Evolving with the Gospel of Jesus

fall 2013 vol. 60 | no.2

TrinityNews THE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

evolving with the

GOSPEL

OFJESUS A companion to Trinity Institute’s 43rd National Theological Conference The Good News Now

FALL 2013

TrinityNews VOL. 60 | NO. 2

THE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

DEPARTMENTS FEATURES

1

Letter from the Rector

2

For the Record

8

Visitor File

9

Archivist’s Mailbag

24

Overheard

Psalmtube

27

28 Anglican Communion Stories

29

32

13 Evolving Toward Community Interview with David Sloan Wilson 14 Silence: A Sermon Stanley Hauerwas 18 A Tormented Theology?

Interview with Chung Hyun Kyung 19 A Better Story Derek Flood

What Have You Learned?

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10 The Good News Now Bob Scott

Parish Perspectives Pew and Partner Notes

21 7 Dance Lessons for Life Kimberleigh Jordan 22 The Community of Creation Elizabeth A. Johnson

33 Letter from Lower Manhattan 25 A Safe Place for the Spiritual but Not Religious Interview with Otis Gaddis 26 A Public Theology Interview with Almeda Wright

On the Cover: An Evolving Icon Inspired by Trinity Institute’s 2013 Conference, “The Good News Now: Evolving with the Gospel of Jesus,” the cover image asks, “Can our images of Jesus change over time?

What does the Gospel look like today?”

Cover art by Marc Tremitiere The writers and interviewees featured in this issue will speak at the 2013 Trinity Institute Conference.

You can find more information about the conference at trinitywallstreet.org. Conference videos will be available in December 2013.

All photos by Leah Reddy unless otherwise noted.

TRINITY WALL STREET 74 Trinity Place | New York, NY 10006 | Tel: 212.602.0800 Rector | The Rev. Dr. James Herbert Cooper Vicar | The Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee Executive Editor | Linda Hanick Editor | Nathan Brockman Managing Editor | Jeremy Sierra Copy Editor | Max Maddock Multimedia Producer | Leah Reddy Art Director | Rea Ackerman B

Trinity News

FOR FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS 74 Trinity Place | New York, NY 10006 | 24th floor | New York, NY 10006 news@trinitywallstreet.org | 212.­602.9686 Permission to Reprint: Every article in this issue of Trinity News is available for use, free of charge, in your diocesan paper, parish newsletter, or on your church website. Please credit Trinity News: The Magazine of Trinity Wall Street.

Let us know how you’ve used Trinity News material by emailing news@trinitywallstreet.org or calling 212.602.9686.

LETTER FROM THE RECTOR

The Ministry of Connection One of Trinity’s great strengths is its ability to bring people together. The worldwide Anglican Communion (of which the Episcopal Church is a part) possesses a wealth of knowledge, talent, and resources, and Trinity is well positioned to connect those with assets and expertise with those in need of support.

Trinity’s work with the Anglican Church in Africa is built upon sharing our gifts, fostering relationships, and mutual partnerships.

In 2007, we heard from partners that they wanted to reach financial sustainability and rely less on grants and gifts. In response, Trinity has sponsored conferences that bring African bishops and diocesan staff together to discuss best practices and share ideas for generating income. These conferences work in conjunction with targeted giving, such as a grant to start the development of an apartment complex in Zambia that will provide income for the province, and grants that provide business training and small, low interest loans to disadvantaged women. Our goal is to help the Anglican Church in Africa in its desire to become financially self-sustaining.

Closer to home, Trinity has facilitated relationships between educators, students, parents, and teachers with Episcopal churches through the All Our Children initiative. Strong, supportive partnerships have developed in Boston and Richmond, Virginia, and here in New York City. Thanks to these relationships, public schools can better draw upon the human and financial resources of the Episcopal Church.

Trinity Institute is another instance of a diverse group of people gathering to share their ideas and their personal histories. The Internet has only made it easier to reach people near and far. People from around the world gather to watch the speakers on live video streamed on our website and discuss their faith in their homes and churches. Bringing so many together strengthens the Church’s ability to do God’s work in the world.

Trinity is fortunate to have resources and knowledge gained over its long history, and we are grateful for every opportunity to share them. We are also eager to connect with others and learn from them.

I invite you to connect with us, whether you are in Manhattan or on the other side of the world.

Faithfully,

The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper jcooper@trinitywallstreet.org

Photo courtesy of the Anglican Church of Burundi

The recently completed Faith Centre of the Province of the Anglican Church of Burundi was built with the help of funds from Trinity and will generate income for the Church of Burundi.

PAGE 2 Grants in Action PAGE 3 A Church for All Our Children New Lease for Trinity Preschool PAGE 4 Marching on Washington Celebrating Britten PAGE 5 Through the Wardrobe PAGE 6 Downward Dalmatian Hour Children Mission and Service Trip PAGE 7 A Controversial Canvas Community Mosaic

Grants in Action In the first half of 2013, Trinity made 20 grants totaling $1,620,100. Funds were directed to programs that advocate for children, strengthen the Anglican Communion, support communities emerging from conflict, encourage spiritual formation, and help create a vibrant Lower Manhattan.

Notably, Trinity made a grant to the Anglican Province of Tanzania, which includes 26 dioceses and approximately 2.5 million members. The grant will help with the construction of commercial-use buildings on plots of land in Dodoma, the quickly growing capital of Tanzania. “The province is taking advantage of the boom in Dodoma in order to sustainably fund the mission of the church,” said the Rev. Canon Benjamin Musoke-Lubega, Director of Faith in Action.

Grants were also made to support partnerships between public schools and churches, communities, and private organizations in New York City, Boston, and Richmond. The largest grant was given to BBMG to develop the “P.S. I Love You Campaign,” designed to build partnerships and highlight the many positive aspects of New York City’s public schools. “Trinity has a long history of supporting education,” said Musoke-Lubega.

“We are keeping that tradition.”

Sustainability Efforts Continue in Africa In June, Trinity hosted the last of four financial sustainability workshops in Kumasi, Ghana.

More than 80 bishops and diocesan professionals from 11 of the 12 Anglican provinces in Africa attended, as did the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Rector, the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee, Vicar, and Jason Pizer, President of Trinity Real Estate.

“We ask the partners to tell their stories and give real-life examples of best practices,” explained Sarah Grapentine, Senior Program Officer for Anglican Partnerships.

These workshops, which began in 2011, are part of a long-term effort to provide skills and financial capacity for the Anglican Church in Africa. They grew out of Walking to Emmaus, a 2007 conference of American and African bishops with existing mission partnerships. At that meeting, African bishops requested Trinity’s assistance in developing the land and other resources they possessed so that they could generate income for the work of the church.

Several African dioceses have since built guesthouses for visitors and commercial space.

Some of the rural dioceses earn money through agricultural programs and smaller projects, such as a diocese which owns a bus and makes it available to charter. Trinity makes grants to support many of these projects.

“Grant making alone without the proper structure and skills in place is not going to be as successful,” said Grapentine.

The workshops addressed how to assess feasibility, mobilize resources, and manage projects.

Over the summer, Trinity staff also met with the African partners to talk about how the participants can continue to support each other. The partners asked for continued assistance and support, and they expressed gratitude.

“The partners appreciated Trinity’s capacitybuilding efforts,” said Musoke-Lubega. “They asked that Trinity continue to accompany them.”

A Church for All Our Children

Jim Melchiorre

Episcopal Church congregations in the United States are increasingly becoming advocates for public schools, especially schools located in low-income neighborhoods. Clergy and members of their congregation are volunteering in classrooms, raising funds for supplies, and testifying before lawmakers in state capitols.

The movement is considered more than a traditional “good deed” but rather what some participants call a Gospel imperative.

“Public schools in America provide the single most important opportunity for the energy and ministry of the Episcopal Church today,” said the Rev. Benjamin Campbell of the Micah Initiative in Richmond, Virginia.

“What Jesus said was that every human being is important, and public education is the way in which society says every human being is to be included, every human being is important,” said Campbell.

Trinity Wall Street is one parish committed to this movement through its local All Our Children program, part of the church’s Faith in Action division. The church has also joined in a national network of more than 50 Episcopal congregations that have made commitments to help their local public schools provide greater equality of opportunity.

“A child’s education is often determined by her parents’ education, income, and zip code,” said Erin Weber-Johnson, Program Officer for Anglican Partnerships at Trinity Wall Street.

“Creating a network has allowed a community to emerge, whose members support each other,” Weber-Johnson said.

Meg McDermott, School and Community Partnership Organizer with St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, works in the library with the children of the William Blackstone Elementary School in Boston.

Trinity’s efforts as an advocate for public schools, along with the work of Episcopal churches in Boston and Richmond, Virginia, are spotlighted in an upcoming segment of the web series Anglican Communion Stories, which can be viewed at trinitywallstreet.org and will also be seen on the next edition of Horizons of the Spirit, on NBC-TV affiliates across the United States. —Jim Melchiorre

New Lease for Trinity Preschool

Kathy Bozzuti-Jones, Chaplain to Trinity Preschool, leading preschoolers in song at the Wednesday chapel gathering.

In September, Trinity signed a renewable lease on ground-floor space at 100 Church Street, not far from St. Paul’s Chapel, which will house the Trinity preschool. The school will begin meeting there in September 2014.

The entrance to the preschool will be on Park Place between Broadway and Church Street, within walking distance of St. Paul’s.

This new site will have the same number of classrooms as the current location.

Trinity is working with Hudson Studio Architects, a downtown firm with significant experience implementing creative and practical school designs. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2014.

“Trinity Preschool has served the neighborhood for more than three decades,” the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Rector, noted in a letter announcing the new lease. “I hope that you share my excitement that the school’s ministry to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers will remain in this neighborhood as a Trinity ministry for many years to come.”

Trinity News

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Marching on Washington a Second Time

Terrell Moody

In August, several members of the Trinity community took a bus to Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I have a dream” speech.

“We got off the bus and saw everybody, and we could feel anticipation and excitement,” said Trinity employee Terrell L. Moody.

In addition to Moody, the group included other members of Trinity’s Task Force Against Racism and Prison Ministry, including Mildred Chandler, Toni Foy, Roz Hall, Susan Mareneck, Cynthia Moten, and Patrice-Lou Thomas. They took a bus with a group from the New York Theological Seminary, which coordinated the trip.

Thousands of people gathered around the reflecting pool on the National Mall, many of them holding signs about Trayvon Martin, marriage equality, immigration, education inequality, and other justice and human rights issues. People of all ages and races were there.

They heard Martin Luther King III speak and were especially inspired by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s speech.

“Al Sharpton was really focused on social issues and gave everyone encouragement to go out into their communities and make a difference,” said Thomas.

“I didn’t know any of these people, but I felt really connected to them at that point,” said Moody. “We focus so much on our differences in America, we tend to forget how much we are alike. I think the March on Washington brought that to the forefront.”

From left to right, Trinity parishioners Toni Foy,Cynthia Moten, Mildred Chandler, Susan Mareneck, Partice-Lou Thomas, and Roz Hall.

For Cynthia Moten, this was both a remembrance of a seminal event and a personal anniversary.

“In 1963, I became actively involved in the civil rights movement,” she said. She recalled picketing in front of a new housing development being built in Jamaica, Long Island, because the builders were not using any minority contractors.

