Video courtesy YouTube (http://bit.ly/121gwUX)

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A Twitter feed photo of Kevin Durant’s tattooed back.

A man thought to be a British soldier was killed by two men in a frenzied attack on a London street. After being run over by a car, the man was hacked with cleavers by men who claimed to be Muslim. One of them told a TV reporter, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

Perhaps they should take a lesson from the pope.

In remarks at a Mass on Wednesday, Pope Francis said building walls against non-Catholics leads to “killing in the name of God.”

“To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy,” the pope said.

In other Vatican news, a financial watchdog group said it had detected six possible attempts to use the Holy See to launder money last year.

An atheist lawmaker’s decision to give the daily prayer at the Arizona House of Representatives triggered a do-over from a Christian lawmaker who said the previous day’s prayer didn’t pass muster.

WaPo posted the text of the “prayer,” by Democratic Rep. Juan Mendez of Tempe:

“In this room, let us cherish and celebrate our shared humanness, our shared capacity for reason and compassion, our shared love for the people of our state, for our Constitution and for our democracy.”

Mild-mannered and respectful, I say.

The Anti-Defamation League is going after Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for making anti-Semitic statements at a Detroit church appearance. Farrakhan denounced “Satanic Jews” and the “synagogue of Satan” that he said controls major U.S. institutions.

Who says New Yorkers are godless? The city council passed a resolution calling on state lawmakers to protect their right to rent worship space on Sundays.

Of course, everyone knows Brooklyn is mecca for hipsters. Right?

Trying to outdo the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s “Jesus was the original hipster” ad campaign, Chabad of North Brooklyn recently released a “Unite the Beards” video with the theme, “Hasid and hipster, not as different as you think.” But no bearded hipsters turned out for a forum on the subject of facial hair. Just bearded Hasidim.

Not quite hipster, more dermal art aficionado: Check out basketball player Kevin Durant tattooed back. It includes a portrait of Jesus and a quote from James 1: 2:4.

A prominent American Jewish leader was warned about a serious Holocaust compensation scam more than eight years before the fraud became public.

Julius Berman, chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, failed to act on the fraud taking place, The Forward is reporting.

The Boy Scouts of America’s national leadership will vote today on whether to allow openly gay Scouts in its ranks. Stay tuned for more coverage.

Kellie Kotraba looks at the growing role of gay Mormon characters in theater and literature.

An American missionary priest entangled in a dispute over the ownership of two mission hospitals in Kenya has been suspended from the priesthood by his order. He sued a cardinal and a nun.

Chelsea Clinton, a Methodist who married a Jew, is stumping for interfaith relations. She is the co-founder and co-chairwoman of New York University’s Of Many Institute, a program for “multifaith” education.

Our own Jonathan Merritt interviewed Shane Claiborne, one of the leaders of the New Monasticism movement, which is made up of Protestants, mostly. Claiborne is pretty rad. He’s also pretty practical:

“One of my closest friends and mentors is an 80-year-old nun who’s as wild as they come. We’ve gone to jail together many times for protesting bad laws. (It’s always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!)”

And finally, who knew? The New York Times gushes about Brigham Young University’s computer animation program. “Out of nowhere, B.Y.U. — a Mormon university owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — has become a farm team for the country’s top animation studios and effects companies. Unlikely as it sounds, young Mormons are being sucked out of the middle of Utah and into the very centers of American pop-culture manufacturing.”

We won’t suck you out of anywhere for subscribing to the Roundup. But you might become part of a farm team knowledgeable about religion news.

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Hey Rev!

Sometimes I feel an overwhelming pull toward seminary. Other days I don’t. How do I know whether or not I’m supposed to go?

- Student

Dear Student:

“The place God calls you to,” Frederick Buechner tells us, “is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Discovering where that place may be for each of us is what we know as discernment. Discernment is often challenging work. That’s because God rarely calls us in a loud and unambiguous fashion: for every heavenly vision, God sends us thousands of holy whispers. Discernment is also challenging because God so often invites us to do things which, as Paul puts it, sure appear to be foolish. Anyone who has heeded God’s call — whether it be to having a child or changing careers or beginning retirement or going to seminary— will tell you that there are moments when she wonders if she isn’t doing something that is totally misguided.

