two influences

While conversing with friends the other night, over a flight of local whiskeys at Chicago’s Watershed, something became apparent to me. I spend a fair amount of time pondering my religious heritage, sifting through my memories with the same care I use when I sip from a tumbler of nuanced rye. I isolate the traditions and encounters that have informed my convictions about religion. I conjure the occasions, adventures, predispositions and relationships that have composed my sense of spirituality. I let this variety play on my tongue then I feel it meld together and slide down my throat, warming my heart on the way by.

The piece that caught my attention the other night was how distinct yet similar my two most recent religious influences are. The first influence is comprised of the voices and ideas I’ve encountered in the evangelical emergent movement since reading A New Kind of Christian almost ten years ago. The second has included the academic forays of the CTS portion of my journey. The thoughts and thinkers that I have encountered while at CTS and those engaged in the emergent conversation are don’t really cross paths. These two primary influential pools have very little to do with one another. Nominally at least. For I find them to be intimately connected, if only in my own faith, seeking, and understanding.

In each there is a commitment to openness, dialogue, difference, engagement. Each pulls from a multiplicity of voices, traditions, and opinions. And both are committed in a firm and flexible way (yes, I said firm AND flexible) to Christian exploration and relation with the divine.

It isn’t a big deal that these two forces come at much of the same material in much the same spirit. It’s not profound. But it has been a formative and pleasant inner-dialogue for me. It is a dynamic interaction that I have been engaging ponderously, and it is one that I thought worth sharing.

If you want a general idea of what this intersection sounds like in words not my own, there’s a decent interview on one of the podcasts I listen to regularly – Homebrew Christianity. The interview captures elements of each force – CTS and emergence - quite well. (It does not address CTS explicitly, but rather the academic and political elements of theology that I have encountered at CTS.) Tripp Fuller of Homebrew interviews Gareth Higgins and they discuss an event going on later this month that will likewise incorporate this CTS-esque element with the momentum of the emergent conversation.

I am going to be involved that weekend with a different event here in Chicago, one that is sure to change the world, or at least this Midwestern fringe. So I recommend that if you’re in my hood, come check out the intersection of art, justice, and spirituality being hosted by my personal muse and guru. If you’re anywhere near North Carolina then gander off for a Wild Goose chase.