“One day while I was marching peacefully around, a senior officer pointed to me and told another officer, ‘arrest her.’” Moten was not aiming to get arrested, and had not been doing anything illegal, but she found herself in a paddy wagon. Her arrest was eventually thrown out, along with many others. “But that got me revved up,” she said, so when she heard about the March on Washington a few months later, she was determined to go.

“The initial experience was euphoria,” Moten said. “To see thousands of people, old, young, black, white, carrying signs, singing, it was like I’d died and gone to heaven. The only negative was it was hot hot hot hot hot hot.”

She still has the printed program from the 1963 march and buttons that were handed out.

“After that I became political action chairman of our Jamaica branch of NAACP,” she said, “and I stayed very active. The important thing was not just being there but what we were going to do afterwards.”

All the participants at the anniversary march came away feeling there was still much to be done. “I don’t believe that we’ve gotten to the end of anything,” said Moten. “I’m not as young as I once was, but that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to be involved, to make sure that we continue to make progress.”

Celebrating Britten Trinity Wall Street Music and the Arts focused its fall programming on the versatile and prolific composer Benjamin Britten, in honor of his 100th Birthday. Celebrated favorites and rarely performed works from Britten’s repertory were presented at concerts led by Director of Music and the Arts, Julian Wachner and featuring the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and NOVUS NY. Other featured artists included tenor Nicholas Phan, cellist Matt Haimovitz, and the Trinity Youth Chorus.

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Trinity News

Through the Wardrobe

For a week in July, the third floor of 74 Trinity Place was transformed into Narnia, or the closest you can get if you made Narnia out of paper and paint and filled it with children.

Fifty-five children, ages 4-12, participated in Journey to Narnia, Trinity Wall Street’s first theater immersion program. They learned about acting, set and costume design, music, and community.

“We asked, ‘How do kids create this alternate space called Narnia?’ ” said Lisa Bridge, Program Manager for Youth and Children. “How do you create a community where you bring everyone in from the margins?”

For those unfamiliar, The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of books by Christian author C.S. Lewis, featuring children who walk into a wardrobe and find themselves transported to a land populated by talking animals, witches, and a fearsome lion (who is also kind of a stand-in for Jesus).

Some of the teachers, like musician Andy Strain, were familiar with the books from their own childhoods. “It was really fun to take that old material and make it our own,” he said.

Bridge organized the theater experience with the help of Jason Craig and Jessica Jeliffe, a married couple who also run a theater company called Banana Bag & Bodice. Since they’ve had their own child, they’ve become interested in theater for children.

“I’m amazed at how quickly the kids learn,” said Craig, who was later dressed as a centaur named Mr. Tumnus.

Bridge staffed the program with certified classroom teachers, parishioners, and teen counselors in training. Performers from the theater company helped the kids paint the set and make costumes, prepare their lines, and design the sound for a theater performance.

It was a satisfying learning experience for everyone. “The kids taught me to not be so rigid.

You just have to go and accept how kids want it to be,” said Casey Opstead, an artist who helped the children prepare and paint the sets and costumes.

Although the week focused more on an ethical reading of The Chronicles than a Christian reading, the tie between the church and the theater program was clear. Kathy Bozzuti-Jones, Associate Director of Faith Formation and Education, taught songs such as “Holy Ground,” and on Wednesday, the children attended the 12:05pm Holy Eucharist, filling up the first six rows of the church.

In his sermon, Fr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones said, “Life is filled with magic, life is filled with surprises, with huge wardrobes for everybody to walk through together.” He then ducked under

the altar, vanishing behind the frontal cloth that covered it, as if disappearing through the wardrobe, while the children giggled.

On the third floor, a cheerful hectic scene took place behind a door decorated with snowy garlands and labeled “To Narnia,” as Opstead helped the children paint sets.

Jamal Innis, a teaching assistant, led a girl to the sink as she held her hands out in front of her, which were completely covered in green paint.

“Paws up,” said Jessica Slade, who also taught scenic design and painting. The children raised their hands in the air and were silent for a few moments before getting started on the next project.

Every morning the children would begin the day by putting their hands on paws painted on a long strip of paper containing the covenant for the week (basically rules for behavior).

They’d then gather for teaching, which included discussion about how to treat others and welcome everyone.

The children were from a range of backgrounds and locations, including Lower Manhattan, the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, and Queens. Children of Trinity congregants and staff also took part.

After only a few days they were already a community. Bridge recalled a rainy day when the children spontaneously formed a conga line and everyone joined in.

It all culminated with a performance on Friday, which was somewhat unwieldy and completely adorable.

“We were prepared, but you never know what’s going to happen,” said Strain, who also designed the sound for the performance. “We ended up finding a lot of material just through improvising.”

The children came into the Parish Hall making choo-choo sounds, holding each other’s shoulders to make a chain.

When the wardrobe doors opened, all the children made a loud creaking sound to the delight of the gathered parents. The older children played the parts of Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy, and the narrators, and the younger children wore paper masks and made growling sounds to indicate they were wolves.

In the end, Aslan (the lion) appeared, and the children sang a closing song.

It was a successful week. Several of the families have shown interest in becoming part of the Trinity community, and many of the children expressed a desire to return next year.

“The kids really got it,” said Bridge. “They understood it was a different space, and they wanted to be a part of that.”

Trinity News

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Jeremy Sierra

Downward Dalmatian

Retired firefighter Jim Sorenson with yoga instructor Anne Libby.

Mickey Kross, a retired New York City fireman, is a Bronx-born former marine who doesn’t hesitate to say what he thinks, and every Thursday he practices yoga at Trinity.

“I’m the last person you’d think would go to a yoga class,” said Kross, “but I tried it and it makes me feel better.”

Kross was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it collapsed on September 11, 2001.

“These guys have done so much work with their bodies and absorbed so much trauma, not

just from 9/11,” said yoga instructor Anne Libby.

So much of their work is traumatic.” Libby is a full-time management consultant who attends services at Trinity. She has been teaching yoga to firefighters as a volunteer since 2004.

“We started doing it for our counseling unit for people who wanted to try something a little bit different,” said Libby. The group started meeting at Trinity in January 2012 when funding was cut for the program.

Kross was skeptical at first but decided to give it a try. “I’m getting older, I’m in my sixties,” he said. “I figured, I’m in pretty good shape for my age. I’ll give it a shot.”

He’s noticed a difference, though he wouldn’t exactly say he likes it.

“I like beer. That’s something I like,” he said.

“I can’t say that I like yoga, but I like what it does for me.” Despite his protestations, he does seem to enjoy the class and the company of the other firefighters.

His balance has improved, he said, and he feels better in general. It also calms him, especially after he has to walk through the crowds of tourists on the way to the church. “I get to the place [where we do yoga], and I have

steam coming out of my ears. I leave, and I’m calm as a cucumber.”

“A lot of us had injuries or were older,” said Jim Sorenson, a retired firefighter. “[Anne] worked us into it very slowly. She’s methodical, she watches you like a hawk, even your toes.”

Sorenson worked as a fire safety director in the World Trade Center and also survived the attacks on September 11.

He couldn’t remember exactly when he started coming to yoga, but he swears by it now.

“It sustains you, it keeps your blood flowing. It’s spiritual, mental, and physical.”

“I worked in [9/11] recovery for nine months,” Kross said.

During the recovery, Trinity opened St. Paul’s Chapel to rescue workers. Kross worked shifts from seven at night to seven in the morning.

“Coldest part of the day is just when the sun comes up,” he said, recalling taking naps in the warm chapel, using his gloves as a pillow. “I’m ever grateful to that church.”

“They have such a warm, wonderful feeling [about Trinity]. They’re very comfortable coming to Trinity,” Libby said. “It’s nice for them to have the fellowship.”

Hour Children Mission and Service Trip For the third year in a row, Trinity community members participated in a Mission and Service Trip with the women of Hour Children, an organization in Long Island City that works with formerly incarcerated women and their children.

Trinity parishioners and staff led job-skills workshops for seven women. Over the course of four Fridays in the summer, the women practiced their interview skills and discussed topics ranging from etiquette to résumé writing to managing their online presence. They also formed friendships with members of the parish.

“By the second week we developed a special bond with one another,” said Maggy Charles, Program Manager for Mission and Service Engagement Programs.

On the final day, Trinity parishioner Luciana Sikula arranged for her employer to donate new business attire for each of the women. “I feel so confident now,” said Dominique as she received her certificate of completion. “Now I know I can do this.”

Trinity staff and parishioners with the women of Hour Children on the last day of the program.

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Trinity News

A Controversial Canvas Photos of saints and angels, praying hands and bleeding hearts, death masks, and crucifixions hung in the Trinity Wall Street Parlor. They were pictures of religious tattoos, part of an exhibit entitled Radical Spirituality: Religious Tattoos, curated by Trinity parishioner Ryan Campbell and presented by the Congregational Visual Arts Committee.

The images were striking. “Some people look at the photos and don’t realize they’re tattoos,” said Campbell. Most reactions were positive, though not all.

One day Campbell noticed a few of the photographs were missing from the wall. He guesses that someone found them disturbing and removed them during one of the many meetings that take place in the parlor throughout the week.

He found them later stacked in the hallway.

Campbell said he could sympathize. “They’re discomfiting. I was even a little uncomfortable,” he said, but he decided that part of the point of the exhibit was to challenge ideas about religious iconography. The exhibit was composed of 22

photographs collected from tattoo artists around New York City by Nalla Smith.

“I’ve been tattooing since 1991,” said Smith.

“Pretty much everybody that I contacted was from those formative years. It was a way to create a dialogue with some artists that I didn’t know, as well, but respected.”

Tattoos have a history that stretches at least five thousand years, and many tattoos have had religious significance throughout. “Religious tattoos are as rooted in the tradition of tattooing

as anything is, since prehistory when shamans were anointing wounds with healing ashes and minerals,” said Smith.

Tattoos have long been controversial in the Christian Church. They were banned by popes but declared praiseworthy by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 if they depicted Christian symbols.

The tattoos at Trinity displayed a wide range of icons, from pious images of Christian saints and crucifixions to Hindu gods and Day of the Dead masks.

“They all have a story,” said Campbell.

Perhaps the most playful was an irreverent mash-up of Star Wars’ R2D2 and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“It’s the only medium where you’re in dialogue with the canvas,” said the Rev. Jack Moody, a retired priest who helped organize the exhibit.

Campbell still doesn’t know who removed the photographs, but they were put back on the wall, giving everyone who passed through the room a look into a different kind of religious imagery.

“The church isn’t the only holder of spirituality,” said Campbell. “People have their faith on them. They wear their faith daily.”

Community Mosaic

Jeremy Sierra

During the year, the Trinity community created mosaics to decorate the inside of Charlotte’s Place, the parish’s neighborhood space. Led by professional artist Jackie Chang, parishioners, staff, and visitors participated in workshops to help design the mosaics and glue hundreds of glass tiles in place. Four mosaics, one for each season, now hang in Charlotte’s Place, and two more decorate the men’s and women’s bathrooms there.

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Could you tell me about the Awareness Foundation?

How do we, as Christians, live our faith in the presence of other faiths? We try to equip Christians to do that through education—workshops, courses, modules. We have the Awareness Course, which is our main educational product. It is offered to all churches, and it can be led or taught by anybody, not only clergy. It’s not only Episcopalian. Any church can use it; any house group can use it.

We are celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. It’s now national in England, and we have a branch in North America. We have a branch in the Middle East, and we have consultants and trustees there.

