My previous entry ended up moving away from a place of meeting, and of conversation, and back into what seems to be the same immovable, unyielding place. I started to sense that, and I stopped. That was hours ago. I have since eaten lunch, and spent a while in the bookstore reading the first couple of chapters in Brian McLaren’s new book, a third of a trilogy that began with A New Kind Of Christian and The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian
entitled The Last Word … And the Word After That.

I finally realized I had been away from home all afternoon, and put it down (and thinking, I’ll probably end up having to buy that one , too).

My mind went back to the thoughts I had begun in the previous post, and how it may well have seemed to anybody who was reading it from a view more sympathetic to the Christian Right, that my narrative there was not heading in a direction suitable for dialogue; I ended up talking about how difficult it seems for Fox News junkies to recognize “Spin” in the “No-Spin Zone”; and how that “Zone” is about as “spinny” as they come.

It seems that Christians don’t have much of an alternative to offset that spin. There is basically nothing. But most people who would tend toward the Brian McLaren, “Progressive”, Generous Orthodoxy of the “New Evangelicals” or whatever, have nothing to help them reflect on the theological issues in play in our present publich discourse about life, politics, and justice.

We need a Church like that. But Churches are deathly afraid of what kind of dialogue might come out of that; or worse, what would happen to dialogue in Church when people begin to ask certain theological questions about what a just society and a Compassionate government looks like.