to the editor of The Chaska Herald for this piece on the series on “Gun Violence in America” that begin next, Tuesday, Feb. 5 at Shepherd of the Hill Church in Chaska.
“Let all religious people beware. Their earnest longing for God is predicated on the reservation on their part that it is necessary for them to do something to find God. The Word of God in the Bible, however, is that God does not await human initiative of any sort but seeks and finds [people] where they are, wherever it be.”
– William Stringfellow, Count It All Joy (Eerdman’s, 1967).
Inspired by Stringfellow’s writings, six students at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago gathered weekly at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday mornings with Professor Bruce Rigdon to reflect together on our late-night (10: p.m. – 2:00 a.m.) “bar ministry” at Poor Richard’s, a “secular” place, in light of Stringfellow’s writings. God was already present everywhere; our privilege was to recognize it in the world.
Outside the fence at the seminary students from the Moody Bible Institute targeted McCormick people with tracts that threatened Hell for the liberal “sinners” who didn’t recognize the depth of human depravity. They wanted to save the “wretched” seminarians who scorned every hint of a shame and guilt as the starting point of the Christian faith. We believed that grace was amazing and that it was everywhere, but Amazing Grace‘s “saved a wretch like me” was the language of Moody, a wallowing in shame and guilt from which we were proud to have been freed.
It’s 1966 in Chicago’s Old Town entertainment district. Kay Zimmerman, a dear friend and classmate who lost her sight at the age of nine, and I walk into Poor Richards arm-in-arm. The bar is unusually full. A young man jumps up on a table with his guitar and starts to strum out the hymn we seminary students ridiculed for it’s wretched theology of human wretchedness: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me…” and everyone rose to their feet to join . “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
Several years following ordination, the Chaplain of Milliken University (Decatur, IL) invited me to an evening with “Bill” Stringfellow. It was two weeks before Stringfellow was to undergo major exploratory surgery for a misdiagnosed illness that threatened his life. During an evening in Bill Bodamer’s home Stringfellow spoke in terms that captured my attention in a new way.
It was during that visit that I began to move theologically from the prevalent paradigm of good v. evil to what Stringfellow argued was the biblical paradigm of life v. death. Even yet today, I am still moving from under the spell of my own form of pietistic slavery to “goodness” into the freedom for which Christ has set me free.
Over the years that followed, Bill became a guest in our home during his visits to campus ministry programs at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Northern New York Campus Ministry (Canton, NY), and The College of Wooster (Wooster, OH). My children remember this frail man with the searching eyes, sensing perhaps that his physical frailty not only revealed a human frailty he never denied but a powerful faith in God’s great extravagance.
“The absolution from pietism is that there is no way at all to please God, no way to strike a bargain with Him, no necessity to meet Him half-way,…no way in which His godliness can be diluted in dependency upon human enterprise. The futility of pietism, ending as it does in honoring death in the name of fidelity to God, is that God has triumphed over death already, in the here and now of this life. What is given to men, in that triumph, is not to add to God’s achievement, since it is decisive, and it is not to complete His work, since God is not negligent, and much less to ridicule God’s passion for this world by resort to moralistic legalism, mechanistic ritualism, doctrinaire meanness or any similar religious exercises.
…
“The vocation of men is to enjoy their emancipation from the power of death wrought by God’s vitality in this world. The crown of life is the freedom to live now, for all the strife and ambiguity and travail, in the imminent transcendence of death, and all of death’s threats and temptation. This is the gift of God to all in Christ’s Resurrection.
…
“Men of this vocation count all trials as joys, for, though every trial be an assault of the power of death, in every trial is God’s defeat of death verified and manifested.”
– William Stringfellow, conclusion of Count It All Joy
First Tuesday Dialogues:examining critical public issues locally and globally* will host three Tuesday evenings of public discussion of the causes and remedies of gun violence in America. Each program will begin at 7:00 PM and end at 8:30 PM.
The series begins withCity of Chaska Chief of Police Scott Knight providing fact information and a law enforcement perspective. Chief Knight just returned from meetings in Washington, D.C. on the epidemic of gun violence in the wake of the tragedy at Newtown, CT.)
The series then turns to a face-to-face debate between proponents and opponents of increased gun control legislation, and concludes with a broader overview of the problem of violence, guns, self-protection, and law, led by a professor of ethics.
Tuesday, Feb. 5, 7:00 PM: Scott Knight, Chief of Police: “The Epidemic of Gun Violence in America”.
Tuesday, February 19, 7:00 PM: A respectful conversation between a proponent (Protect Minnesota) and opponent (NRA) of greater gun control.
Tuesday, March 5, 7:00 PM: A professor of ethics lead a discussion of the various Ethical Perspectives by which people of faith and good conscience approach the conundrum of violence, liberty, and the role of law in society.
* First Tuesday Dialogues is a community program of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church, ”a place for the mind and heart”, offered free of charge on behalf of the public good. All are welcome.
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861 – 1918), “father of the Social Gospel Movement”
“All human goodness is social goodness. Man is fundamentally gregarious and his morality consists in being a good member of his community.”
“The chief purpose of the Christian Church in the past has been the salvation of individuals. But the most pressing task of the present is not individualistic. Our business is to make over an antiquated and immoral economic system….”
The Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch had a profound impact on Christian theology and activism that led to the end of child labor and to legislation that protected worker rights in the early 20th Century. The man whose theology was shaped by his ministry with the poorest of the poor in the “Hell’s Kitchen” of New York City is the man from whose “Social Gospel” Glenn Beck now urges church members to flee for their lives.
Views from the Edge 