Restorative Theology

Time-lapse prayer and meditation

2012-01-24T10:33:00.002-05:00

Two videos that make use of time-lapse photography and musical soundtracks have caught my attention this morning. This form is something I first became captivated by two years ago when the volcano in Iceland (whose name I won't bother to spell out here) erupted, and a photographer went and took some amazing hi-def time-lapse photos and strung them together in video form to the soundtrack of a

Discerning Brethren social imaginaries

2012-01-24T00:20:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Shady...(Photo by PacificCoastNews.com) Over at Hermes Table, Brethren pastor and professor, Andrew Hamilton, has a wonderfully provocative post: Will the Real Brethren Please Stand Up? Inquiring as to the wide gaps in interpretive-theological approaches and ambivalence about the "peace stance" within the Church of the Brethren, Andy argues that: [T]he distinctions are a result of

Encircling a falling hero

2012-01-23T22:35:00.000-05:00

Emperor Haile Selassie I Over the Christmas break I was able to read a book which was neither theological nor philosophical, which needs to happen far more often than it does. The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski details the final years of Ethiopa's last monarch, Haile Selassie, who fell to a communist military junta, the Derg, in 1974, and who died in captivity a year later. The book

Subverting idolatrous narratives

2012-01-19T23:03:00.001-05:00

Walter Brueggemann,subversive biblical scholar This week has been one of these weeks when I've felt absolutely spoiled rotten by being a grad student in a university environment. Monday through Wednesday, the seminary held its annual School for Leadership Training (SLT). This being my last year, it is also likely my last SLT. So what a way to go out, to have renowned Old Testament scholar,

It's the final countdown!

2012-01-16T17:00:00.002-05:00

Notice: This post related to the above in name only After coming back from Ethiopia last summer, high on my first major teaching experience, I began my penultimate semester at Eastern Mennonite University in a funk. Having just been a teacher, here I was again in the classroom...but as a student. It took me a few weeks to process what was going on with my bad attitude and moping around, but

Restorative Theology by the (modest) numbers

2012-01-09T12:04:00.000-05:00

Mmm...charts; 2011 (blue) vs. 2010 (orange) visits 2011 marked the second full year of Restorative Theology's place in the theoblogoshere. As such, it is the first time that I'm able - using Google Analytics - to see some web traffic reports from one year vs. another. The good news is that visits were up 188% in 2011 over '10. The bad news is that average time spent on a particular page fell

Individualism in the axial age?

2012-01-06T10:04:00.001-05:00

Click for an awesome book symposiumat The Immanent Frame blog Two years ago, when I started reading more "hardcore" academy nerd literature (especially philosophical writing about secularity), I was gifted to find a wonderful online resource, perfect for an almost-digital-native such as myself: The Immanent Frame blog. One of the features of this blog is that they consistently have a

Christmas break: Weeping and a crisis of faith

2011-12-27T12:05:00.001-05:00

It's been a blessedly quiet Christmas break this past week. After a crushingly difficult semester for my family, we've been in Iowa for the past week and a half, and I've been severely limiting e-mail and Facebook. It's also been a very quiet front here at Restroative Theology, for the same reasons, but here are a few scattered thoughts from this past week... My daily Scripture reading has

The creation myth of human rights

2011-12-02T07:33:00.001-05:00

For as much as I gripe about nationalism in the U.S., I want to be fair in representing the fact that the myth of "nation as savior" is not unique to my own nation, as this video about universal human rights makes plain. Especially of interest to my argument is minutes 2 through 5... The historiography/myth-making going on here is fascinating. Essentially reading "nation-state" back to

The hunted becomes the Hunter

2011-12-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

James Davison Hunter Yesterday afternoon and evening, I had a chance to listen to and later converse with James Davison Hunter, a sociologist from the University of Virginia, just over the mountain from Harrisonburg. Hunter was a significant figure for me this time last year, as I was reading his recent book, To Change the World. One of my favorite Christian scholars, James K.A. Smith, was

A student's lament for Advent

2011-11-27T23:26:00.001-05:00

Sometimes it's hard to tell... Pastor Phil started Advent on a curious note this morning in his sermon at Park View Mennonite Church. He began by talking about lament, doubt, and questioning God, even getting angry in prayer. It was a good reminder to hear that the psalmists and the prophets are on the side of questioners, doubters, and angry prayers everywhere, even going so far as to

The ROI of RJ: Rehumanization

2011-11-22T12:49:00.001-05:00

Photo by Jeff Frost via Flickr In an impassioned op-ed piece over at NationofChange, Christopher Petrella paints a troubling picture of the state of corrections in the United States and the paths which brought us here. Particularly troubling is what Petrella calls "the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and profitability." Not only is the phenomenon of for-profit

