Tuesday, 06 February 2007

• Veritas Soundbites

  
  

  Thank you to those who were praying today.  In gratitude, let me just jot down a bit of the experience.
  Tonight's theme: Reconciliation Amidst Violence and Racism
  Tonight's speakers:
  Emmanuel Katongole - Co-Director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.
  Erwin McManus - author and pastor of Mosaic, a church in Los Angeles.
  Yvonne Latty - journalism professor and author of this USA Today op-ed that led to a rush of racist and hateful e-mails.

  On to the soundbites...

  ~Don't just forgive, release.  We must move pass the conversation of pain.
  ~Christianity should speak to brokenness.
  ~Moving to humanity as a project is much easier than moving to humanity as a community.
  ~We need to create a dream that cannot be accomplished alone.
  ~You cannot carry out fundamental change without a cerain amount of madness.
  ~What is the enemy of racism?  Love.  Being heroic.
  ~Q: What can we seek to unify us now that the grief of 9/11 is a distant memory?  A: Let 'US' be known as the advocate of the downtrodden.
  ~The danger to 'US' is from within: we lack communal, civil conversations about real issues.  Instead, we try to entertain ourselves to death.
  ~We don't open our eyes to see what's going on...we don't recognize the connections, the ripple effect of the loss(t).
  ~History judges outcomes, not actions.  We should intervene in certain places, but let's try to prevent the wars.
  ~The human story is a macrocosm of our own human condition.  I can't heal myself, much less the world.  That's where Jesus Christ comes in.
  ~We need to come to terms with our own brokenness.  Salvation?  Peace?  This isn't just our burden.  It's bigger than us.
  ~You can touch a life by showing them a different way.
  ~Two calls:  the ethical one - do not harm.  the aesthetic one - dream.  vision.  strain to live in that vision.  live restless lives.  but in order to dream, you need to rest, to Sabbath.

  And Erwin McManus's closing statement:
  ~Let's shoot for creating new humanities, for living heroic lives.  You will determine what your conversations are about; you will establish the future values of this world.  The world moves disproportionately.  New York is in a different place in time than Tulsa.  Los Angeles is different than Bangkok.  New York City needs to lead the cities of the world into a conversation that has moved beyond racism.  You have a disproportionate and unfair responsibility.  This conversation at another college in another city would be completely different.  But God has placed you here.

  Now to write my three papers for the night. =(

  • 11:03 PM
  • 69 Views
  • 6 eProps
  • 3 Comments