Last Sunday Bill asked us to contemplate and write a response to the following:

Christianity + Me - What is your relationship to Christianity?
Concerns that occupy your mind beyond immediate family.
Questions for Holly & Bill

We will go through these a bit more over the next few weeks, but suffice to say that about half who responded have negative feelings about Christianity, just under half have positive feelings, and another quarter feel fine about Jesus but not great about religion in general. And our concerns ranged from the very personal to the very global. We are holding this tension between big and small, that which is right in front of us and that which feels far away. Many of us are worried about the state of our country, either socially or politically. Many of us are worried about health and feeling purposeless.

So it leads us to ponder the purposeful-ness of hope. Is there reason to hope? I read recently, in The Pedagogy of Hope by Paolo Freire that hopelessness creates violence or immobilization, that without just a bare minimum of hope we cannot enter the struggle. But these two - hopefulness and hopelessness - are not as much opposites as they are in constant tension with one another. We need hope and struggle, he writes, to re-create the world.

These are also the lessons of Jesus, world re-imagination and re-creation. He is hopeful without being naive.

The question we ask, with extremism so loud in our ears, is whether it is possible to be in conversation with people with whom we find ourselves in such opposition? If we cannot see them as human, is healing possible? We can’t minimize the harm done by extremists, and with that said, how do we humanize them without giving them power?

There are a couple of hard but good links to share that both of us recommend watching about what is happening in our country right now:

A PBS Frontline documentary called “American Insurreciton, Part 2.” You can find it HERE.
An interview with Barbara Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, that can be found HERE.
A book by Brian MacLaren called Why Don’t They Get It? It can be found HERE.
A poem of hope shared by Calista Herbert and written by Amanda Gorman that can be found HERE. “Be bold, sang Time. Be bold…”

Humans are so beautiful and so terrible. I guess that’s the way of reality in general…paradox. We are so grateful for this community who are interested and interesting, who care enough to hope. Thank you for listening and see you soon.