To the extent that we aspire to bear witness to beloved community, our hopes for America, its citizenry, and the rest of the world won’t be dictated by any government or political party. Beloved community is a call to embody a more comprehensive patriotism wherever we find ourselves. Like discipleship, the practice of democracy is a widening of our capacities for moral awareness and an expansion of our sphere of respect.
Everyone gets ice cream this weekend
Oreamnos americanus: the true mountaineer
Sacagawea Peak
Currently Reading: Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks 📚
Finished Reading: Balkan Contextual Theology by Stipe Odak 📚
Tremendous. Refreshingly complex and open-ended. As one author puts it:
Autochthonous forms of theological thinking inspired by concrete lived experiences in the Balkans are mostly missing or are on the margins of the mainstream theological corpus.
I have been fascinated by writers from the Balkans from the moment I picked up Udovički’s Burn This House in a bookstore in Lancaster, PA in the summer of 2013. There is much to revisit in this collection of essays—much to hear and learn from.
The notion of border-living in the Balkans refers to a way of life that is historically grounded and which has long resisted the Western models of religio-national homogeneity by simultaneously affirming the borders among different groups and shaping the paths to cross those borders.
Looking down on Big Sky
Goofball
Andrew H. Miller:
Reading stories is one way we explore attitudes of attachment to ourselves. . . . One can be amused with oneself, or earnest, reckless, experimental, smug, interested, judgmental, intermittently bored . . . . Fiction provides a wild taxonomy of such attitudes. More than that, it studies what it is to be committed to yourself at all. It makes of our commitment to continue reading an allegory for our commitment to continue being ourselves.