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.
Click “Public discussions of gun violence begin” to read the article.
Protect Minnesota has agreed to be part of the Feb. 19 program.
the worm
unknown insinuated itself in-
side the mind of the communicator,
insistently removing all the in-
formation that was thought to be secure.
…
the end
of facebook, youtube, ibm and e-
mail now is certain: malware winning o-
ver anti-virus systems– the old e-
vil adam-lurking where there is no prayer.
…
[Chinese Hackers Infiltrate
New York Times Computers
Jan. 31, 2013]
– Steve Shoemaker, Jan. 31, 2013
NOTE: Click HERE for the NYT story.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published this piece on the Roman Catholic Cardinal with the red cap and the late Stan Musial who wore the red cap of the St. Louis Cardinals. Click “One cardinal remembers another: Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Stan Musial” for an interesting read.
Jacket of “My People Is the Enemy”
“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
“Let all religious people beware.”
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 with City 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.
An interesting debate on gun control is developing among Roman Catholics that might be called “How shall Christians be pro-life?”
Click “Catholics raise issue of guns amid calls to end abortion” (New York Times), and leave your comment on “Views from the Edge” to promote discussion.
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.
Similes are lies.
Metaphors mislead.
This is not like that.
Nothing moves or melts,
jumps or flys or feels
as another does.
…
One is one–unique.
Note the differences:
individuality,
singularity,
smell, location, sound…
Concentrate, honor each.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 27, 2013
“You’re not abandoned. God provides minimum protection – maximum support.”
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (June 1, 1924 – April 12, 2006) was bigger than life. He had a way about him. He was a great preacher who packed the Chapel at Yale and the Riverside Church in New York City, one of the nation’s greatest pulpit dating back to Harry Emerson Fosdick. Once a promising candidate for a career as a concert pianist, Coffin chose the ministry instead, but he carried his musicality into the cadences of his speech and the power and beauty of his language. A former member of the CIA, he became fiercely committed to peace, a leader in the civil rights, peace, and nuclear freeze and disarmament movements.
After many years of watching from afar, our paths crossed while serving as Pastor to The College of Wooster in Wooster, OH and Pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, the College congregation-in-residence. The night of his arrival on campus, a handful of professors gathered in a home into the late hours of the night. I was spell-bound not only by his stories but by the quick repartee and personal interest in the lives of the strangers in the room. For the rest of the week Bill roused the campus with his passionate faith and wisdom.
Years later PBS broadcast Bill Moyers’ interview with him. Bill had suffered a stroke three years before, recovered his speech through persistent therapy, and was now reflecting with Bill Moyers about the recent news that he would be dead by the end of the year. It was vintage Bill Coffin. Realistic, cheerful, life-affirming, humorous, bold, loving, enjoying every moment of the conversation.
It led me to tears. “I have to call him,” I thought. “I have to tell him how important he’s been to so many of us – his close friends and distant admirers such as I.” After some searching, I learned that he was living in Vermont and dialed the number.
Randy, Bill’s wife, answered the phone. “You don’t know me,” I said, “but I saw Bill’s interview with Bill Moyers last night on PBS. I just felt I had to call. He’s not likely to remember me but I had to call. This is Gordon Stewart calling from Minnes…” “O my, how good of you to call. Let me get Bill. I know he’ll want to talk with you… Bill…Bill….”. “Gordon!” boomed out the familiar New York baritone voice. “We’ve thought about you many times. So good to hear from you! How the hell are you? What’s happening out there in Minnesota?”
William Sloane Coffin was not a personal friend. He was a heroic figure I had admired and had put on a pedestal. There are many reasons he deserved to be emulated, foremost perhaps, was that he really loved people and never forgot them. He lived freely at the end when death was knocking at his door because he believed, as he said,
“The abyss of God’s love is deeper than the abyss of death. And she who overcomes her fear of death lives as though death were a past and not a future experience.”
“Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” brought this reply, or so I thought, from good friend Steve Shoemaker (aka “Shoe” ) in Urbana, Illinois. He seemed to have taken Sebastian’s side in the Shoe War.
Verse — “Heal”
I taught my dog to heel,
not so she’d be a slave,
but so she’d always be
safe to walk alongside of me.
…
When first I used a lead,
a leash and collar, she
would pull and jerk and try
to run away. She thought that I
…
was cruel and mean to make
her suffer so. But now
she leaves her pen with glee
as we, a team, explore the world.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 26, 2012
NOTE: The word “my” was not bolded or italicized in the Steve’s email. “Views from Edge” bolded and italicized “my” on the assumption that the Verse’s author was holding himself up as a man of virtue in contrast to the bad dog owner who hadn’t trained his dog properly. It turns out that “Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” wasn’t anywhere near his radar screen when he penned his Verse. Follow-up email from Steve: “Stop being so self-centered–I was not thinking of you and your sodden shoe at all when I wrote this. I wrote this for ___________” (who had asked him for a poem on healing in preparation for a sermon). 🙂
I think I’ll take a trip to Urbana for training… as a dog trainer…and healing.
Views from the Edge 