“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Church Attack Leaves Turkish Christians Troubled and Confused” – Jayson Casper in Christianity Today: “Turkish Christians are shaken by last weekend’s terrorist attack on a Catholic church in Istanbul. Claimed by ISIS, it comes amid threats that have already caused some believers to shy away from Sunday services. And like the rest of their nation, Christians are confused by details that eschew easy explanations. ‘Everyone is a little nervous, questioning the future,’ said Ali Kalkandelen, president of the Association of Protestant Churches (TeK). ‘And for the next few weeks—even months—everyone will watch their backs.’ Two masked gunmen casually walked into Mass at Santa Maria Catholic Church on Sunday morning, shot into the air, and killed one person. Security footage then shows them leaving the building, only slightly less casually than when they entered. A statement issued by Martin Kmetec, archbishop of Izmir and president of the Episcopal Conference of Turkey, expressed his community’s ‘shock’ that an innocent person was killed in a ‘sacred space of faith in God.’ It demanded better security for churches, a curb on the culture of hatred and religious discrimination, and that the truth be revealed. Shortly thereafter, security services arrested two foreign nationals, from Russia and Tajikistan. ISIS later published a statement saying the attack was in response to its call to ‘target Jews and Christians everywhere.’ The statement was followed by another from a group calling itself ISIS’s ‘Turkey Province,’ which said that it fired its pistols during the unbelievers’ ‘polytheistic rituals.'”
“The Tree of India” – Matthew J. Milliner in Comment: “Long before I had any familiarity with Hinduism, I dreamed about an upside-down tree. Its roots reached into the heavens; its branches and polychromed leaves covered the earth. Nearly a year after the dream, I read the Kata Upanishad for the first time:
The tree of Eternity has its roots above
And its branches on earth below.
Its pure root is Brahman the immortal,
From whom all the worlds draw their life, and whom
None can transcend. For this Self [i.e., God] is supreme!
A Jungian would call this coincidence casual proof for the theory of the collective unconscious, while the more skeptical might say I must have encountered the motif somewhere along the way without realizing it, which my subconscious simply recycled. Or maybe no explanation is required at all, as there is nothing entirely surprising about dreaming of an everyday object upside down. But the dream had that numinous character, which for me rules out the skeptical approach. A deeper explanation may be that the dream signals the enduring power of a subcontinent’s devotional medley to which we assign the word ‘Hinduism,’ a heritage that stretches back four thousand years, making even the Judeo-Christian tradition appear relatively young. Perhaps my dream signals that there is something universal about Bharat, the Sanskrit word for the nation more commonly called India, that is not of mere regional interest. Instead, India concerns all of humanity, insofar as to be human is to grapple with the mystery of God. Whatever the explanation, the time for merely reading about India was over. Too many of my students were asking me questions about how to reconcile yoga with their Christian faith, and I knew my answers were bookish. For years my college had been assigning Shūsaku Endō’s Silence to freshmen. The brightest of them soon discovered his final novel, Deep River, which goes beyond Japan to grapple with the earlier religious mystery of India. The least I could do, as one entrusted to help students grapple not with the questions I expect they will have but with the ones that actually drive them, was to visit India myself, where—in the words of Jung—’there is no village or country road where that broad-branched tree cannot be found in whose shade the ego struggles for its own abolition, drowning the world of multiplicity in the All and All-Oneness.'”
“Whose risks? Whose benefits?” – Mandy Brown at Everything Changes: “I’ve written before about risk, and about reframing the risk of danger into the risk of harm. And I want to come back to this topic, and to one of the common orientations I have observed, both in myself and in others: when trying to make some change, we’re apt to notice and calculate all of the risks associated with making that change. We’re much less apt to notice all of the risks of not making that change—of persisting on the current path. It’s a kind of status quo fallacy, I think: an assumption that only deviating from the current route is risky, while staying put somehow is not. But every time I ask the question, ‘what’s the risk of not doing this thing?’—whether that question is put to myself or someone else—there’s a pause, an inhale, an ‘Oh,’ and then another ‘Oh,‘ as the road ahead suddenly reveals itself to be partially in shadow. As the little bush around the bend abruptly seems like a good place for something monstrous to crouch and hide, as the cliff’s edge looks a lot closer than it seemed a moment before. What I find helpful about this recentering—of considering both the risk of change and the risk of the status quo—is how it reorients us towards a more realistic view of risk. No path, no choice, is ever entirely free of risks; no road we could walk is always and forever perfectly safe and clear and certain.”
“Pastors and Their Strangely Attractive Scars” – Harold Senkbeil at Christianity Today: “There’s something about the art of pastoring souls that can’t be codified and taught in a classroom. Ministry is best learned in context. Just as medical doctors move through rotations during their hospital internships, so physicians of souls accumulate practical wisdom by serving the people of God patiently over the years. You don’t master this craft overnight; nor can you adequately sum it up in a how-to manual. M. Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, has done us all a favor, whether or not we are pastors. His book, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul: The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry, provides a unique picture of what it means to pastor people with sensitivity and grace. No, this is not a how-to manual, but that is its saving grace. We don’t need any more how-to manuals on ministry. Nor do we need yet another book tracing the latest trends of the day and forecasting how pastors and churches will need to scramble to reinvent themselves in the image and likeness of an ever-shifting culture. Instead, Barnes’s book takes the long view on ministry. It takes seriously the formative impact of sheep on their shepherds over time.”
“A spiritual reading of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’” – Lisa Ampleman in America Magazine: “I first read T. S. Eliot’s poetic sequence Four Quartets as an eighth-grade Catholic schoolgirl, in a thin hardbound anthology from our small school library. I usually preferred fiction, but I was floored by lines like these in the final poem: ‘And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.’ As a child feeling the pull of approaching adolescence, about to move away from the safety of a neighborhood school to a large high school nearly half an hour away, I was feeling anticipatory nostalgia for the ways that Sacred Heart School had shaped me, and T. S. Eliot helped me process that experience. I didn’t ‘understand’ much of the poems, but I responded emotionally to them, which is a good approach to encountering poetry at any age. I later read the sequence (celebrating its 75th anniversary this year) during both my master’s and doctoral exams, and in between I wrote a paper on how ‘East Coker,’ the second poem in the sequence, enacts the via negativa championed by St. John of the Cross. Each time I read Four Quartets, that phrase about exploring struck me like a gong.”
“Willow Creek announces shuttering of Chicago campus” – Leonardo Blair in The Christian Post: “Citing an ‘unsustainable financial scenario’ Willow Creek Community Church Senior Pastor David Dummitt has announced the shuttering of the multi-campus megachurch’s downtown Chicago campus. ‘Over the last few months, we have come to the difficult decision to close that location,’ Dummitt said in a video announcement released by the church Monday. The campus had shown much promise over the years, he said, but as the church and city went through ‘significant changes’ paying the mortgage on property acquired by the congregation on State Street in 2018 became a challenge. ‘For years they (the campus) met in a rented theater. After a successful capital campaign they opened their doors in a new, current facility on State Street back in April of 2018. And at that time we had pledges to fund almost the entirety of its purchase with a plan to carry a responsible level of debt in line with the size and budget level of the campus at that time,’ Dummitt explained.”
Music: Bruce Cockburn, “Pacing the Cage, from The Charity of Night
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Matthew Erickson 