gathering in light

Barclay Press, the main Evangelical Quaker publisher, has totally revamped their website and invited five columnists to write for them over the next year. I am one of their columnists, along with Joseph Thouvenel, Pam Ferguson,  Eric Muhr, and Nancy Thomas. The new site and featured columns launched yesterday. I was really excited to receive the invitation to write for Barclay, they’ve played a big role in helping me first get published, their staff is wonderful to work with, and I really like what they’re doing their.  As a press they have a great mix of spirituality and faith in everyday life, emerging and missional church theology and Quaker books available.

A blog I read fairly often has been posting quotes from Yoder’s essay on tradition, they’re worth sharing here, plus you might as well check out INHABITATIO DEI.

“We are not talking about ‘the authority of tradition’ as if tradition were a settled reality and we were then to figure out how it works. We are asking how, within the maelstrom of the traditioning process, we can keep our bearings and distinguish between the way the stream should be going and side channels that eddy but lead nowhere. Can we do this by some criterion beyond ourselves? The peculiarity of the term ‘tradition’ is that it points to that criterion beyond itself to which it claims to be a witness. We are therefore doing no violence to the claim of tradition when we test it by its fidelity to that origin. A witness is not being dishonored when we test his fidelity as an interpreter of the events to which he testifies. That is his dignity as witness; he wants to be tested for that.�

–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition�, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 77-78. From here.

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 This past weekend I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, at a Quakers United in Publication (QUIP) conference. There was a really great group of people there, writers, publishers, editors, bloggers, you name it, if they’re interested in publishing and they’re Quaker there’s a good chance they were there (or should have been!). I was one of the people accepted to the editorial board for the second Quaker Young Adult book, an edited volume of essays and artwork projected to come out in 2010. The weekend was spent doing a panel for the rest of the QUIP members and then collaborating with my fellow editors on a call for submissions for the book, as well as some basic overall structure for the project, etc. [Read more]

I’ve been using the GTD system since I first setup my Moleskine GTD for students and am getting a decent amount out of it. But I’ve struggled with finding ways to keep things straight with all the information flying at me on my mac. I’ve been working on using five separate DevonThink databases for all my research and work, these separate databases have really helped me keep things focused (they are home, academics, teaching, projects, and field research). But the more projects I begin work on, the more things there are to keep track of that fall outside the powers of DT. The trouble for me is keeping everything else straight, todo’s, dates, random notes, emails, etc. I’ve tried the various GTD programs put out by Apple developers but I’m not about to dish out $40 for a program that helps me “get things done.” I found a delightful and simple solution the other day when I stumbled across Dennis Best’s post “Getting things done (simply) in Leopard.” It’s really great, really simple, and uses all the apps that are pre-installed on your mac, apps that you’re most likely using anyways. He walks through how to setup Apple Mail and iCal for GTD and offers a few great scripts for those of us who needs things put in laymen’s terms (that’s me). Anyways, check the post out, maybe it will help, and save you a few bucks. [Read more]

Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Mouw was invited to be a part of a roundtable of thinkers commenting on the Pope’s recent visit to the US for the New York Times.

But the attraction of a pope-in-a-stadium has its own unique meaning, I think. In a “post-modern” age Benedict represents something that is decidedly pre-modern. He comes to America as one who knows how to walk ancient paths. He models a chastity that stands in sharp contrast to the easy promiscuity of our culture. Yet he is conversant with our present-day patterns of thought. He brings much learning to what he has to say to us.

From Richard Mouw’s Stadium Religion

You can read his three posts here:

•  I really liked his thoughts on Evangelicals and Catholics in Dialogue: Why the Pope Speaks for Evangelicals, Too
• On Faith and Human Rights
• Stadium Religion

Tom Sine’s recent book, The New Conspirator’s, has been gaining a lot of attention since it was released last month. This week he’s staying with my friend and emerging peace church activist Jarrod McKenna. Tom and his wife are staying in Australia with McKenna at the Peace Tree community, and traveling around Perth doing some speaking engagements. Today, both Jarrod and Tom were interviewed on a local Perth radio station about the book, and some of the connections between Tom’s book and what Jarrod and the Peace Tree community aredoing. You can check out the radio interview over at Rodney Olson’s website. 

• New Conspirator’s Website
• Paternoster Website (for UK)
• Beyond Four Walls Review
• Mustard Seed Associates Website

I’m pretty excited about what the Peace Tree is doing, and what Tom is trying to encourage through his four streams of church renewal. The four streams are missional, mosaic, emergent and new monastic. As you all know these have been around for awhile, and so it is not Tom who is guilty of my comments below, as much as all of us (I am as much an insider in this conversation as the rest of us). Yet, I have also had some cautions (or maybe criticisms) of these as categories when it comes to identifying with them as the categories that define our movements.

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 I’ve talked about Peet’s Coffee and Teas enough on this website to give yet another shameless (and unsolicited) advertisement for them. For me, Peet’s is that one place I can go where I’m undistracted from the internet, friends, and the endless list of things to do at home, plus with the extra high-octane coffee I am able to get superhuman amounts of work done. I’ve written too many papers, articles and read way to many books there not to have a special affinity for that space and their brew. And so the poem below really made me laugh. The brother of a friend of ours from church wrote this poem for the “Why I Love Peet’s” contest: [Read more]

Hear my prayer, O Lord; let not my soul fail under Thy discipline, nor let me fail in uttering to Thee Thy mercies: by them Thou has drawn me out of all my most evil ways, that I should find more delight in Thee than in all the temptations I once ran after, and should love Thee more intensely, and lay hold upon Thy and with all my heart’s strength, and be delivered from every temptation unto the end.

O Lord, my King and my God: may whatever of value I learnt as a boy be used for Thy service, and what I now do in speaking and writing and reading and figuring. When I was learning vain things, Though didst discipline me: and the sin of the delight I had in those vain things, Thou has forginven me. Among those studies, I learned many a useful word, but these might have been learnt equall well in studies not vain: and that surely is the safe way for the young to tread.

(Augustine, Confessions, translated by F.J. Sheed, 1993: 15)

I’ve been reading through the Confessions again at the persistent prodding of my buddy Kyle and this was a little treasure I came across this morning.