We’ve recently taken a 5000-mile road trip, from home in Vancouver, BC, to our middle son’s college in suburban Chicago. Along the way, we stopped for a couple of days to enjoy Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Black Hills in South Dakota. And the two park areas provide rich fodder for theological reflection.
In particular, they raise the question of our calling as human beings toward the rest of the world.
Yellowstone is all about preservation of nature, enjoying as it has from its beginning the blessing of such proponents of wilderness as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. As one drives for hours through this vast park, seeing only the one road ahead and behind with few other signs of human presence, one cannot fail to be impressed by grandeur, vitality, authenticity, and other themes.
Indeed, if one does fail to be so impressed, the visitors’ centre will do all it can to help. And it will do so in the cadences and categories of nature mysticism, a long tradition in America. The film presentation we watched in the centre explicitly invoked Emerson and Thoreau and their successors in this alternative religion.
Summer hiatus
August 24, 2007
I write today from Wheaton, Illinois, in Chicago’s western suburbs, where we are helping middle son Joshua begin studies at the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College. We drove down and over from Vancouver via Interstate 90, thus traversing Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois–with stops at Yellowstone Park and the Black Hills. I hope to write about some theological and religious questions raised for me in the comparison of how we are treating “nature” in both of those places (briefly: very differently, and in bad and good ways in both, in my view).
We intend to return via I-80, thus traversing Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, part of Utah, Idaho, and Washington again, with a brief stop to visit the Mormon sites in Salt Lake City.
After Labour Day, then, I expect to be back in the normal groove and to post something substantial shortly thereafter. In the meanwhile, I wish you a pleasant end of summer and beginning of fall. Having narrowly escaped destruction in winds approaching 90 mph here in Wheaton yesterday, please receive that wish as more than a pleasantry!
A Bad Appeal for a Good Cause
August 17, 2007
Churches sometimes succumb to the temptation to appeal to our less-worthy motives in order to get us to do what we ought. In our age of individualistic, therapeutic, consumeristic selfishness–not that every age isn’t selfish, but this is the kind of selfishness that afflicts us most–churches often present the various needs they have for volunteers in terms of “opportunities.”
So each Sunday morning we hear of “opportunities” in youth work, or the soup kitchen, or the Sunday School, or an Alpha program. And each Sunday morning we then ask ourselves, if only for a moment’s consideration, “Do I want to do that? Will this be good for me? Is it indeed a valuable opportunity? No? Then forget it.”
Yes, Christian service is always a valuable opportunity for me: to use my spiritual gifts, to develop a serving spirit, to enjoy the company of fellow Christians, and so on. But Christian service is supposed to be also about honouring God and loving my neighbour. It’s about an obligation to meet others’ needs, not just benefit myself with one happy opportunity after another.
Medicine and Religion: Yes and No
August 9, 2007
Richard P. Sloan is worried about the connection of medicine and religion, as well he should be. He is Professor of Behavioral Medical (sic–I hope that word is actually “Medicine”) at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.
Professor Sloan makes basically two points in his recent posting on the Newsweek/Washington Post website, “On Faith.” He thinks he is making only one: namely, that religion has no part in medicine. But in fact he is making at least two.
His article is entitled, “First, Do No Evangelizing.” This title is just a teeny, tiny bit offensive to Christian physicians who might be expected to bristle at this allusion to the Hippocratic Oath, whose first clause is, “First, do no harm.” Evangelism = harm? Ouch.
But as someone who is in favour of both evangelism and medicine, I think Professor Sloan is right about his main point: physicians must not take advantage of patients’ dependence upon them for their physical wellbeing to press spiritual matters upon them.
E-mail Silence: I’m Not Writing Back Because I Hate You
August 5, 2007
It’s summertime, and we’re all dealing with e-mail as best we can. Some of us answer it daily no matter what. Others let it pile up when we’re on vacation, and then whittle away at it upon our return. Others blast through the pile in a burst of sustained correspondence the first day back.
In the summer, we all recognize that people’s normal communication habits are interrupted.
But in the rest of the year?
I’ve come to see e-mail silence–when someone takes longer to reply than I think she should–as a Rorschach test. How I interpret that void, how I fill it in, tells me what’s in my mind to use as filler.