Priest looking to sky in front of a church photo courtesy Shutterstock (http://shutr.bz/12WHl8j)

Discernment is more like searching for clues in a great forest than it is like pulling answers out of a box. Mercifully, however, the work of discernment does get easier with practice. Over time, you begin to learn where the clues are likely to be hidden.

Here are a few things, Student, that I have learned during my years of searching.

First, make sure that you talk with God about this decision. God enjoys having conversations such as this one. Share your anxieties, your passions, your uncertainties. Hold your questions before God. You may be surprised by what she has to say.

Second, be open to the people through whom God may give you advice. My experience is that God often speaks through the voices of friends and of teachers. Do the people whom you love, trust, and respect think that seminary is a great idea? Or are they saying “no” or, perhaps, “not yet”?

Third, use your imagination. Pretend that you have made the decision to go to seminary. How does that feel? And now pretend that you have said, “no thanks.” How does that feel? Which decision makes you the most free, the most passionate, the most energized, the most at home?

Fourth, allow yourself to sit with this question in abundant silence. God doesn’t like to shout. Laptops and smartphones are fabulous technology. But, if you rarely look away from your screen, you may not even notice God when she is sitting right beside you.

Fifth, decide that you’re going to make a decision. A clear ending is vital to any period of discernment. Without the promise of an ending, discernment will slowly ossify and turn into paralysis and regret.

Finally, Student, whatever decision you make, commit yourself to it entirely. This is a diving board moment. Like a marriage proposal, like the opportunity to move to a new city by yourself, like the words which you may or may not speak to a dying friend. The decision that you make is going to shape your life in profound, unexpected, wondrous, and permanent ways. Trying to do this partway won’t work.

Is seminary the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet? Is it where God is calling you to be? Or is that place somewhere else for you?

Whatever your answer may be, jump in. Give all of yourself to whatever you choose to do.

Have a question about life, love, or faith? Post it as a comment or email it to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org, or submit your question online privately.

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As seems to happen all too often in a troubled world, religious people are left to struggle with these riddles of life and belief following the tornado that devastated Moore, Okla., on Monday, killing at least 24, including at least nine children, injuring hundreds, and destroying homes and buildings by the score.

People have struggled mightily over the centuries to make sense of the evil that happens on the watch of a God believed to be both beneficent and omnipotent. Legion is the ex-believers who cite the inescapable problem of evil in their explanations for why they gave up faith. But to this friendly religious skeptic, the persistence of evil hardly disproves the existence of a good and all-powerful God — provided we’re clear about what we mean by “all powerful.”

If you’re set on maintaining that a loving God controls every little thing, well, good luck squaring that with the suffering of innocents and deaths of children. But if we’re talking about the idea of love, the idea of dignity, the idea of hope, these endure no matter what hideous circumstances befall us on the ground. These are undefeated, unconquerable. In this sense, it’s possible for the doubting, the wavering, the skeptical, and the grieving to reconcile the power and goodness of God with the ample evidence to the contrary.

Not only possible, but extremely helpful.

“We’ve been through this before,” Moore city manager Steve Eddy said. “Our citizens are resilient.” Although Moore was speaking of the tornados that have struck his city in the past, he could well have been describing the human experience. We have been through tragedies before. And we are resilient, invariably drawing upon wells of faith and strength we scarcely knew we had to get us through.

Writing in Christianity Todayabout last winter’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which 20 Connecticut school children were murdered, Philip Yancey eloquently describes the ways in which Christian faith asserts itself, in the most consoling and uplifting ways, in the wake of unfathomable disaster:

“Tragedy rightly calls faith into question,” Yancey writes, “but it also affirms faith. It is good news that we are not the random byproducts of a meaningless universe, but rather creations of a loving God who wants to live with us forever.”

To his Christian audience, Yancey offers the hope of Easter, the empty tomb, the Resurrection. God, he writes, will restore all. As one in the practice of translating explicitly religious claims into universal concepts to which I can relate, and presumably all can relate regardless of creed or affiliation, I welcome the comfort and perspective these words bring.

But they still skirt the central question. Why did an omnipotent God allow Newtown? How can a vicious tornado kill kids when God is good?

There is, alas, no good answer. Unless, that is, believers can arrive at a deeper understanding of God’s omnipotence. They won’t have to look far for clues. No farther than Moore, Okla., in fact, where flawed but generally good-hearted people are going about the tasks that people always go about after tragedy: tending to the injured, consoling the grief-stricken, and beginning the long work of rebuilding their devastated community.