The Honnold Forum: A requiem

2011-11-20T21:57:00.000-05:00

For the first year of this blog's existence, I was in the final year of moderating an online community called "The Honnold Forum," or simply, "The Forum." Honnold started out as a high school rock band me and a few friends pulled together in 1996-'97. Three years later we had a website. Then from 2001 to 2010, the most prominent and active feature of that website became the Forum, which

The occupation of policing social movements

2011-11-01T11:36:00.000-04:00

Conversation at Occupy Chicago (Photo by Michael Kappel via Flickr) James Cavanaugh, a retired ATF executive, offers a good picture of the role of police in the #occupy movement in this op-ed piece posted to Tickle the Wire, a site focused on federal law enforcement. Most notably, he encourages the "greatly underutilized" resources of police negotiators to form relationships and build trust

From quietism to the blogosphere

2011-10-29T11:44:00.003-04:00

Dirk Willems in the digital age? Yesterday, I had the pleasure of conducting a break-out session at the 2011 Anabaptist Communicators Conference, which was hosted here at Eastern Mennonite University. The conference theme was "Anabaptism in a Visual Age" and my session was billed as follows... From quietism to the blogosphere Surveying Anabaptist online engagement This session will survey

Sink deep roots

2011-10-26T23:17:00.000-04:00

From: Building Peoplehood and Peace My first encounter with sociologist Robert Bellah came just last week when I read this excellent interview with him: The Roots of Religion, conducted by the folks at Big Questions Online. The ways in which he describes religion have to be some of the best I've heard from a secular social scientist. Most appealing to me is that he describes religions as

The stumbling journey onward

2011-10-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

With two of my students in Ethiopia Before coming to EMU three years ago for graduate studies, I could hardly imagine that someday soon I would sense God calling me to be a teacher. The development of this sense has oftentimes been painful, but just as often, it has been exhilarating. My call to the set-aside ministry in the church, which preceded our coming to Virginia, has always been

To faithfully #Occupy

2011-10-20T11:07:00.000-04:00

A theodoodle for occupation During seminary chapel worship on Tuesday, we were given a time to be reflective and write. We were supposed to write about something different than what I ended up writing about, but whatever. So here are a few theological notes and questions in relationship to the Occupy movement. The very word "occupy" is not neutral. Occupation can have quite an oppressive

Political correctness and humor on the Open Graph

2011-10-17T22:41:00.001-04:00

Satan from "Coffee With Jesus"via Radio Free Babylon Sometimes you look into the vast world created by the immanent frame and never know the frame itself there. This can last for years, a lifetime even. It's normal. Then...sometimes, the immanent frame winks back at you. And you feel very small. This happened to me this morning on Facebook. I posted on my wall strip #118 of the webcomic,

Theodoodling?

2011-10-12T23:10:00.001-04:00

In early June of this year, I had the pleasure of speaking about blogging to a later manifestation of the same class which helped birth this very blog, "Research as Art and Transformation," with Howard Zehr and Paulette Moore. This time around, the class was being held during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (shameless ad: I just finished the website today and registration for SPI 2012 is open

Beasts for the Kingdom: A prayer

2011-10-12T14:27:00.000-04:00

Beasts of burden, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia This morning for a final-year seminary class, my fellow seminarians and I were led through a time of guided retreat. In the seminary chapel there were set up four stations, each asking a different question. One about how we conduct our closest relationships, another about our public ministry, and yet another about how we take care of ourselves personally

On the social media wave of the Nobel Peace Prize

2011-10-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

Leymah Gbowee Nobel Peace Prize winner & CJP alumna On Friday of last week, I had the most fun day at work ever. I had the fortune of being the web & social media nerd for the alma mater of a Nobel Peace Prize winner! Liberian nonviolent peace activist, Leymah Gbowee, was one of three women to win the 2011 prize. She is also a 2007 alumna of Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice

"Restorative theology" as a toddling two year-old

2011-10-04T15:54:00.000-04:00

Appropriate image by gfpeck via Flickr. Happy belated second birthday to this here blog, Restorative Theology, which saw its first post published on Saturday, October 3, 2009! The reasons I gave in that first post for naming the blog as such still seem right, and in some ways have deepened through further study, blogging, and ministry experience. Yes, "restorative theology" does seem to name

The "Jewish State" revisited

2011-10-03T12:04:00.000-04:00

Sari Nusseibeh, professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, has a fascinating op-ed piece up at Al Jazeera... Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State' Nusseibeh makes a number of points which resonate with the theopolitical literature I've been absorbing over the past year or more, found mainly in the work of William T. Cavanaugh. The article highlights the complex nature