Whether it is Bible reading or living in a home, we metaphorically translate what is foreign into familiarity and move what is to what ought to be. That is, overcoming otherness is bringing our uniqueness to a situation not originally intended to accept it, and then translating and transforming the situation so the uniqueness can feel at home.
Category: Politics and Society
We may need again to become local and to direct our gaze to humans and particular scales and scopes.
The year in climate is thus filled with lots of room for optimism, provided we can take home these three points: 1) that we are stewards of creation and not dominators of it; 2) that we are constituted for thriving by a sacred relationship to an environment that sustains our wellbeing; and 3) that we reduce our desire.
. But one of the most significant areas of rethink was in our newly interwoven understanding of health. We understood that mental and emotional health was inseparable from physical health.
Thirty-six years ago, Robert Bellah and others, in their seminal book “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” identified a problem and prophesied its social consequences - that of political and social polarization. We live in those prophesied consequences today. The problem, as Bellah and his co-authors identified it, was the tendency … Continue reading Inarticulate Authenticity
I will do my share even if, for a time, you aren’t doing your share.
It may have been the first human, the first common thing she heard in a long while.
The substance of the addiction is thus a way to imitate a certain semblance of well-being and thriving. The problem is, of course, that sustainable sources of thriving are absent, and they must therefore be imitated by artificial substitution. Sustainable sources of thriving are still absent.
What we need to emphasize then is that our universal claims to spiritual reality are better housed within our aspirations and moral ideals than as housed by any so-called objective descriptions which we have come to doubt as neither objective nor descriptive.
If you are going to argue with someone, you have to see them as rational; otherwise, arguing can’t reach them. You have to try to understand them on their own terms if you are going to give reasons that they see as reasons.
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 