Christians believe that the people of the church are the hands and feet of God. It’s in this way that God intervenes and comforts in the darkest times. It’s in this way hope and goodness endure, no matter what. And it’s in this way that God, or love, or the transcendent, or whatever word you want to use for the ultimate, prove to be all good and all powerful, even in the face of evil.

They have, in fact, never been defeated.

(Tom Krattenmaker is a Portland-based writer specializing in religion in public life and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. He is the author of the new book “The Evangelicals You Don’t Know.”)

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“This theology is, in a word, abusive, for it blames the victim for whatever calamity, abuse, or tragedy she suffers and says it is deserved.”

– Evangelical writer Rachel Held Evans, criticizing Minneapolis pastor and author John Piper for using natural disasters, such as the Oklahoma City tornado, to explain the wrath of God.

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Pope Francis waves to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Tuesday (March 19) at the Vatican. RNS photo by Andrea Sabbadini

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“(T)his ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God,” Francis said Wednesday (May 22) in remarks at the informal morning Mass that he celebrates in the chapel at the Vatican guesthouse where he lives.

“And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

Francis explained that doing good is not a matter of faith: “It is a duty, it is an identity card that our Father has given to all of us, because he has made us in his image and likeness.”

To both atheists and believers, he said that “if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good.”

In a passage that may prompt a theological debate about the nature of salvation, the pontiff also declared that God “has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone!”

“Even the atheists,” he said to those who might question his assertion. “Everyone!”

Wednesday’s remarks displayed the kind of plain-spokenness that has become a hallmark of Francis’ homilies and speeches, and they also developed themes that Francis frequently mentions in a pontificate that is just over two months old.

One is that the Catholic Church must be open to the world and not “self-referential, closed in on herself,” as he said last weekend at Pentecost. Another is that the church must be humble and recognize its own shortcomings, and that it should be tolerant of nonbelievers.

Francis’ homily on Wednesday was inspired by the passage in the Gospel of Mark in which the disciples tell Jesus that they tried to stop someone from driving out demons because he was not one of their party.

Jesus rebukes them saying: “There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us.”

The pope’s remarks were reported by Vatican Radio.

KRE/AMB END GIBSON

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Religion News Service graphic “25 plays in 20 years: Homosexuality and Mormonism in theater” by Tiffany McCallen and Kellie Kotraba/Columbia FAVS

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(RNS) Twenty years ago, a gay Mormon character stepped onstage for the first time. His name was Joe Pitt, and he was in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.”

Pitt lived in New York with a good reputation and a bad marriage to a woman addicted to Valium. As colleagues dealt with the devastation and uncertainty of AIDS – it was the 1980s – he grappled with openly acknowledging his sexuality. He was Mormon. And gay. And the two didn’t mix.

Before Pitt, there was a gay Mormon character in a novel: Brigham Anderson, in Allan Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” published in 1959. But words like “gay” and “homosexual” weren’t used; it was all innuendo.

Teresa Sanderson performs in Plan-B Theatre’s ERIC(A). Photo by Rick Pollock/courtesy Plan-B Theatre

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Now, the scene has changed: Gay Mormon characters and themes have a growing role in theater and literature.

Utah playwright Eric Samuelsen said “Angels in America” was a turning point: “For a lot of LDS playwrights, part of the reaction to that play was, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’”

But the biggest catalyst came in 2008, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints threw its weight behind Proposition 8, the ballot measure that ended gay marriages in California. Prop 8 is now before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected in coming weeks.

“I really believe that Prop 8 really inspired a lot of people to say, ‘I’m not taking this anymore, I’m going to write my story,’” said Gerald Argetsinger, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Gerald Argetsinger gives a talk at the University of Missouri about the increasing number of gay Mormon characters and themes in theater. He is also the editor of an anthology of short works that deal with homosexuality and Mormonism, due out this summer. RNS photo by Kellie Kotraba/Columbia FAVS

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Argetsinger, who is gay and Mormon himself, has spent the past few years working with friends to compile works that contain gay Mormon themes and characters. Their anthology, “Latter-Gay Saints: An Anthology of Gay Mormon Fiction,” is due out this July from Lethe Press.

Looking back to 1959, they found more than 200 plays, short stories and novels — half are from the past five years.