Photo courtesy of the Awareness Foundation

What is your connection to Syria now?

I have my family in Syria, my mother, my sisters, nephews, nieces, and extended family, friends everywhere. I’m Syrian, and I have my network there.

What is life like for your family right now?

It’s tough. It’s a very, very tough situation. Syria used to be an oasis of diversity. There are a lot of faiths and cultures in Syria. There is the majority, which are Sunni Muslims, but also there are Christians, there are Alawites, there are Druze, there are Ishmaelites, Kurds, a lot of groups that are not foreign to Syria. They are from the original fabric of the society. We do not import religions, we have enough of our own.

THE REV. NADIM NASSAR The Rev. Nadim Nassar was the first Syrian to be ordained as an Anglican Priest. He is now the Director of the Awareness Foundation and an outspoken person of faith. He visited Trinity in September 2013.

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY SIERRA

You’ve said that people often ask you when you converted to Christianity, but your family has been Christian for a very long time.

You know, they still ask, “Father, when did you become Christian?” They suppose that I was a Muslim, coming from Syria. As Christians in the Middle East, we were almost invisible until the Arab Spring, until the problems in Iraq.

Ninety percent of the Christians in Iraq left, and now it’s happening to the Christians in Syria. In Egypt also. The pressure is enormous on Christians.

Yesterday I heard [fundamentalists] attacked a Christian town near Damascus, one of the very few places in the world that people speak in the home the language of Jesus Christ, Aramaic. Militant Muslim fundamentalists entered the town, they burned it down, they burned churches and destroyed icons and killed Christians. It was devastating news for me, because this [town] was really an icon. Thousands of Muslims visit this town every year to present their offerings and prayers. It’s not only for Christians.

Do you support an intervention by the United States?

Intervention, yes, but military intervention, no. I am against any military intervention anywhere in the world, not only in Syria. I believe we should focus on bringing the Syrians around the table for dialogue to find a solution for their conflict. A military strike would not end the war and would not help any party to obtain victory. This is absolute nonsense.

I lived in Beirut during the war, and I remember when the New Jersey, the battleship, came to the coast of Beirut and shelled the mountains of Lebanon. And it turned the night [into] day. It was an awful night. Every Lebanese remembers. But did it end the war? No. The war continued. It ended only when the Lebanese went to the city of Taif in Saudi Arabia and sat around the table and found a way out. So we should learn from history.

What can we, as Christians, do?

First of all, we keep praying for Syria and for the countries that suffer civil wars and civil unrest, and we keep pushing in every way we can as Christians, and putting pressure on politicians to think with their brains, not with their muscles, to solve conflicts around the world.

I’m disappointed and sad that politicians so quickly went into debating whether we [United States] strike or we don’t strike. The whole question is wrong. The question is, how do we end the conflict using our brain rather than our battleships? As catalysts for peace, Christians have to press all the time and put pressure on politicians to think and try peaceful means to end conflict.

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Trinity News

Who Was John Watts Jr? He stands imposingly in the south side of Trinity churchyard, a fifteen-foot-high bronze sculpture of an eighteenth century English barrister gone green with age. Passing tourists are likely to recognize the neighboring tombs of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton, and wonder, “Who is that?”

His name is John Watts Jr., born 1749. He died in 1836. The statue was erected in 1893 by John Watts DePeyster, Watts’ grandson, as an attempt to keep his grandfather’s memory alive for the people of Manhattan. It is a physical monument to the man in the city he helped shape.

Watts was one of seven children of John Watts Sr., a Scottish immigrant from a wealthy background, and Anne DeLancey of the colony’s founding DeLancey family. He was likely born at his father’s country house at Rose Hill, an estate that stretched from 21st Street to 30th Street, and from Broadway to the East River. Or perhaps he was born in his father’s town home in Lower Manhattan. In either case, he was a New Yorker from birth.

Young Watts was a child of privilege. His maternal uncles served in high government posts, and his father was a prosperous merchant who dealt in, among other things, pickled peppers.

Watts Sr. also held several posts in the colonial government, serving as a member of the Colonial Assembly and the King’s Council in the years just before the Revolution.

Watts Jr. graduated with his A.M. from King’s College in May, 1769. At just 19, Watts gave the “valedictory oration” at commencement ceremonies inside the first Trinity Church. A few years later, he was appointed Royal Recorder of New York, a colonial post that included serving as a mayoral assistant, judge, and in sundry administrative and judicial functions. Watts Jr. would be New York’s last Royal Recorder.

In 1775, Watts Sr., who was a Loyalist and government official, became the target of a threatening open letter from a group of patriots.

He fled the colonies for England. In 1779, the New York State Legislature “attainted [Watts Sr.] with treason,” seized Rose Hill and the Lower Manhattan townhouse, banished Watts Sr, and, theoretically, “tainted the blood” of Watts’ descendants with treason.

In 1784, Watts Jr. and his brother Robert were denied a petition to have the attainder

against their family overturned, though they were allowed to purchase back their father’s proprieties. Sources suggest that Watts Jr. was a patriot: he was the only Crown official in New York who held elected state or federal office after the Revolution.

Shortly after his father fled the colonies, Watts Jr. married Jane DeLancey in a double wedding with her sister Susanna. Some sources suggest DeLancey was Watts Jr.’s cousin. The couple went on to have eleven children, eventually making a home at Rose Hill.

Watts Jr.’s career flourished. In 1791, he was elected to the New York State Assembly , where

he served as speaker. In 1793, he was elected to the United States Congress. He served during the fifth and sixth years of Washington’s presidency but was defeated in his bid for reelection. In 1806, he was appointed the first judge in Westchester County.

Additionally, the Watts family was active in Trinity Church. In 1794, the vestry named Watts Street, the part on the church’s property, in Watts Jr.’s honor.

Throughout his life Watts experienced considerable tragedy. As John Watts DePeyster, his grandson and commissioner of the monument wrote, “Mr. Watts was a monument of affliction, in that he had seen his wife, six handsome, gifted, and gallant sons, and four daughters precede him to the grave. One childless daughter survived him and three grandchildren.”

Two of these untimely deaths would leave another, lasting legacy. In 1793, the only child of his younger sister, Margaret Watts Leake, died at the age of eight. The child was the favorite and planned heir of his childless paternal uncle, John George Leake. John George Leake and Watts Jr. were friends, and at some point it was decided that Watts’ son Robert would be Leake’s heir, provided the young man took the surname Leake. Leake died. Robert took the name Robert J. Watts Leake, inherited the fortune, and promptly passed away, leaving no wife or children. Watts Jr. inherited Leake’s fortune from his own son.

Watts was already a wealthy man, living in Lower Manhattan with his two grandsons. He decided to use the inheritance to found and endow the Leake and Watts Orphan Home, to “foster, educate, and protect orphans.”

According to DePeyster, this was an idea Leake and Watts had discussed. The home was one of the country’s first private charitable institutions dedicated to child welfare.

The Leake and Watts Orphan House was founded in 1831. In 1843, it opened at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and in 1890 it was moved again, this time from Manhattan to a site in Yonkers. This final move prompted DePeyster to commission the monument for Trinity churchyard.

Today, Leake and Watts Services, Inc. operates across the New York metro area and serves 5,000 children a year, providing everything from foster care to preschool services for autistic children.

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BY BOB SCOTT

The following articles feature the speakers of the 2013 Trinity Institute Conference

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At the turn of the last century, secularization theory predicted that as the modern worldview advanced, religion would retreat. Google that term today, and you will mainly find articles asking why that has not happened. I believe the simple explanation is that religion and culture were never inherently rivals to begin with. Instead, they are linked, and they develop together.

This claim is not a post modern attempt at peacemaking through synthesis or relativism.

Rather, it is the insight from a vital source of theological understanding that has been honored in our Scripture and tradition since antiquity. Known as wisdom literature, this body of writing finds the work of God in creation and regards the world as an important source of revelation. The type of theological reflection it nurtures grows fuller with each new discovery about our shared humanity and the cosmos of which we are part. For Jews and Christians, wisdom literature includes texts such as the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. It turns up at key points in the New Testament as well, such as

when Paul asserts in Romans that, “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (1:20).

In his Pulitzer Prize–nominated book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright observes that “when Proverbs reports that ‘pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall,’ it is indeed reporting it, asserting that, as a matter of fact, proud and haughty people usually get their comeuppance.” In this sense, he says this is both science and theology. He cites Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad, who said that the wisdom literature discerns “an order which is at work behind the experiences,” much in the way scientists try to drill down through phenomena to basic principles.

Wright nominates Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, as a premier theologian of Wisdom. Living in a cosmopolitan city where Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy coexisted under Roman rule, Philo

A religion whose understanding of God does not evolve has little chance of surviving the test of time.

How can the Church continue to evolve faithfully in the light of the many challenges it now faces?

sought to remain true to his own tradition while engaging productively with those around him by honoring the spirit of God in all things. He used the Greek word Logos to describe the divine principle underlying creation and reasoned that if God’s Logos (or Wisdom—he used the terms interchangeably) was at work everywhere, he should find traces of it in the cultures around him. What’s more, it would not simply be a fixed set of rules, but a dynamic motion. Wright notes, “By animating matter and men, it animated history.” In this way, Philo avoided what would later be called Deism, the view that God set the cosmos in action and then stepped back (a distinctly non-Judaic view). Wisdom sees God as intimately, powerfully, and continually at work.

Are the Lights On? If this is the case, the various forms of evolution-– natural, biological, and cultural-–become allies with religion in helping the Logos to emerge and influence creation. Refusing to allow our faith to evolve with our knowledge of the world becomes a way of resisting God’s ongoing

creativity, and it comes at a cost. Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, cites Wolfhart Pannenberg’s warning, “Religions die when their lights fail.”

Johnson explains, “Lights fail when history takes people’s experiences onward, and the God that they believe in doesn’t keep up. And the God who shed such light on their life when it was in a certain historical context, if that guy can’t keep pace with where the people’s experience is going, the light gets dimmer and dimmer and ultimately people are going to look for another.”

Pannenberg, she says, made the point through the history of religions asking, “Who worships Zeus anymore?”

What Pannenberg shows in history, we can see in today’s headlines. Last summer, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby addressed the U.K.’s Evangelical Alliance, which has campaigned on religious grounds against same-sex marriage.

The archbishop, who himself voted against a marriage equality measure in the British Parliament, told them, “We have seen changes

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in the idea about sexuality, sexual behavior. We have to face the fact that the vast majority of people under 35 not only think that what we’re saying is incomprehensible but also think that we’re plain wrong and wicked and equate it to racism and other forms of gross and atrocious injustice. We have to be real about that.”

Being Real Part of being real is acknowledging that reasonable people will almost inevitably disagree about where God’s spirit is moving and how to interpret our expanding knowledge of creation.

“There will be an irreducible diversity to meaning systems, including religions, based on the fact that people need different things, depending on their circumstances,” says David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at the University of Binghamton.

He counsels coexisting rather than expecting differences to go away.

Having made a deep study of religion as a force in cultural evolution, Wilson astutely observes that “for everybody, something is sacred. …We like to think that liberals are science friendly, and conservatives aren’t,” but he points to research demonstrating that the closer people get to whatever principles or beliefs they hold sacred, the less open they are to “rational” persuasion.

