I often use my Sojourners Category here as a container for issues that I comment upon that are either from Sojourners, or in the category of Faith, Politics, and Social Policy that I discover elsewhere. Often, in posts last year and in 2002, I would put such things under Theoblogical, but this broadened the theoblogical category too widely. Sojourners magazine was one of those early influences on me that enabled me to do some of that “theological sociology” which calls into question many of the things that are “assumed” by cultural Christianity that may well be results of the slow, often unnoticed melding of theological views and values that are “of this world”.

This year, I will have been reading Sojourners for 20 years. I began getting it after hearing Jim Wallis address a Lutheran Synod convention in Phoenix after he had been in Tuscon during the Sanctuary Trials.

Just a year earlier, during a youth group trip I organized to visit The Church of the Saviour, we heard the testimony of a group from this Church who went to Nicaragua and El Salvador to help the people there, who were being killed beuase they were in the way of a Civil war being fought in which the US was supplying one of the sides of the conflict, and who were committing unbelievable atrocities and mass murders of families. The US , of course, was doing everything it could to disavow and hide these facts, including refusing to grant assylum to people fleeing this conflict, saying that these people were NOT facing political persecution (often at the hands of US trained and supplied groups). This was in the mid-80’s. I picked up an issue of Sojourners at the Potter’s House bookstore, on which the cover story headline read “Ronald Regan is Lying about Nicaragua”. The testmonies I heard from people involved in the Sanctuary Movement (Churches were “illegally” hiding people who had fled central America and were seeking to avoid being deported……a movie entitled “Salvador” starring James Woods depicted some of the realities of El Salvador and Nicaragua , as well as a depiction of the murder of a group of Missionaries made famous by the Jean Donovan story).

So I will use Sojourners as my category for things that I blog which come from that theological sensibility in me that was nurtured and is stil being nurtured by Sojourners.

The “Theoblogical” Category I will reserve for items relating to The Church and Blogging and/or other emerging web technologies.