In the past 20 years, 25 plays with gay Mormon characters or themes have been professionally produced or performed as major shows on college or university campuses, with more than 15 in the past five years.

The growth of gay Mormon theater comes against a culture shift in how the Mormon church relates to gays and lesbians. The church-run website mormonsandgays.org pairs the church’s official stance – “(homosexual) attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is” – with stories of gay Mormons and their families and friends.

Another independent group, Mormons Building Bridges, is “dedicated to conveying love and acceptance to LGBT individuals.”

Shell-shocked by the backlash set off by the church’s support of Prop 8, the church has largely sat out recent statewide fights over gay marriage, and recently announced its support for the compromise proposal of the Boy Scouts of America to allow gay youth but exclude gay leaders.

Fiction has provided a way to talk about the lingering tensions on both sides.

After “Angels in America,” there was Mark O’Donnell’s “Strangers on Earth,” Paul Rudnick’s “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” and Neil Labute’s “A Gaggle of Saints.”

Logan Tarantino and Topher Rasmussen perform in Plan-B Theatre’s ‘Adam & Steve and the Empty Sea”. Photo by Rick Pollock/courtesy Plan-B Theatre

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In 2001, Moises Kaufmann’s “The Laramie Project” told the story of the beating death of gay rights icon Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. One of the men who beat him was Mormon, and the show put a spotlight on the church’s uneasy relationship with homosexuality.

More recent works involve two subsets of characters in the gay-and-Mormon narrative: women and missionaries. Argetsinger has noticed a difference between gays and lesbians in the way they write about the church.

“Lesbians are able to put the church behind them better than Mormon men are,” Argetsinger said. When they leave the church, they don’t look back in writing. They just leave.

Only four of the 25 gay and Mormon plays in the past 20 years have been written by women: Julie Jensen’s “Wait” in 2005, Carol Lynn Pearson’s “Facing East” in 2006, Laekin Rogers’ “Hands of Sodom” in 2008 and Melissa Leilani Larson’s “Little Happy Secrets” in 2009.

A poster for the play “Missionary Position”, written and performed by Steven Fales. Photo courtesy Steven Fales

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Gay missionaries make frequent appearances. In 2009, Steven Fales’ “Missionary Position” told the story of a “squeaky-clean Mormon boy on his mission, trying to hide his homosexuality.” That same year, Devan Mark Hite told the story of another gay Mormon missionary with “Since ‘Psychopathia Sexualis.’”

In 2011, “The Book of Mormon” musical stormed Broadway – and so did its gay missionary character. The show has been wildly successful, which Argetsinger credits to the show’s satirical approach.

A newer show, Matthew Greene’s “Adam and Steve and the Empty Sea,” tells the story of a missionary and his gay best friend. It premiered this January at Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City – a venue dedicated to highlighting the works of Utah playwrights.

Although some of its recent shows have dealt with homosexuality and Mormonism, Plan-B’s producing director Jerry Rapier said that’s not necessarily the focus. He thinks in terms of “a character who happens to be gay and Mormon, instead of a gay Mormon character.”

In February, Plan-B brought the first transgender Mormon character to the stage in Matthew Ivan Bennett’s “ERIC(A).” The show is about a man grappling with a sex change operation after years spent living as a Mormon housewife.

Matthew Greene’s “Adam and Steve and the Empty Sea,” tells the story of a missionary and his gay best friend. Photo courtesy Plan-B Theatre

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An insider perspective makes the shows work, said Rapier, who is gay. “They ring true because they are written by active, faithful Mormons,” he said.

Many of the stories are based in reality – take Samuelsen’s “Duets.” It’s part of three one-act plays slated to open next season, and it’s about a woman who tells her best friend that her husband is gay.

“It’s a fictional play, but I could plug in the names and faces of lots of kids I’ve known,” said Samuelsen, who taught at church-owned Brigham Young University for 20 years and watched several college-age women marry men they knew were gay.

Plan-B’s producing director Jerry Rapier. Photo courtesy Jerry Rapier

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Self-publishing has also propelled the increase in works about homosexuality and Mormonism. That’s what worked for Seattle writer Johnny Townsend, who collaborated with Argetsinger on the upcoming anthology.

He’s written at least 70 short stories and sold at least 1,200 books. Many of his characters are Mormon or Jewish – he’s a former Mormon, now a non-practicing Jew. Some of them are gay.

