Restorative Theology

Ecclesia and Occupy: Through a glass darkly

2012-05-23T12:46:00.003-04:00

Paulette Moore speaks about Occupy Harrisonburg,at the #Occupy Empire conference last month. Arun Gupta has a great analysis of the Occupy movement's history (albeit brief) and current state of affairs, posted at the Al Jazeera English site: What happened to the Occupy Movement? Especially powerful in my reading is his section, "Colonised by consumption," where he argues that the public

Theological technologist?

2012-05-21T19:00:00.000-04:00

Koru photo adapted from Jonathon Colman via Flickr. More transitions are afoot these days, in addition to what the last two posts have indicated. While my blogging here has frequently made reference to my academic work at EMU, I rarely talked about my professional work at the same institution. For almost as long as I was a graduate student, I was also the Web and Information Systems

Who is this blog for?

2012-05-16T08:59:00.001-04:00

My wife and I had an interesting conversation the other night about the nature of my public writing on this blog, and how it has been received in various social circles in which I find myself. At this transitional point in our life together as a family, I've been in a reflective mood in general, but as it relates to this blog and our conversation, it seems the right time to ask: Who is this

Lead me not into temptation: Restorative Theology after grad school

2012-05-02T10:29:00.002-04:00

"not many of you were wise by human standards... God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise"(1 Cor. 1:26-27) The sands are shifting. This blog was born in the first half of four grueling years of graduate school, which came to a close this past weekend. My writing on this blog thus far often served as a testing ground for applying in-class reading to pressing issues and concerns

P.S. to "A justice system at its best"

2012-04-18T16:49:00.001-04:00

Photo by my mommy!(Click for the whole gallery.) In my part-time role as Web & Information Systems Coordinator for EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, hands-down one of my favorite parts of the job is being co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog. Over the past few days I've been working with a part-time CJP student in my home state of Iowa, who wrote up an excellent restorative

Anatomy of a mini-conference

2012-04-17T18:40:00.001-04:00

Peter Dula and Chris Haw field questions from participants. (Click for more photos.) This past weekend, seven months of shared work between my friend, Aaron Kauffman, and I came to fruition. #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Misison was by most anecdotal accounts a great success. Around 60 people converged on the Discipleship Center, perched atop the campus of Eastern Mennonite University,

#Occupy Empire in tweets

2012-04-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

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Three Brethren Desiring the Kingdom

2012-04-10T08:31:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, Josh Brockway, my friend and fellow Brethren brother (and presenter at this week's #Occupy Empire conference!), fired up a new blog for the Brethren Life and Thought journal. Described as having "an Anabaptist and Radical Pietist voice," the blog is intended to bring scholarly discourse amongst folks in the Schwarzenau Brethren tradition into the digital age, something

Easter at Arlington

2012-04-09T12:29:00.001-04:00

"He has risen." Easter sunrise at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. First, a confession: Holy Week did not feel very holy last week, at least in terms of how I engaged it. The demands of the final three weeks of grad school are starting to compress, and my participation in local worshiping bodies - seminary and our congregation - has been strained. No Wednesday evening lenten worship with

Micro-saga: On becoming a peacebuilder

2012-04-04T15:45:00.001-04:00

In March 2008, Howard Zehr entered my comfortable life as an IT professional climbing the corporate ladder in central Iowa...and he promptly pulled me off. This encounter with Howard led me and my family to EMU, the CJP and seminary, and the dual degree program between the two. To say that I’ve been challenged and changed is a vast understatement, and CJP has had a big say in that process. The

The Mennonite: "First Mennonite conference on Occupy..."

2012-03-26T08:32:00.000-04:00

Tim Nafziger Tim Nafziger has this great piece up at The Mennonite about our upcoming #Occupy Empire conference... First Mennonite conference on Occupy plus The American Spring I'm grateful to Tim for getting interviews with most of the keynote speakers, to get some of their thoughts on the Occupy movement and how this conference is related (or not). It also announces the fact that we

Keeping Yoder Christian

2012-03-20T15:43:00.002-04:00

"Love is a battlefield" As John Howard Yoder's legacy continues to make an impact on the theological academy, his work has become somewhat of a battleground for how to read and interpret his work. One recent book, Paul Martens' The Heterodox Yoder, attempts to make the argument that Yoder's theological ethics became quite non-theological over the course of his career, or that his "politics"

BL&T: In place of (non-sacraments): Re-enchanting the Brethren

2012-03-13T09:44:00.001-04:00

Over at the Brethren Life and Thought blog, I just posted my contribution to a three-part series of posts on James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom. Here's the link and the first bit of the post... In place of (non-)sacraments: Re-enchanting the Brethren While the Schwarzenau Brethren have long practiced the beautiful biblical-mimetic ritual we call “Love Feast,” there’s been the insistence

