Just received Janet Martin Soskice's new book The Kindness of God -- I've only read a few pages but I scanned the bibliography and the index and "this one's a gooder," I can tell.
Doesn't it make you go "mmmHMMMMM" when you find an author has been reading what you've been reading? I felt that way about Mike Yaconelli; our approaches to ministry could hardly have been more different, but I felt instinctively he was trustworthy.
Long lunch with a colleague yesterday fretting over the sense of isolation and exile and, frankly, peril amongst a perceived plurality of colleagues of very different outlook, temperament, theology, rhetoric (and generation, which isn't incidental either).
And for this difficulty, I pointed out, Divine Providence has furnished us with the RevGals. I'll persuade her yet!
In a similar fashion, someone -- I think it was Karl Rahner -- pointed out that for Christians for whom it is always, innately, winter in the heart, God in his infinite mercy has furnished TEXT...praise Him!
One of our assistants, during a discussion on factions amongst the clergy (yes! in the church! shock! horror! I know, I know), commented wisely that amongst all the polarities that fragment us -- in theology, in spirituality, in agenda, in ambition -- there is another "yes/no" categorization that cuts across all the others. There are fellow-clergy we'd be glad to see at our deathbed, and there are those we'd be, well, less glad to see. I thought that put matters into a healthy perspective.
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5 comments:
Hurrah!
Indeed...The same, of course, applies to Bishops (only doubled in spades)...Must make sure my family are aware of this, in case of doubt.
And absolutely YES re dear dear Mike Yaconelli. I heard him speak at Greenbelt sometimes, and his delivery was startling because he was so excited but the content was, and remains, quite wonderful.
Enjoy JMS. I think you will have to carry out a representative reading function on behalf of those colleagues who are too busy buying percussion instruments to concentrate on real reading this Advent.
Uh-oh--there's another book I want!
Thanks for the recommendation. And yes, I just wrote out funeral directions because I want my family to know what I want and who I want to do it. They know about the death bed stuff too. When I first started working in ministry here I asked clergy who they would want to come to visit them in the hospital. It was very illuminating.
I'll have to check out this book...don't know the author, but like the recommendation....
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