Self-publishing allows for targeting a niche audience, but Townsend said that audience is “not nearly big enough.”

Ironically, he said, sometimes the people most intimately connected with the stories aren’t interested. People who are gay and Mormon – or were Mormon – “are over it; they don’t want to read about Mormons anymore.”

(Kellie Kotraba is the editor of Columbia Faith & Values.)

KRE/AMB END KOTRABA

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Chelsea Clinton speaks during the National Day of Service, Inaugural Weekend 2013. Photo courtesy Avelino Maestas via Flickr (http://flic.kr/p/dMMPYe)

The former first daughter is now the co-founder and co-chairwoman of New York University’s Of Many Institute, a program for “multifaith” education. Its website says the institute “supports a new generation of religious and civic leaders who, deeply rooted in their own religious and spiritual traditions, reach across faith boundaries to solve social problems together.”

Clinton’s new job was reported first by the New York Post. There was no press release or big announcement, the newspaper reported — just her bio downloaded onto the program’s website.

Clinton is Christian and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, is Jewish. She told Time magazine last year that she was interested in helping to create, support and sustain multifaith leadership.

“I find that really fascinating and fantastic … it’s something that’s quite close to home,” Clinton said in September. “It’s something that I personally care a lot about and I’m committed to helping people who are really doing the work make it happen.”

Clinton has been taking a more active role at the Clinton Global Initiative, which was founded by her father, former President Bill Clinton. She also works as a special correspondent for NBC News and has taught at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Since 2010, Clinton has been affiliated with NYU as assistant vice provost for the Global Network University.

(Catalina Camia writes for USA Today.)

KRE/AMB END CAMIA

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Maryknoll seminary building in New York. Photo courtesy Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers

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The New York-based Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers suspended the Rev. Dr. William Charles Fryda after he refused to drop a case he filed three years ago against Cardinal John Njue and Sister Marie Therese Gachambi, the mother superior of Assumption Sisters of Nairobi.

Fryda alleges that the cardinal and the nuns were attempting to seize control of St. Mary’s Mission Hospital, which has branches in Nairobi and Kenya’s third-largest city, Nakuru.

Fryda left his home in the U.S. to work and live in Tanzania and Kenya in 1980. Having trained as a doctor, the missionary wanted to help poor Kenyans access medical services. Many could not afford services in private and government-run hospitals.

Within 15 years, he has built two hospitals, one in Nairobi and the other in Nakuru, about 150 kilometers north of Nairobi.

Because he was a foreigner, Fryda enlisted the help of the nuns to register the land on which the hospitals were built. The agreement with the nuns was that the hospital would later be transferred to a new company, known as St. Mary’s Mission Hospital Limited. The attempt to put the institutions under the new company sparked the dispute.

By then, the priest was attempting to build a similar hospital under the same name in central Kenya, when the nuns branded him a trespasser and asked him to move off their land.

The Maryknoll order asked Fryda to drop his suit, and many missionaries say the suit paints them and the Kenyan Catholic Church in a bad light, according to one Maryknoll priest who did not want to be named.

Last year Njue asked the court to refer the suit for arbitration within the Catholic Church. His lawyers argued the case could be resolved through the church’s internal canon law, but Fryda’s lawyers argued the case should remain in civil courts.

He later filed a constitutional petition seeking to stop the cardinal and the Maryknoll Society and its regional superior, the Rev. Lance Nadeau, from interfering with his rights.

Nadeau then circulated a May 1 letter that said, “With exception of the sacrament of penance in danger of death, Father Fryda is suspended from exercising any public priestly ministry or governance in the church.”

Fryda’s lawyers said the priest declined to comment on the case.

KRE/AMB END NZWILI

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Isaac Villegas, courtesy Faith & Leadership

An occasional offering from Faith & Leadership, Duke Divinity School’s online magazine on the practice of Christian leadership.

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A few years ago, I was asked to preach at an annual board meeting for my denomination, Mennonite Church USA. Then 28, with barely three years’ experience as a pastor, I was honored to be invited. But I was also nervous about the prospect of speaking to an assembly of 200 respected church leaders.

Not wanting to look out of place, I asked a friend who was familiar with these sorts of meetings for advice about what to wear. Suit and tie? Tie but no coat? Coat but no tie?

He told me not to worry and to wear what I had on — a T-shirt, jeans and my Chuck Taylor All Stars.