Tales from the Enlightenment: "religious freedom"

2012-03-08T12:02:00.003-05:00

Gather 'round, kids; grandpappy Kant has a story to tell! For a few weeks now I've been avoiding any news media outlets - which for me are entirely online. As election season has ramped up, I noticed how even my go-to-guys - Stewart and Colbert - have become almost exclusively fixated on the ugly vetting process for the Republican presidential candidate. It's become a sort of interpretive

Update on the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle thing

2012-03-07T15:35:00.002-05:00

Apparently Farmer Joe here is Joel Salatin Last fall when I was bellyaching about the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle video that sucked me in hook, line, and sinker...it had been some time since I'd actually eaten at a Chipotle. And that continued...until last night. After my family went to a movie we swung by the Chipote here in Harrisonburg, Virginia. As I approached the counter to order,

EMU News: Young Anabaptists Consider Mission in an "Occupied" World

2012-03-02T12:45:00.001-05:00

Occupy robots! (Photo by Howard Zehr) EMU News has a nice press release up about our upcoming conference, #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission. Here it is... Young Anabaptists Consider Mission in an “Occupied” World by Laura Amstutz Kauffman and Gumm wanted to play on and challenge the “occupy” language made popular in the last year by protesters around the country. “We wanted to

Wringing Out Saturated Selves: Christian Education in a Secular Age

2012-02-29T11:51:00.001-05:00

This morning I gave my senior capstone presentation at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which was based on a paper I wrote with the same name as this post. I've embedded the paper below, but let me make a few comments about the concerns animating this paper/presentation, the paper's major flow and points, and where it leads from here. I take the upcoming #Occupy Empire conference I'm helping organize

[Cross-post]: Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

2012-02-20T15:28:00.002-05:00

Mirrored digital Koru(Adapated from J. Colman via Flickr) One of the joys of being a tech and web nerd in my part-time job at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been getting in on the planning and implementation of the first-ever online class offered by the center, which just started on the first of this month but has been a year in the making. So I just posted this piece over at

#Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission

2012-02-16T00:51:00.000-05:00

Scrub that dirty ol' empire away! I hinted at it a few weeks ago. So now I'm very excited to announce that registration is now open for a mini-conference that my friend, Aaron Kauffman, and I are organizing as part of our senior capstone project at Eastern Mennonite Seminary... #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's MissionApril 13-14, 2012 - Eastern Mennonite Seminary Anabaptism at its best

Happy (Saint) Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T08:03:00.002-05:00

Let's remember the reason for the season... I first encountered Ted Swartz in my 20s at a Church of the Brethren district conference meeting in my home state of Iowa. At that time he was with his former partner, Lee Eshleman, who sadly took his own life after battling depression for years. Ted has continued to do comedy and lives here in Harrisonburg. He's also a graduate of Eastern

The fall of leadership: A Yoderian rejoinder to neo-Reformed sausage parties

2012-02-07T16:12:00.002-05:00

Mmmm...sausages... (Photo by Greg Peverill-Conti via Flickr) There's been some heated talk about masculinity and the Christian faith coming from the neo-Reformed movement these days. Lots of talk about what "real men" are like and such, and of course the related question of how women factor into these things. What strikes me is that most of the talking is being done by white dudes and, well,

There's power in the mall

2012-02-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

"Ouch, Charlie! OOOOOOUCH!"(Photo by ravindra gandhi via Flickr) Just as I wrapped up reading James K.A. Smith's excellent Desiring the Kingdom the other day, I noticed a post from the always-excellent theoblog supersite, The Other Journal: When is a Mall just a Mall? The Complexity of Reading Cultural Practices by Cory Willson & Robert Covolo The authors are two PhD students at Fuller,

#Occupying Empire: David Fitch eats and tweets at McDonald's

2012-02-02T11:24:00.004-05:00

David Fitch, ready for the mission field [Note: The preface to this post's title, "#Occupying Empre" is signaling a series of posts I'll likely do this spring. More importantly it's a reference to a conference that I'm putting together with a seminary friend: #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission. Registration isn't open yet and speaker/schedule info is forthcoming. So this is kind of

The shape of a conflict transformation course

2012-01-31T14:32:00.000-05:00

Tonight will be the first session of my "Intro to Conflict Transformation" course at Bridgewater College. I just put the finishing touches on the syllabus and sent it off to have photocopies made for the students. At this early stage of my becoming a teacher, I thought it would be good for later reflection to post some of the particulars of this course. So here's a bit of what the course is

AMP post: The Sacrement of Mission

2012-01-31T00:17:00.001-05:00

"I worship and love, therefore I am." Photo by Petra via Flickr. For the past four or five days I've been reading James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. It's about time, too, since I've been reading his blog, watching/listening to his lectures for almost two years now. In some ways I feel like I've already read a lot of it, but I'm still very