Walk Humbly with the Lord

Viggo Mortensen is probably best-known as an actor and all-round artist. But as a theologian? Too intriguing for words. Yet his name appears as one of the editors (and also one of the contributors) of a newish book called Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality.

However, it turns out that the Viggo the actor isn't Viggo the theologian. The latter is a thelogian at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He's published several books on theology.

The book has other familiar names amongst the contributors, including Stanley Hauerwas, John Drane, Andrew Walls, and Darrell Guder.

The essays cover the 1910 World Missionary Conference (an attempt to sift the history from the myth); Hauerwas on the Church is Mission; community, the fluidity of mission, the church in a multireligious Europe, the Canadian Church in the third millennium, being a Christian minority in a Muslim land, Andrew Walls on missiology as vocation, and much more. You can see a full list of the contents and contributors here.

The book is also available on Google books (in part, at least). Bruce Hamill has written a post about Hauerwas' essay, and there is more about that essay on the Prodigal Kiwis site.

British versus American faith

Stanley Hauerwas wrote in The Guardian:

I am not convinced that the US is more religious than Britain. Even if more people go to church in America, I think the US is a much more secular country than Britain. In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the US, many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.

and....

Americans do not have to believe in God, because they believe that it is a good thing simply to believe: all they need is a general belief in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in the US. The god most Americans say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny, because it is only the god that has given them a country that ensures that they have the right to choose to believe in the god of their choosing, Accordingly, the only kind of atheism that counts in the US is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

See the full article here.

The world goes back to being the world

Postmodernism helps us to understand that, as ethicist Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School puts it, after a few centuries in which the culture at large snuggled up to the church and was its ally in forming a least-common-denominator sort of civic faith in its citizens, the world has gone back to being the world. While we may intially hear this word as bad news, Hauerwas insists it is good news in that it gives us permission (not that we ever really needed it) to go back to being the church, to being a human community shaped by the particular worldview of scripture.

from The Postmodern Parish: new ministry for a new era, by Jim Kitchens. Published Alban Institute, 2003, page 14

Christianity and the Social Crisis,

Walter Rauschenbush, whose book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, I wrote about in the previous post, is now available in a centenary edition, which came out last year. There is an introduction by Paul Rauschenbusch, and essays in response to each chapter by Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, James Forbes, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Phyllis Trible, Jim Wallis and Cornel West.