Eric with a good link and excellent points, which might just need to be taken as more than what I just called them (“excellent points”), but as duties; as “calling”. Our CALL is not only to the task of reconciling ministry to be done “in the world”, but also to the community in which we receive this call and from whom we are sent. If this experience does not adequately prepare us, then our calling is handicapped.

Eric’s Tasty Morsels of Thought – Jeff Sharlet seeks the right questions

Every Christian has a friend or family member who doesn’t quite think like they do, but that doesn’t mean that we are really any different from each other. I think that instead of working out our differences through bigotry, hatred, and competition, we’re called instead to allow the Triune God to transcend those differences so that we can be reconciled to each other in a positive harmony and peace. The articles in Harper’s are disturbing, no doubt, but wouldn’t it be better to see these differences in theology, ethics, and epistemology not as an excuse to further a false “us vs. them” mentality (especially when we are as much “them” as we are very much the same “us”!), but instead as an opportunity for reconciliation?

I agree with James KA Smith that this a job not for antropologists or even for bloggers, except those bloggers who are also “resident teachers” charged with the task and the calling to BE that community and model the ethos of reconciliation that applies to , even at the very least, to “enemies”; whcih might just include those who we are so quick to condemn as “heretics” and “blind, ignorant, and deceived”. If we eschew the goal of reconciliation, who is the heretic and the blind but us?