Not only are the stereotypes about liberals and conservatives unhelpful for predicting individual behavior, they are inadequate to address the questions we face. Duke University theologian Stanley Hauerwas describes himself as “too conservative for liberals and too liberal for conservatives.” For him, “what it means to be a Christian is to be invited to engage in an ongoing redescription of the world. That requires a quite radical perspective that defies the liberalconservative divide.”

Dialogue and Progress We may find hope in the fact that while the baby boomer generation often seems to have gotten stuck in that divide, younger people are far less caught up. “There’s an interesting sense that young people are kind of ‘live and let live,’” says Yale Divinity School professor Almeda Wright.

Reflecting on her extensive research with young adults, she finds, “They want to passionately hold to their own convictions, but they’re not as concerned with making sure that everybody agrees with them. In some ways our young people are like, ‘That’s you, that’s fine.’” She sees this view not as apathy but as an interest in authentic dialogue and relationship.

Of course the capacity for the relationship of religion and culture to be what game theorists call “win-win” does not mean it will be. The Rev. Kimberleigh Jordan from the Riverside Church in New York City cautions, “I am wary of a modernist approach that says we are on a trail where society and civilization get better as we move through history, and so we’re aiming for this point where all will be well, and everything 12

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will be good for everybody.” If progress is inevitable, as certain forms of modernism suggest, why after years of struggle do we still have racism, sexism, and a host of other problems? Her point resonates well with the wisdom literature, which includes the book of Job, that stark reflection on why bad things happen to good people, a text that finally has no answer except faith itself and submission to the mystery.

What then can we do to enhance the possibility of true progress? One way is through self-examination. “I think that every one of us always has to use our critical consciousness [to ask] whether our interpretation of the Gospel is life giving, inclusive, and hospitable to other living beings. Is it really promoting Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God?” asks Chung Hyun Kyung, Professor of Ecumenical Theology at Union Seminary, “or are we becoming more authoritarian and exclusive, an inhospitable Christianity?”

Chung believes in the importance of listening not only to our inner critics, but to external ones as well. “Critics of what we are doing make us see who we are. Christianity must be always contextualized, embodied in specific localities with their culture and religions. Therefore, we have to be always open to how our contexts are challenging us.”

We Are All Theologians The theologians I spoke with agreed that while their calling is important, the work before us requires the participation of the entire body of Christ. “What happens in this dance or this dialogue or this life of faith of bringing our current reality to historical internal truths becomes way more than just the sum of the parts,” says Almeda Wright. “It becomes something new that emerges out of that conversation, out of that dialogue. To be a Christian is to be a theologian.”

Johnson begins with what it means to be the Church. “This is a certain ecclesiology that puts a great priority on baptism and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in every baptized person,” she says. “So anyone who owns that identity and is part of a community, then they are contributing through their own ideas, their own questions, their own praxis to the growing of the faith.

Now, I’m not saying everything is change. We have this fundamental Gospel that adheres. But it’s always a question of how does that Gospel get heard by people in a new era? How does it address new questions, ethical questions, existential questions, questions of life and death? And if it’s only bringing answers that addressed previous people’s questions, it’s not going to make it.”

Robert Owns Scott is the Director of Faith Formation and Education for Trinity Wall Street and the Director of Trinity Institute.

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.

Psalm 19:1–2

Evolving Toward Community David Sloan Wilson on how an evolutionist understands the mixed blessings of religion Interviewed By Bob Scott

If I understand correctly, what Darwin said was that cooperation and altruism didn’t really confer much, if any, advantage on an individual, but a group with lots of cooperative people would outperform another group.

If you look at religions, what you find is that there are two dimensions. This is often described by theologians as a horizontal dimension, which is man’s relation to fellow man, and a vertical dimension, which is man’s relation to God. A lot of religious believers place a priority on the vertical dimension as primary, the thing that’s most real. What I took Singer to be saying is that the essence of religion is the horizontal dimension, and the vertical dimension is important only in terms of whether it leads to human action. There’s a gospel song with a wonderful title, “If You Don’t Love Your Neighbor Then You Don’t Love God,” and what Singer seemed to be saying, which I also think, is that the essence of religion is how religions cause people to interact with each other.

Yes. What an individual does and must do in order to maximize its slice of the pie is going to be different than what’s needed in order for the group to function well to make a big pie. There are exceptions, but for the most part the things that are best for me are different than what it takes for all of us to work together.

Therefore, natural selection is pushing in two directions. The most local interactions, the interactions taking place within a group, are favoring these self-serving behaviors, which in moral terms we call immoral. We call something immoral when it benefits me at your expense.

In order for the moral behaviors and practices to evolve, the things that benefit all of us, there has to be a selection process, but that has to be at the group level. Moral groups outcompete less moral groups, but less moral individuals often outcompete more moral individuals within the group. That is the concept of multilevel selection in a nutshell and why moral behaviors do not automatically evolve. They require special conditions, and that goes a long way in explaining the incredible ambivalence of human nature.

It’s captured, for example, in the religious concept of original sin, that in some sense we’re born evil, bent on not just the destruction of others, but self-destruction over the long term.

That’s somehow deeply embedded in human nature, and something must be done in order to bring people out of that state. Social organization is often required, and, of course, religions are awesome, often, at providing that social organization. They’re very good at creating communities. So that’s one of the positive elements of religion.

What is Darwin’s Cathedral about?

Ever since I was a graduate student, I’ve been interested in the basic question of how niceness can evolve as a Darwinian strategy. Evolution is supposed to be about individuals surviving and reproducing better than other individuals, and against that background, you’d think that would be the first thing that would be selected against.

So the question of how altruism and cooperation and goodness in all of their forms can evolve in a Darwinian world is a fundamental question that Darwin confronted and that has been a major topic ever since.

We are a highly social species, unique in our capacity for unrelated individuals to cooperate with each other. And so [I looked at] religion from an evolutionary perspective. Darwin’s Cathedral was advancing a group-level adaptation hypothesis for religion. I was saying that most enduring religions are very impressive at creating communities.

Can you say a bit more about your approach to the study of evolution?

I’m an evolutionist. I study the core theoretical elements of evolution, including something called multilevel selection, which explains how evolution operates on a hierarchy of units, with genes at the bottom and ecosystems at the top, including human social systems, including religion.

Roy Scott

The epigram for your book, Darwin’s Cathedral, is from Isaac Bashevis Singer, “But now at least he understood his religion. Its essence was the relation between man and his fellows.” Why did you choose that?

Of course, what evolution does is it produces adaptations, and adaptations are properties that enable organisms to survive and reproduce in their environments. But adaptations can exist at different levels. You can be a gene that functions well, at the expense of the organism. You can be an individual that performs well, compared to other individuals, and often at their expense.

And so there’s a multilayer, multilevel property.

How does this multilevel property account for what you’ve called the mixed blessings of religion?

What we discover is that what’s good for the group is not necessarily good for the larger society.

So what’s good for me is not necessarily good for my family, what’s good for my family is not necessarily good for my clan, what’s good for my clan is not necessarily good for my nation, what’s good for the corporation is not necessarily good for the global economy. Life is multilevel, and everything that we count as moral and altruistic and cooperative at one level becomes a form of selfishness at the next level.

And so one reason that religion or any other functional organized group is a mixed blessing is that primarily its blessings are confined within the group, and as a group it might act as an immoral agent against other groups. Anyone who lives in this world knows that that’s a problem with religion, and it’s a problem with secular organizations.

David Sloan Wilson (Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society) studies how religions and cultures co-evolve, for good or ill. He is in a unique position to frame the challenge to faiths today: the survival and flourishing of the human race. A Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, Wilson founded the Neighborhood Project, which applies evolutionary theory to improve the quality of life in his struggling city.

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Silence: A Sermon

STANLEY HAUERWAS

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female: for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Finally, like me, you have to be thinking, finally. Finally we have a Paul that does not embarrass us. We have had to struggle with Paul’s seeming indifference to slavery; we have cringed at some of his judgments about the place of women in the church, we have had to put up with his judgmental attitude about sex, but now it seems we have a Paul with whom we share some fundamental convictions.

After all, what could be more precious to us than the democratic commitment to treat all people equally? We want everyone to be treated fairly. We want to be treated fairly. We want to be treated equally not only at work and home, but also in the church. The church accordingly should be inclusive, excluding no one. Of course, Christians no longer have a problem about Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, but certainly equality between males and females remains a challenge.

In spite of some of Paul’s judgments in some of his other letters about what women can and cannot do in the church, in this passage from Galatians Paul seems to be on the side of equal treatment. He finally got one right.

There is just one problem with our attempt to read Paul as an advocate of democratic egalitarianism. As much as we would like to think that Paul is finally on the right side of history, I am afraid that reading this text as an underwriting of egalitarian practice is not going to work. Paul does not say Jew or Greek, slave

or free, male or female are to be treated equally.

Rather he says that all who make up the church in Galatia, and it is the church to which he refers, are one in Christ Jesus. It seems that Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female have been given a new identity more fundamental than whether they are a Jew, slave, or free. Insofar as they now are in the church they are all one in Christ.

For Paul, our unity in Christ seems to trump equality. Let me suggest that this is not necessarily bad news for us, because one of the problems with strong egalitarianism is how it can wash out difference. In truth, most of us do not want to be treated like everyone else because we are not simply anyone. Whatever defeats and victories have constituted our lives, they are our defeats and victories, and they make us who we are. We do not want to be treated equally if that means the history that has made us who we are must be ignored. For example, I think being a Texan is one of the determinative ontological categories of existence. I would never say I just happen to be a Texan because being a Texan is a difference I am not about to give up in the hope of being treated fairly.

But what does it mean to be “one in Christ Jesus”? Some seem to think being one in Christ means Christians must be in agreement about matters that matter. In particular, we must be in agreement about the beliefs that make us Christian. The problem with that understanding of what it means to be one in Christ is there has been no time in the history of the church when Christians have been in agreement about what makes us Christians. To be sure, hard-won consensus has from time to time been achieved,

but usually the consensus sets the boundaries for the ongoing arguments we need in order to discern what we do not believe.

That we often find ourselves in disagreement, moreover, is not necessarily the result of some Christians holding mistaken beliefs about the faith. Rather, our differences are often the result of our being a people scattered around the world who discover different ways of being Christian given the challenges of particular contexts and times in which we find ourselves. If we were poor we might, for example, better understand the role of Mary in the piety of many that identify themselves as Roman Catholics.

If unity was a matter of agreement about all matters that matter, it clearly would be a condition that cannot be met. For example, I happen to know some of you are fans of the New York Yankees. Clearly we have deep disagreements that will not be easily resolved. So it surely cannot be the case our unity in Christ Jesus is a unity that depends on our being in agreement about all matters that matter.

There is another way to construe what it might mean to be one in Christ Jesus that I think is as problematic as the idea our unity should be determined by our being a people who share common judgments about what makes us Christian.

Some, for example, seem to think that unity is to be found in our regard for one another. We are united because we are a people who care about one another. Some even use the language of love to characterize what it means for us to be united in Christ.

The problem with that way of construing our unity is it is plainly false. We do not know one

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another well enough to know if we like, much less, love one another. Of course it is true that you do not have to like someone to love them, but I suspect, like me, you tend to distrust anyone who claims to love you but does not know you. If love, as Iris Murdoch suggests, is the nonviolent apprehension of the other as other, then you cannot love everyone in general.