“They’re asking you to preach to them because you’re young and they’re old, so look as young as you are,” he said. “They want to see youthfulness.”

After much deliberation, I went with the tie-but-no-coat option — and left the Chuck Taylors at home. When I arrived at the conference center, I was relieved to see that I had managed to satisfy the unwritten dress code.

But even so, wardrobe aside, I knew immediately that I still stuck out: I was in my 20s; the church leaders were not. In fact, virtually the only other young people in the crowd were two women who, I soon found out, were the other speakers.

The three of us, I discovered, were there to speak for our generation, to share our youthful hopes for our denomination. We were the eventual heirs of the church; the 200 of them were God’s faithful servants who had spent decades building and sustaining a church that they would one day entrust to a new generation. The three of us spoke with unearned confidence, but the crowd received our words with warmth and grace, respect and gratitude.

Afterward, I realized that my friend was right. They wanted me because I was young. They would have loved my Chucks.

As you can probably guess from my age and my surname, I fit at least two underrepresented demographics among church leaders in many denominations: pastors under 35 and pastors who are Latino (especially those who happen to be acculturated enough to write and speak in English).

So whenever I’m asked to write or speak or join a committee, I can’t help but wonder, Why? Is it because I am, at least for the next few years, young? Is it because I’m Latino? Or is it because I am — to borrow the phrase that Jack Donaghy on NBC’s “30 Rock” uses to describe his African-American, Harvard-educated employee — a “toofer,” a “two-for-one,” one person who satisfies two desired demographics?

As the child of Latino immigrants and a member of a generation that is by all accounts heading out the church door, I confess that I sometimes wonder whether I am valued only because I am a “two-for-one.” I can’t help but worry that I’m wanted only to the extent that I fit someone’s stereotype of an authentic minority or a bona fide young person.

In her book “Sister Outsider,” the late African-American writer and activist Audre Lorde wrote about how all of us want to “be seen as whole people in our actual complexities.” The problem, Lorde said, is that “we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own.”

Inevitably, those expectations will not be met. People who are invited to participate because they fill a missing demographic category or otherwise satisfy someone’s definition of a minority are ultimately “going to be found wanting in some way,” Lorde wrote.

Lorde, for example, noticed how some did not find her black enough or womanly enough. In my case, I worry that I won’t be brown enough or young enough to meet others’ expectations about what I am supposed to look and sound like. Does my accent sound Latino enough? Does my beard make me look older than they want me to be?

But as Lorde explained, we are at our best only when we act out of wholeness, when we can call upon all the pieces that make up who we are as individuals.

“My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly,” Lorde wrote, “allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definitions.”

I understand what Lorde is saying, and I want what she wants. I want to be invited to participate and to join in the struggle for hope. I want myself and others to be free to wander in and out of stereotypes and to offer our minority identities, our difference, “not in order to be used, but in order to be creative,” as Lorde put it.

I want to be part of a group that allows each person to be ordinary and strange, to be the same and different, to be whoever we happen to be and whoever we have to be, as we work together to create communities of abundant life.

“I came that they may have life,” Jesus said, “and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 NRSV).

I’ve found such life among my Mennonite sisters and brothers. That’s why I welcomed the chance to speak as a young adult to our denominational leaders. I knew that we — both the leaders and the young people they had chosen as speakers — were committed to the same work, the abundant life of Jesus, here and now.

Yet I know what it feels like when a group wants me to play a part, to use me to legitimate a project unrelated to my hopes and the hopes of the demographic I’m supposed to represent. I’m wary of tokenism, where people want to use my otherness for their own purposes, regardless of how that would affect me and my people.

There’s always a risk that a group might try to use my identity, my difference, to make their project more valuable and more appealing to a wider public. Even with suspicion in the back of my mind, I take the risk, because I long for the church that the apostle Paul described in 1 Corinthians, where the body of Christ “does not consist of one member but of many” — a church full of many identities, not of sameness, all working together in the movement of the Holy Spirit for the sake of all of us (1 Corinthians 12:14).

The only way to discern what is good for all of us is for all of us to risk working together, to experiment with the creative power that comes from putting our different identities in conversation.

For, as Paul wrote, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). The common good is something we discover along the way, as we make room for the Holy Spirit to manifest God’s presence in the midst of our differences.

Isaac S. Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship in Chapel Hill, N.C., and teaches classes in prisons with Project TURN. 

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