Monday, March 13, 2006
Meet the New Monastics
David Miller has a wonderful piece in today's SF Chronicle, Meet the New Monastics. Based on an interview with a Duke Divinity School student living in an intentional Christian community, the article describes what I hope my own parish would aspire to be like. There is indeed a renewal movement working its way throughout the mainline church that links a deeply grounded, authentic Christian spirituality with engagement in political and economic life. May it thrive!
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Nice article. What particularly catches my attenton is to find someone coming from the evangelical tradition arriving at such a path.
I was struck by the part about his having been sent by his church to be a missionary in Africa -- and the dissonance on returning to the US where no one cared about Africa. Last year when we went to Peru, we were on a plane with 4 groups of missionary teenagers, each in their own identifying t-shirts. They appeared white and suburban. I had a lot of thoughts. First, how very rich and powerful this country has become, even since my own youth. Nobody would have sent a teenager off for two weeks in Latin America even if they had the money when I was a kid; the cost and logistics would have seemed too much. Secondly, I hope the Peruvian hosts were getting good economic value for having the kids -- Peru is a needy country, for most of its people. And finally, I wondered whether traveling in this context changed the lives of the US kids. Exposure to 3rd World countries should bring us up short.
Apparently for some, it does, as this article illustrates.
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