The love that matters is that which does not fear difference. Christians are, of course, obligated to love one another, and such love may certainly have a role to play in our being one in Christ Jesus. But that does not seem to be what Paul means in this letter to the Galatians.

Paul seems to think that what it means for us to be one in Christ Jesus is a more determinative reality than our personal relations with one another make possible. Indeed, when unity is construed in terms of our ability to put up with one another, the results can be quite oppressive.

For the demand that we must like or even love one another can turn out to be a formula for a church in which everyone quite literally is alike. A friendly church can be a church that fears difference. As much as we might regret it, I suspect it remains true that those we like, and perhaps even love, are those who are just like us.

Whatever it means, therefore, for us to be one in Christ Jesus it surely cannot mean that we must like one another.

How then are we to understand what it means to be one in Christ Jesus? Paul says that if we belong to Christ we are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to God’s promise that he would make us his people. Once we were no people but now we are a people who, through baptism, have been clothed anew by Christ. What it means for us to be one in Christ is to be a people who have been given a new story. We are the children of Abraham, which means the kind of struggle against idolatry Elijah faced is now part of our history. We are one with our Jewish brothers and sisters because together we face a world that knows not the God who refuses to let Elijah accept defeat.

The very fact that the Old Testament is Christian Scripture means the story of Israel’s faithfulness, trials, and persecutions must illumine our life as the church of Jesus Christ.

For example, I suspect there are few things we do as Christians more important than pray the Psalms. The Psalms give voice to Israel’s faith in God even when the enemies of that faith, the Ahabs and Jezebels, seem to have the upper hand.

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THUS ISRAEL ASKS,

“WHY HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME? AND WHY DO I GO SO HEAVILY WHILE THE ENEMY OPPRESSES ME? WHILE MY BONES ARE BEING BROKEN, MY ENEMIES MOCK ME TO MY FACE; ALL DAY LONG THEY MOCK ME AND SAY TO ME, ‘WHERE NOW IS YOUR GOD?’”

“Where now is your God?” is a question that haunts us. It haunts us not because we do not believe in God, but because we simply don’t know how to answer it. We stammer for explanations.

We believe God remains present in this world―in our lives. And we want desperately to believe we have been made one with Christ Jesus, but that seems like some ideal that has little bearing on reality. In fact, the evidence seems to testify to God’s absence. To read the Psalms is to discover that the current challenges posed by the “new atheists” to the faith are not nearly as significant as those voiced by the Psalmist. Thus Elijah asks God to take his life because being “no better than his ancestors,” he assumes his situation is hopeless.

What can it mean for this to be the history that makes us one with Christ?

I think it has everything to do with learning to hear, as Elijah does, God’s silence. Better put: it means that we become for the world God’s silence so that the world may know that the salvation offered by God is not just another failed ideal.

Elijah stands on the mountain to be encountered

by God. There is a mighty wind, but the Lord is not in the wind. God is not in the earthquake, nor is God to be found in the fire. Rather God is in what is described as “the sound of sheer silence,” a silence we are told that Elijah heard. We cannot help but wonder how silence can have a sound that can be heard, but then we must remember that this is God who is passing by Elijah.

I suspect if you are like me you would prefer a God who chooses to be in the wind, earthquake, or fire. We want a God who leaves little doubt about what it means to be God. We are not at all sure we want to be a people capable of hearing the “sound of silence.” To hear the sound of silence means we face a God we cannot make serve our peculiar purposes. Like Elijah we must first listen.

In truth, I find listening to be a hard discipline.

I am seldom silent. I am, after all, an academic.

I am not supposed to be at a loss for words. I am to be the kind of person who always has something to say. To learn first to be silent, to listen, threatens loss of control. My only power is the power of the word. So I try to anticipate what you are going to say prior to what you say so I can respond before you have said anything.

I try to play the same game with God. I want God to be loquacious. I want God to be like me. But God is not like me. That God is present in silence suggests that listening to silence is as essential as listening to what God says. This is what Elijah had learned about the God of Israel.

And this is what we must learn if we are to hear the word of the Lord today. For the same Word that speaks to us today has spoken through the prophets. And God has not left us without resources for learning to be faced by silence.

What it means for us to be one in Christ, moreover, I think we discover in the silence that engulfs as we confront the most decisive moment of God’s silence, that is, the crucifixion. That is when we learn to listen to the sheer silence of our God. That is the moment we discover we are one in Christ Jesus. During Holy Week we hear again how our Lord is silent before his accusers.

On Maundy Thursday we kneel in silence as the body and blood of our savior is carried away, the nave is stripped, and we leave the church. That silence, the stunning silence of the crucifixion, is the silence of our God who refuses to save us by violence. The silence of Jesus is echoed by the silence of those who helplessly stood by with his holy mother to bear witness to his silent submission to the Father’s will, for our sake. It is this silence that makes us one with him in a manner more determinative than our agreements or commonalities.

This means that there are times when asked, “Where now is your God?” we best remain silent. Yet it is enough. By learning to be silent we have learned to be present to one another and the world as witnesses to the God who has made us a people who once were no people.

Such a people have no need to pretend we know more about our God than we do. We need not pretend that we do not face the reality of death and how that reality makes us doubt if our lives have purpose. But we believe we have been given every gift needed to remain faithful. Just as Elijah was commanded to eat so that he would have strength for the journey, so we have been given this bread and wine which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, makes us one with and in Christ Jesus.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

This is indeed good news, but the new identity we have in Christ is one that cannot be attested to by words. The words we use must be surrounded by the silence of God. To belong to Christ, to belong to one another, means we must, like Christ―and like Elijah before him, trust in the sound of that silence.

This sermon was originally preached on June 23, 2013 at The Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, NC.

WE

BECOME

FOR

THE

WORLD

GOD’S

SILENCE.

Stanley Hauerwas was named “Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001. He has been Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University since 1983, after a notable career at Notre Dame. Hauerwas gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2001, the first American invited to do so in 40 years. He is author of many books and collections of sermons, including his award-winning memoir, Hannah’s Child.

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A TORMENTED THEOLOGY? CHUNG HYUN KYUNG ON THE CROSS OF CHRIST INTERVIEWED BY BOB SCOTT

What is the role of the cross for you?

Jesus has this vision of the kingdom of God, the feast of equals. And he prophesied, and also he embodied, enacted that kingdom of God, this feast of equals, in his own life, in his own Jesus movement. He followed this vision all the way, under Roman colonialism and the very corrupted religious hierarchies in his time. And he had to pay the price for his vision, and his embodiment of this vision, and his movement.

Jesus died on the cross, and the cross was a punishing tool for the political prisoners in Roman times. So as a liberation theologian, I always feel that Jesus was killed. Jesus didn’t die. He was killed. He was tortured and killed on the cross, which was a political, oppressive tool used for prisoners under Roman imperialism.

I don’t wear a cross because who wants to wear torture equipment? Even symbolically, I am not going to wear an electric chair for my necklace. So I don’t ever wear a cross.

Sometimes in Christian theology the cross has been understood as satisfying God’s anger or paying a debt that the human race owed to God. How does that language strike you?

Jesus’ vision, Jesus’ movement, Jesus’ teaching in life saved us. Not his death on the cross itself. So a traditional, tormented theology—only Jesus’ blood, the man without the sin, his clean blood can save such a simple humanity— that very archaic, old metaphor doesn’t work for us.

In a way, Christian theology has a history of glorifying human suffering— for example, all the people, soldiers killed in crusade. All these deaths are sanctified. It is good death. But I don’t think the death of so many innocent people is good death. Many Asian, African, and Latin American theologians experienced horrendous suffering under dictatorship, like in Korea, the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, or South Africa. There are many martyrs who try to make justice and make peace. These people are killed.

We want to honor those martyrs’ lives and their convictions. And we also want to affirm that their death was not in vain. We call them little Jesus, little Christ, who were also crucified by the power and principality of this world. But none of their deaths were glorified. We find the meaning of their death, and we took their legacy of fighting for liberation in our psyche, and in our own action for liberation, and action for peace and justice. We carry their legacy.

We all know if you really tell the truth the way you see it, you are meant to be crucified, even in the present day, even in the USA. People speak up about what politicians are doing. Many of these people [suffer] the consequence of their truth telling. I think that is the cost of discipleship. All of us carry our cross if we want to lead a life of truth, a life of authenticity, a life of the Gospel, what Jesus taught us.

Dr. Chung Hyun Kyung gained worldwide attention with her address to the World Council of Churches in Canberra, Australia, in 1992, and since then she has built a substantial body of provocative, faithful work as a writer, speaker, and professor of Ecumenical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. ©2011, Paul Wainwright, detail from “Box Pews, Looking Down”, ECVA exhibition “Word and Example”

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A Better Story: Justice Redefined by the Gospel

BY DEREK FLOOD Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime, 1808 (oil on canvas), Prud’hon, Pierre-Paul (1758-1823) / Louvre, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library

A Better Story:

Justice Redefined by the Gospel

BY DEREK FLOOD

Go to see an action film this weekend, and in addition to the spectacle of epic visual effects, you will likely encounter a very familiar story line where in the end the good guys win and the bad guy “gets what he deserves.” That’s the way life is supposed to work, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s why, when tragedy strikes, we so often find people of faith asking, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The assumption behind this is that bad things are supposed to happen to bad people and good things to good people. This is justice based on people “getting what they deserve,” and we find it again and again in the movies we love.

We love them because they tell us a story we long to hear.

This is what is known as retributive justice, and it has deep roots in Western culture, stretching back for centuries upon centuries.

So much so that it has become part of our DNA, part of what we assume to be self-evident. So when we speak of justice being done, we mean punishment. Justice and punishment go together like bread and butter. The two are inseparable in our thinking, even synonymous. For someone to “get justice” or to “get what they deserve” means that they are punished.

The converse to this is mercy. Reflecting the assumptions of the surrounding culture, Christian theology has classically framed mercy as being in conflict with justice. This goes way beyond theology, however, and can be found in the assumptions underlying any national debate over the use of state violence, whether in regard to crime or international conflict and war. To “bring about justice” means punishing, it means violence, it means seeking to harm. Conversely, mercy means to refrain from violence. It thus is understood as an inaction. So in short: in this framework justice means inflicting harm, and mercy means doing nothing.

Because these are our culture’s default understandings of both justice and mercy, it is common for people to think that the only way to address crime or conflict is by inflicting harm, by the use of violent force. It is either that or doing nothing, we think. Either we act to “bring about justice” (meaning we respond with violence seeking to harm), or we act in mercy (which is understood to mean refraining from violence, and thus to do nothing). Because the options are framed in this way, many Christians reject the

teaching of Jesus to love our enemies because they think it entails doing nothing in the face of evil, which would be unloving and morally irresponsible. We need to protect the vulnerable from harm, don’t we? We need to care for the wellbeing of ourselves and our loved ones. So while people may regret the need to respond with violence, they feel they have no alternative but to respond to violence with violence. It’s regrettable, but what choice do we have? How else can we stop violence?

The tragic irony is that inflicting violence and harm in the name of justice does not in fact stop violence at all; it perpetuates it. Consider a person who cries out in their pain, “I want to make them hurt like they hurt me!” What is it that they are longing for here? The hope is that punishment will cause them to see the error of their ways and repent. If they suffer, they will recognize the harm they have done and be sorry.

In other words, the desire is for the other show empathy and remorse. The sad reality, however, is that inflicting harm almost never results in a person feeling empathy. It instead produces resentment. This really should not surprise us.

Inflicting harm is not good for a person. People do not learn empathy by being shamed and dehumanized. So the fruit of this kind of “justice” is that it makes things worse.

That’s where the Gospel comes in. The Gospel presents a new kind of justice which is characterized by making things right. It is the narrative of God in Christ acting to restore and redeem all of humanity through an act of grace and enemy-love. Paul refers to this in Romans as the dikaiosyne theou which literally means

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“the justice of God.” In Christ we see that God’s justice is a restorative justice, a justice that acts to make things right.

It’s crucial to recognize here that this Gospel perspective entails understanding both justice and mercy in a completely different way: justice is not about inflicting harm, it is about making things right. Similarly, mercy is not about inaction; on the contrary it is about acting to make people whole again, acting to make things right. Mercy is therefore not in conflict with restorative justice at all; rather it is the very means to it.

As a concrete application, let’s continue with the example of crime: restorative justice begins by addressing the needs of the victims—asking what they need in order to be restored and made whole again. This seems like an obvious focus, but the fact is that in our current criminal justice system the focus is placed on the criminal and the state, and the actual needs and well-being of victims are ignored.

A corollary focus of restorative justice is on the reform of the criminal, helping them to develop empathy and insight so they can break out of patterns of harm. This obviously benefits the offenders, helping them to regain their humanity, but it is equally in our own self-interest because a reformed criminal means a safer world for all of us. Consider what happens instead when people are made to suffer for their crimes in prison and then after serving their time are placed back on the street. Is it any wonder that they return to the same patterns that landed them in jail in the first place? Such patterns are, if anything, reinforced in the brutal culture of prison life—especially when the goal of prison is understood as punitive.

That is the difference between retributive and restorative justice. Looking at the fruits, we can see that one produces death and the other, life.

We need to wake up and realize that seeking to harm someone is not justice at all. Rather than continuing to tell stories that perpetuate this myth of redemptive violence, we need instead to learn a different story, a better and deeper story.

The Gospel shows us the true story our hearts long for. It’s the story of redemption. It’s the story of overcoming evil with good. Or to put it in the childish terms of action movies: it’s about turning “bad guys” into “good guys.” This is what real justice looks like, and the more that we can imagine and rehearse this, the more we can make that story a reality in our world.

Derek Flood is a voice in the postconservative evangelical movement, focused on understanding the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice. He is the author of Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross, and a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, Sojourners, and Red Letter Christians. His website is TheRebelGod.com.

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7 Dance Lessons for Life

ORMER PROFESSIONAL DANCER AND ORDAINED MINISTER F KIMBERLEIGH JORDAN OFFERS HER INSIGHTS INTO THE INTERSECTION OF DANCE AND LITURGY

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LIVE! This command, often yelled by a choreographer or director in a rehearsal, is an exhortation to be more fully alive and present in the dance. It compels the dancer to take risks and expand across boundaries in the space. This admonition is a reminder to continually imagine how to expand our worship beyond comfort zones and take some risks.

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C HOREOGRAPH THE WORDS A number of years ago, my pastor and mentor instructed me to “choreograph the words” as I was struggling with my first post-seminary sermon. Now I have expanded his suggestion to include the entire service of worship. I try to honor the sound, rhythm, and poetry that is alive in sacred texts, prayers, and other portions of liturgy. This means working collaboratively with sound technicians and other worship leaders, and maintaining a discipline of preparation and rehearsal with laypeople who serve as lectors.

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C HOREOGRAPHY, LIKE LITURGY, IS PROBLEM SOLVING An adage that choreography students learn is that choreography is problem solving. For example, make a dance for two dancers using twelve gestures. Likewise, liturgical design can be viewed from this perspective.

The “problems” are presented by the lectionary, the liturgical season, or the cultural calendar: Create a service that celebrates the birth of Jesus in a fresh way or marks the passage of life on All Saints’ Day. I try to imagine how we might embrace and embody the seasons with new senses.

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LEAVE NO SPACE UNUSED “She eats up the space” is a compliment for someone who uses all the space of the stage well in her movements. In liturgy, though we are not on a stage, there are many obvious similarities, so why not creatively engage all parts of the worship space, to the furthest corners? Use the aisles for more than processions, use ceilings for banners and streamers, use balconies for readings, vestibules for introits.

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LET IT BREATHE The breath is the silent partner of all dance and all life. Let the spaces of silence exist, giving worshipers the room to simply be silent before God. Some people come to worship to get a fill-up on God sounds and God words, and others come to empty themselves of the chatter of the workaday week. Honor this diversity and make room for these different sensorial needs in worship.

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WHEN YOU FALL, GET BACK UP AND KEEP MOVING A famous section of George Balanchine’s signature dance piece, Serenade, was built around a dancer’s fall in rehearsal. Like dance, liturgy is a live, human event, where there are accidents, faux pas, typos, sermons that miss the mark, and musical selections that flunk rather than inspire. The wise liturgist can respond to these liturgical mishaps by simply getting back up and dancing on.

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DON’T FORGET THE “THERE AND THEN” In a well-executed dance performance, there are a million points of technique that must be worked out before the show, but that is not what leads us to dance. Likewise, the liturgist must always be prepared for the service: is the music set, are the lights at the right setting? But those details are not the point. Awe, transcendence, hope, and passion are what enroll our hearts and souls in the regular practice of liturgy. In the there and then, we will gather around a table with Jesus Christ as our host. It is of this holy vision that, each time we gather, we hope to catch a fleeting glimpse.

Kimberleigh Jordan is a preacher and blogger who brings dance and other arts to her interpretation of theology. She is Director of Worship at the Riverside Church in New York City and holds graduate degrees in arts, theology, and dance from New York University, Union Theological Seminary, and Dance Theater of Harlem.

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The Community of Creation ELIZABETH JOHNSON

is the generous God of life. This is a kinship group of hugely diverse members whose mutual relationships are enormously rich and complex.

In varied interactions each member gives and receives, being significant for one another in different ways but all grounded in absolute, universal reliance on the living God for the very breath of life. Within this guild of life the distinctive capacities of human beings are part of the picture and can be exercised without lifting our species out of creation, as though we were demi-gods set over it. If humans are defined first of all as fellow-creatures, dominion can become a role within the larger sphere of community relationships, which are reciprocal rather than one-way.

Repositioning the human species within the community of creation centered on the living God and reconceiving our identity primarily along the lines of kinship rather than rule opens a promising new avenue for religious selfunderstanding and sound practice. Rather than setting up a top-down structure of relationship, theology done in this framework makes its first word that of our connection to others of God’s creatures, rather than of differentiation from them. While embracing the best of stewardship theology, this model’s different imaginative framework unleashes aesthetic, emotional, and ethical responses that express ecological sensibility at a core level. Note that the relationship envisioned here does not encourage communion by the ploy of blurring the lines between species, as if Homo sapiens were not a singularity. Rather, it allows each species to stand in its own difference, but encompassed by a wider whole that affects their relation.

To take the measure of this paradigm, consider key biblical texts that present a strong sense of the community of creation and offer mandates other than dominion. Allowing these writings to fertilize our imagination will suggest new patterns of theological anthropology rife with potential for critical life-enhancing spirituality and practice.

[Consider Job: 38–42, for example.] Ecologically aware scholars today find in the community of creation so superbly presented in Job a bracing summons to practice the virtues of humility and joy. Talk of multitudes of creatures who by divine design live freely, being subjects of their

own lives rather than objects for human use, punctures human obsession with ruling over others. We have lived for so long with this picture of ourselves, as subjects inhabiting a world that is our object and resource, that it is difficult to imagine it might not be true. However, the repeated questions from the whirlwind—where were you? do you know? can you make it happen? can you provide?—can be read as an antidote to the pride and consequent disregard of other species that has found justification in the Genesis dominion text (though such an interpretation is not necessarily the only one).

Humans take their place as creatures among other beloved creatures in whom the living God is independently interested.

At the same time, the community of creation image is bursting with God’s delight in the flourishing of life in the natural world, a joy which humans are called to share. In the book of Job this is not said in so many words, directly.

But the voice from the whirlwind’s close descriptions of animals’ idiosyncratic behaviors and habitats, the colorful abundance of word pictures, the sheer poetic power of these verses brings a subtle realization of divine enjoyment to the fore. The skill of the hunting lion, the freedom of the wild ass, the soaring flight of the eagle, even the apparent stupidity of the ostrich who lays her eggs where feet can crush them: the divine voice lingers lovingly over each one with what sounds like pleasure and pride. By sharing divine admiration of these creatures with similar gladness, Job, and with him human readers of the text, enter into deeper relationship with the Creator’s joy in the world.

Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University. Her current focus is mining the theological significance of the theory of evolution. Her work first came to wide attention with the publication of She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse in 1992. After receiving a Ph.D. in theology from Catholic University of America (1981), she taught at that university before moving to Fordham, where she was named Professor of the Year in 2011.

EXCERPT FROM THE LAST CHAPTER OF ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON’S FORTHCOMING BOOK, ASK THE BEASTS: DARWIN AND THE GOD OF LOVE. LONDON/NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY, JANUARY 2014. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION. 22

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Image Zoo

If evolutionary science has established any great insight it is that all life on this planet forms one community. Historically, all life results from the same biological process; genetically, living beings share elements of the same basic code; functionally, species interact without ceasing. Human beings belong to this community and need other species profoundly, in some ways more than other species need them. Take trees as an example. To stay alive trees take in carbon dioxide, synthesize it in the presence of sunlight, and give off oxygen as a result. Earth’s atmosphere is rich in oxygen thanks to the lives of green plants, trees tallest among them. Human beings breathe in this oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide as a waste product.

Which species is more needy of the other? In a thought experiment, remove humans from the earth. Trees would survive in fine fashion, as they did before humans arrived and started to cut them down. Now imagine trees removed from the planet. Humans would have an increasingly hard time surviving, with growing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and less oxygen to breathe. The point is, human beings are not simply rulers of the life-world but dependent upon it at the most fundamental level.

The biblical vision of the community of creation offers a similar view for more ancient religious reasons. In its origin, history, and goal, the whole world with all its members is ultimately grounded in the creative, redeeming love of God. Neither plants, animals, nor human beings, neither land, sea, nor air, neither sun, moon, nor stars would exist apart from the life-giving, loving power of the Creator. When parsed to its most basic element, the relational pattern of the community of creation is founded on the belief that all beings are in fact creatures, sustained in life by the Creator of all that is. At the core of their identity, humankind and otherkind share this same fundamental status of receiving their life as a gift. Consequently, we human beings and other species have more in common than what separates us.

Unlike the dominion worldview which sets humans in a relationship of ruling over others, this community worldview holds that human beings participate with others in an interdependent world fundamentally oriented to God. We are situated within, not over, the magnificent circle of life, whose center and encompassing horizon

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overheard |

Robert Wright

“Love, you might say, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other…

love at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other.”

Quote from The Evolution of God by Robert Wright (New York: Back Bay Books/Little Brown and

Images from Thinkstock

Company, 2009)

A Safe Place for the Spiritual but Not Religious Otis Gaddis on progressive evangelism INTERVIEWED BY BOB SCOTT

Could you describe the work that you’re doing now?

I’m a chaplain at the University of Maryland in College Park. That is my primary work, but it’s always in relationship to a larger work, which is practicing what I describe as progressive evangelism. Progressive evangelism is the capacity to engage people spiritually in a way that is beneficial to both parties, with the result that the Holy Spirit is revealed in both people’s lives in a way that makes them want to continue the conversation.

When we think of evangelism, it’s an experience most people don’t want to have, especially Episcopalians, because we don’t want to cause people pain and suffering. We think that’s what it means to tell someone else our beliefs. But to be the midwives of a conversation, the midwives of a realization, to help someone else articulate their spiritual story, and through that discover how we are connected to the absolute, to God— that’s a skill that needs to be out there, and it’s actually appreciated.

And I can tell you that’s happened in my work. At the University of Maryland I have two ministries. One is a traditional Episcopal service for students, and I’m working on a community of mostly spiritual but not religious people who would never be going to church, or wouldn’t come to this church. We’re doing spiritual practices in the contemplative tradition. The people in my ministry who are spiritual but not religious may consider themselves atheists, might even be of other religions, but they feel like they can be in this space and continue a conversation over a period of months.

What did you do to create that kind of invitation to people?

According to the Pew Research Group, less than one in five young adults from 18 to 29 is participating in a religious community or service more than twice a month. So of those [other] four out of five, some are going to be interested in spirituality. There are people on this campus who were already meditating but without any guidance. They were curious about spiritual practices but didn’t have anywhere that was safe for them. Safe meant, “you’re not going to try to make me into something.”

So I’m here in my collar, and people can walk into the space that I host and say, “I don’t really want to be religious, but I’m interested in spirituality.” And I can say, “Welcome,” and they feel comfortable.

tradition. I’m authorized to convert you. But as an Episcopalian, I am authorized to companion you though a spiritual process because that’s what we do. We back our way into our experiences.

We’re like Peter who has a vision and is like,

How do you communicate that it’s safe? People tend to be somewhat skeptical, especially when you’re wearing a collar.

The thing is here, a lot of people don’t even know what the collar means anymore. I think the safety comes in when you tell them, by your actions, that you’re just there to help them. For instance, something as simple as pastoral care, or asking them to meet one on one, or asking them questions to help them reflect on their life, and when the hour is over they’re like, “Wait, the only reason you brought me here was so that you could ask me questions about my life and listen to me?” For those who have no real connection [to the church], this is actually a fundamentally weird and wonderful idea.

If I were a conservative evangelical pastor, it wouldn’t be authentic for me to say, “I’m here just to help you on your spiritual journey.” That’s not something that I’m authorized to do by that

“Okay, I’m going to go visit Cornelius. The spirit told me to do it. I showed up, the Spirit was there.” That’s who we are. As an Episcopalian, I’m free, authentically, in my tradition to tap into anything. I’m authorized to pick up something from a piece of Buddhist text, something from the Sufis, deploy that in a conversation and try to pull out the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is not limited. She will show up anywhere, and my job is to recognize that.

The Rev. Otis Gaddis III (Chaplain, University of Maryland), a recent graduate of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, is a founding member of the Episcopal Evangelism Network, a community of practice engaged with dreaming of a new Episcopal Church.

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A Public Theology Courtesy of Almeda Wright

Almeda Wright on listening and empowering young people INTERVIEWED BY BOB SCOTT

Would you describe your work at the Youth Theological Initiative at Emory?

The Youth Theological Initiative (YTI) is an ecumenical community for rising high school seniors and juniors. I was a mentor and lived in the dorms with the students. I taught a class on American religious radicalism from Jim Jones to Koinonia Farms What did that period teach you, or how did it change you?

One of the founding principles around YTI was that young people are prepared to do deep and rich theological reflection, and they’re already doing it. Sometimes they don’t have the vocabulary.

Sometimes they don’t have the safe space to ask questions, but they’re already thinking, “What does this mean for my life?” or, “What are these doctrines that I’ve inherited from my faith community of origin?”

As adults, our job really needs to be to listen and to push to keep the conversation going.

Oftentimes we want to say, “Act this way,” or, “Do this,” or, “Believe what we’ve always believed,” versus saying, “That’s a great question, let’s explore it together because I don’t have the answer either.”

You’ve written about seeing young people as a source of theological insight. Could you say more about that?

Some people describe adolescence as a liminal space or a threshold. And it’s true in some sense, but right now adolescents are already changing and really pushing their communities. And sometimes we push them in their academics, but we don’t see them as also having those same skills to bring to the church and to the life of faith.

Why would we say that you can take AP Biology and Chemistry and English Literature, but not also say, “You have enough intellect, enough spirit, to fully participate in this conversation about what this doctrine means,” or, “How are we living into what our baptism represents?”

They’re having these conversations outside of the listening ears of adults.

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You spoke about your research showing a tension between a personal relationship with Jesus and public faith in young people. Where do you see that, and what do you think that means?

When you talk to young people, and when you do long-skill interviews, you’ll see energy levels where they’re really excited, and energy levels where they go really flat. When I ask them about their friends, about their social life, about how they experience God in their day-to-day life, they’re excited, and the energy is really high.

And then we [ask], “What are you concerned about in your community?” and, “What worries you?” And they have a whole host of things that they will list. Then I will ask them, “Where do you see God in the midst of this?” and the conversation goes flat. There’s a sense that God isn’t big enough, not necessarily that God doesn’t care, but when it comes to societal problems, or racism, or poverty, or big ticket injustices, [they] don’t know where God is. And so in some ways [they] act as if God is not there, or that’s not God’s problem. That’s what I see as this fragmented spirituality, or the personal Jesus versus a public faith.

What kind of faith are we sharing if we’re not empowering young people to think that God is big enough to talk about this, that God is empowering you to work towards this?

Does your work point to any directions for addressing that?

I do see some exemplars of faith. I see some moments in movements and history where we were doing a better job. We will often look back at the civil rights movement and churches that were able to fully integrate what they were preaching in the pulpits on Sunday with the work that they were doing in their participation in the movement.

There’s this idea [during] slavery… “hush harbors,” where [slaves] would go to secret locations to pray. People knew that there was resistance that was being built. If you were spiritually grounded and knew that you were assured of your faith, then it empowered you to do a whole lot of different things.

You’ve asked how we could cultivate a generation of young public theologians. What would that look like?

I see the radical thrust within young people because they’re going to be willing to ask the questions and worry about the consequences later. They’re not worried that their mortgage will somehow be affected by the fact that they’ve asked a tough question, or they’ve gone and picketed and protested a particular area or a particular problem. If I’m telling you that your God is big enough, I’m telling you that your faith requires something of you. I’ve got to help you figure out where you give legs to this, where you put hands and feet on this.

Public theology reminds us to pay attention to what is going on in the community around us.

It reminds us to ask of our faith, “What do you have to say?” and, “What does this say in the face of struggle, of racism, of poverty, of sexism?” It’s empowering young people to have that dialogue.

Almeda M. Wright (Yale Divinity School) studies, writes, and speaks widely on adolescent spiritual development, African-American religion, and the intersections of religion and public life. She is Assistant Professor of Religious Education at Yale Divinity School. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Pfeiffer University. She also served as Assistant Director of the Youth Theological Initiative of Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where she earned her Ph.D. Wright’s publications work includes the editing of book Children, Youth, and Spirituality in a Troubling World (with Mary Elizabeth Moore).

psalmtube

Compassionate Imagination

BY JEREMY SIERRA

salesman, and the man who participates in an awful and surreal practice that involves using living people from the developing world as lawn ornaments (a story which, according to an interview, originated in a dream).

Saunders knows the pitfalls and foibles of human nature, but he also knows that love can, on occasion, shine through them.

You may have read Saunders’ graduation speech that circulated earlier this year. He calls on the students at Syracuse University to be kind. It draws on the same far-reaching empathy and understanding as his fiction.

“There’s a confusion in each of us,” Saunders says, “a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.”

So his advice is this: “Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality—your soul, if you will—is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”

You could call that consciousness or you could call it compassion, and compassion is the place where the generous vision of fiction and unconditional religious love intersect. This kind of compassionate imagination can help us see humanity at its most lost, broken, even monstrous, and still understand that there is a hidden life and history behind every human being we encounter. Maybe then we can, in Saunders’ words, “err in the direction of kindness.”

Jeremy Sierra is Managing Editor of Trinity News

Images from Thinkstock

Reading is a religious activity.

Put another way, if religion is composed of everything we create that brings us closer to one another and the truth and to God—music, for example, and liturgy, theology, and prayer books—then opening a great book is akin to a religious experience. The best books, the Bible included, give us a glimpse into other lives, a God’s-eye vision of reality.

George Saunders’ story collection, Tenth of December, is one such book. It is empathy inducing, possibly transcendent, in the sense that it compels the reader to transcend his or her own experiences.

Like the Bible, you could also argue that Saunders’ book is all about salvation. Time and time again he takes his characters to the brink of tragedy only to bring them back again, to redeem them either by their actions or simply by showing them to be deeper, more broken, and more humane than they might appear at first glance.

In “Victory Lap,” two teenagers save each other, quite literally. Later, a convicted murderer sacrifices himself rather than harm another inmate. In the title story an awkward boy saves an old man from committing suicide, and the old man saves the boy from drowning in a frozen lake.

In the final few pages of the book, Saunders writes: “They were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing has just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing.”

This expansive compassion for his characters strikes me as religious in nature, grounded in unconditional love.

Sometimes, of course, the characters fail to recognize each other as complicated people in difficult circumstances, situations made all the more devastating because Saunders makes us empathize with them—the poor woman who ties up her mentally ill child so he doesn’t hurt himself, the criminal, the somewhat slimy

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stories Two Anglican priests made history in the past year when they became the first and second female bishops in the Anglican Church in Africa. The Rt. Rev. Ellinah Wamukoya was elected bishop of the Diocese of Swaziland in July 2012, and the Rt. Rev. Margaret Vertue was elected bishop in October 2012 in the Diocese of False Bay, outside Cape Town in South Africa. Both dioceses are in the Province of Southern Africa.

Along with bishops, priests, and laity from across the continent of Africa, Bishops Wamukoya and Vertue traveled to Kumasi, Ghana, in June to participate in a Financial Sustainability and Stewardship Peer-Coaching Workshop sponsored by Trinity Wall Street.

The bishops spoke with Trinity’s Senior Video Producer Jim Melchiorre about a variety of topics including income, education, health, and the continent-wide goal of keeping the church financially sustainable into the future.

Bishop Wamukoya: Swaziland is classified as a middle-income country, but the reality is not quite so.

The wealth is in the hands of a few people, whereby 70 percent of the people depend on agriculture, and they live on very little money, maybe less than a dollar a day.

We are one of the countries adversely affected by the HIV and AIDS scourge.

Therefore, we have a lot of work to do to make sure that when people are infected, it doesn’t mean the end of the road. They can still live, they can still worship the Lord.

They can still be useful to their families. We have to encourage them to do that and at the same time help them to find ways and means to make a living.

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Sustainability to me means the diocese should be able to generate its own income. Currently we are working with the United States and Ireland to develop a farm the diocese owns. It’s called the Luyengo Farm Project, and we hope that in a few years’ time we shall be shareholders in that farm, and we’ll be able to fund some of the projects and work the diocese has. We also have the Thokosa Conference Centre that is run by the diocese through a board. We are seeing some dividends now, but I am sure that it has a potential to give even more. And then we also have some real estate properties in the towns of [Manzini and Mbabane]. I would love to see them being managed better, being improved. Once we do that, then the Diocese of Swaziland will be on its way to selfsustainability.

Bishop Vertue: We span quite a large area.

The center of the diocese to the furthermost points would be about two hours’ drive. We have the whole coastline, so we have a lot of people who depend on fishing for a living.

In the farmlands you have a lot of unemployment because it’s seasonal work.

The education system in South Africa at the moment is a little poor, so we are trying to put in place an education center at most of our churches, so that the children can, at least, have a very good grounding before they enter school. In one of our areas where we have a church school, the literacy rate is only 2.7 percent, so that’s challenging.

We put in place programs to develop young people. And we have a very, very strong presence of young people in our churches; at least 40 percent of the people attending the service will be under 30.

Sadly, we’re not having to concentrate on old-age homes because of HIV and AIDS. So we have what we call “homefrom-home,” which has about eight children, together with parents or with people who act as parents to these children. And at holiday times we ask community members to take them home, and through [that] a lot of them become foster parents, and that makes room for more [children] to come in. We are learning much about sustainability right here at this workshop, so we can generate funds to begin to assist these many projects.

learned?

WHAT HAVE YOU

possible otherwise. Upon graduation I considered switching to the corporate sector, but my place right now is in the nonprofit community.

THE EDUCATORS I HAVE MET have been truly inspiring folks, within our congregation and also at the schools that Trinity has partnered with. Their love for children and love of teaching shows that what they do is so much more than a job. It’s really a calling.

TRINITY IS a great community abundant with the gifts and talents of the staff and congregation.

That’s the thing I love about Trinity: the diversity and what people bring and offer of themselves.

I AM MOST PROUD OF all the work that we’ve done with schools at Trinity. I’m proud of the three-prong strategy we developed—partnering with schools in Lower Manhattan, engaging civically, and developing a network nationally within the church. Across the country Trinity is bringing together people who are doing similar work to offer time for respite and renewal, and provide a forum where they can share and learn with each other.

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH CAN support schools by being a moral voice for children and public education and by encouraging churches to engage civically with children in their communities.

Anita Chan came to Trinity in 2003 to work in the Human Resources department, eventually becoming Associate Director of Faith in Action and steering Trinity’s various education initiatives. While at Trinity, she also had two children and earned an MBA. Chan left Trinity in June of 2013 to move to Beijing with her family, where her husband will be Deputy Attaché for the Department of Homeland Security at the American Embassy.

I WILL NEVER FORGET all the wonderful people that I’ve met during my time at Trinity— everyone I have worked with, young people I met at local schools, grantees doing amazing work in their communities, leaders from churches across the country. For me Trinity has been a portal for connecting to the world.

BECAUSE OF TRINITY I have been able to dive into my passion of working with children and schools. I don’t think that would have been

COMMUNITY CAN STRENGTHEN SCHOOLS by pulling together resources and working collaboratively. Children need the breadth and depth of knowledge, relationships, and resources that a community has in order to succeed. Our success should be measured in terms of our children’s success.

MY CHILDREN REMIND ME that there is so much to learn, to always love, and to never give up hope.

I’M NERVOUS AND EXCITED ABOUT moving to Beijing. It’s really going to be an adventure for me. I’d love to learn about the school system in Asia. I’m nervous about the whole thing but also excited to see what I can learn and how I will grow from this experience.

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PA R I S H

perspectives

The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Rector, blesses the Memorial Garden in the Trinity churchyard, where the ashes of departed people connected with Trinity may be interred.

Joyce Mondesire, Courtney Mortson, and members of the Trinity youth ministry program, Nicolette and Anita, on Celebration Sunday, which kicks off Trinity’s program year.

Delores Osborn and Marion Toy on Celebration Sunday.

Trinity parishioner Cynthia Moten participates in a “work day” at All Souls Episcopal Church in New Orleans.

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TOP LEFT: The Trinity Youth Chorus performs its Spring Pops concert. The theme was songs of home and New York City, and featured songs ranging from “New York, New York” from On the Town and Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” The chorus provides musical education and performance opportunities for children in Lower Manhattan.

TOP RIGHT: Children sing in a concert to conclude the Hour Children Music Camp in Charlotte’s Place. Hour Children ministers to currently and formerly incarcerated women and their children. The camp was led by members of the Trinity community and included performance and composition.

Fr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones baptizes Trinity Verger Carlos Mateo’s daughter, Genesis. 23 children and adults were baptized on Pentecost, the most in many years. There were also eight confirmations, a reception, and three re-affirmations.

Lisa Bellan-Boyer and Elizabeth fold paper cranes. The cranes were sent to Holocaust Museum Houston, where they are collecting 1.5 million butterflies to remember children who perished during World War II. Bellan-Boyer is an interfaith minister who teaches origami weekly in Charlotte’s Place.

Performance artists participate in a performance piece, entitled Time After Us, in St. Paul’s Chapel choreographed by Ernesto Pujol. Performers walked counterclockwise for 24 hours.

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News from Trinity’s partners and friends, near and far.

Archivists Round Table On October 3, Trinity hosted a student social organized by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. (A.R.T.), a professional organization for archivists in the New York Metro area that offers monthly programs in addition to workshops and continuing education. Archives Graduate students came to socialize with other students, eat pizza, and meet with board members of A.R.T. Trinity’s Archivist and Parish Historian Anne Petrimoulx is the Director of the Membership Committee on the board.

Don and Lee Englund Trinity parishioners Don and Lee Englund walked 490 miles along the Camino de Santiago.

This pilgrimage is a route in northern Spain that ends at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia where the remains of the Apostle Saint James are said to be buried. The route has been traveled by pilgrims for over 1,000 years.

Erin Weber-Johnson Grants Program Officer Erin Weber-Johnson will be leaving Trinity in November to work full-time for the Episcopal Church Foundation as a Capital Campaign Consultant. She has been working part-time at Trinity and the Episcopal Church Foundation since 2009 and has been involved in making grants supporting many programs, including the Episcopal Service Corps, a service program for young adults. With the support of Trinity and other organizations, ESC has grown to include dozens of sites around the country.

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Ferina Moses After 22 years serving as a volunteer youth minister at Trinity, Ferina Moses has been called to do youth work in the Diocese of North Carolina. Although Moses has already moved to North Carolina, she will continue to work with the youth at Trinity over the next year in a smaller capacity, organizing a joint pilgrimage to the Taizé Community in France. The youth group and other members of the community honored her ministry at a special celebration in October.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, Priest for Pastoral Care and Nurture, participated in a panel discussion about the Trayvon Martin case in September. The symposium was organized by the International Consortium of Caribbean Professionals and the Universities of the West Indies Alumni Association. Bozzuti-Jones, alongside professors and community leaders, spoke about the need for forgiveness and nonviolence.

Gwynedd Cannan Trinity employee Gwynedd Cannan retired in August after 12 years as Trinity’s Archivist and Parish Historian. Cannan completely organized Trinity’s extensive collection of historical documents and artifacts for the first time in its 300-year history.

Millenium Hilton The Millenium Hilton’s owners donated supplies for 50 classrooms in a Lower Manhattan elementary school through Trinity’s Totes for Teachers Program. The hotel is the first outside organization to adopt a school through the program. Staff from the hotel delivered the supplies to the school in October.

Linda Hanick Chief Communications Officer Linda Hanick announced her retirement effective June 2014.

Hanick joined the Trinity staff as a consultant in 1981 and became a full-time employee in 1989. As a producer she received five Emmy Awards. She became Vice President of Communications and Marketing in 2004 and Chief Communications Officer in 2010. Nathan Brockman was promoted to Director of Communications and Marketing on October 1.

Time After Us In October, Trinity hosted a piece of performance art, entitled Time After Us, in St. Paul’s Chapel. It was choreographed by performance artist Ernesto Pujol and presented by the French InstituteAlliance Francaise. Beginning at 10:30am on October 3, 24 walkers moved slowly backwards counterclockwise in the center of the chapel for 24 hours, in an understated performance that the Rev. Daniel Simons called “quietly beautiful in its simplicity.”

Lineage Project In October, Trinity hosted a training by the Lineage Project for individuals interested in teaching yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness practices to court-involved youth, including those who are incarcerated and in the foster system, as well as homeless LGBTQ youth.

Lawyers, social workers, and other community members interested in social justice attended the training, led by Trinity employee Leslie Booker.

Booker is the Director of Teacher Trainings and a Senior Teacher for the project. The next training will be held in January 2014.

Spread the Word Do you have news to share with the rest of the Trinity community?

Email your news, milestones, and updates to news@trinitywallstreet.org or call 212.602.9686.

The gifts Christ gave were … to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. —Ephesians 4:11–13 The Good News expressed in Lower Manhattan today is a message of love and the hope of wholeness for a population that differs greatly from when Trinity Church was first chartered in 1697. The 17th-century congregation could never have imagined accessing sermons and information through websites, emails, and social media. Similarly, contemporary parishioners likely would find the sermons of that earlier era to be long and dense, even though at the time those particular messages were edifying and effective. The saints are equipped differently in different eras, having current tools and resources and practices at their disposal. But the mission endures: to restore and heal and make whole.

We don’t need to look back several centuries to see dramatic change and to appreciate the challenge of keeping the Good News fresh and accessible. Throughout the national Episcopal Church and, indeed, in all Christian denominations, communities are working to discover (quickly) who and what the Body of Christ is to be today. Driven perhaps first by the awareness that old economic models of church are broken, the challenge is so much more than financial sustainability.

I am energized rather than threatened by these conversations and by the evidence that what I have known as the church all my life is suddenly changing. I am excited to see what new thing God is working on to fulfill God’s purpose. I am also gratified to observe that in this holy upheaval, the individualism of our day is challenged head-on by a deepening appreciation, if not a total rediscovery, of the centrality of community. We are all in this together.

Trinity Wall Street is pleased to participate in a bold experiment in the Diocese of New York. The Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of New York, invited the parishes of the diocese to embark on a year of discovery through Indaba. As defined by diocesan materials distributed for the organizational meeting in September, “Indaba is a Zulu word which means gathering for purposeful discussion.

It is both a process and a method of engaging one another in which we listen and learn about the opportunities and challenges that face us in our various communities of faith.”

Through our internal Indaba, we will be replicating on the local level an international process initiated at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, reportedly a dramatic and healing change in the manner in which Anglican bishops came together.

Trinity has been joined for Indaba with two distinctly different congregations, one located in Harlem and the second in upper Westchester County. Each congregation has a team of four who will visit in one another’s homes and worship together in each other’s churches. Although I suspect that our differences will be most apparent initially, as we come to know one another, our common faith and experiences of Jesus Christ will ground us in mutual love and understanding. As we discover how God is present in such different settings than our own, we will develop keener sight to see how God is present in new ways. No doubt in the midst of shared experiences we will hear that wondrous still, small voice, calling us to the fullness of life in new ways in a new day, together.

I … beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. —Ephesians 4:1–6

Blessings,

The Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee Vicar, Trinity Wall Street amallonee@trinitywallstreet.org Leo Sorel

TrinityNews

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Trinity Wall Street

Twelfth Night Festival December 26, 2013–January 6, 2014

Trinity Wall Street Music and the Arts presents its annual Twelfth Night Festival in collaboration with Gotham Early Music Scene and other New York cultural partners. For a full listing of events and to purchase tickets, please visit: twelfthnightfestival.org