So with plenty of time to read and reflect on what I read....here are some things that have come up, that I continue to reflect on, but reflections that are far from complete. I write this so that you know I am doing more than eating guinea pig, playing with llamas, and getting my hair cut this year in Peru. I have found it helpful to read articles and books, and then apply the the thoughts and theories to my work, a novel idea.
First, reverse engingeering versus blue print engineering the earlier being to take something a part in order to examine and study how it works, and applying that to the church, scripture, missiology, and cross cultural experiences rather than tangible goods like automobiles. Perhaps it is another word for analysis, but I think it is a different way of doing analysis. I am an analyzer. I like to look at things from a variety of perspectives. Next, the idea that post modernism is a black hole, with a gravitaional pull, where at the center throbs the question ¨Can anything be known, and are there absolute truths?¨ I am supposed to be of the post-modern generation. We ask questions, and we question things, but a black hole where it is asked can anything be known? I am not so sure that from this author´s perspective, I am totally post modern. I kind of enjoy some absolutes every once in a while. I dig the black and white, even though I live in a world full of grey areas. Then there is dialogue (around scriptural texts in cross cultural settings). For five years now I have heard various professors and theologians talk about and encourage contextual bible study. Most of them have been people of color. They have encouraged me to read the bible through a variety of lenses, and to consider helping others to do the same. Here at Paz y Esperanza that idea of reading the bible with a new set of eyes has come up again in some reading my coworkers have asked me to do. The readings are about rereading the bible through the eyes of gender. Since arriving in Peru and having been asked to preach multiple times I am trying to remember that I am the stranger. I am being welcomed into another culture in which we share the same faith, and one in which what I consider normal is someitmes the reverse. As I seek to sing the Lord´s song in a strange land, but also listen to others sing it in their own language I realize that both groups (I and they) are being invited into dialogue with the text and our own socio-political situations. I write my sermons and design my bible studies based on what I know, but am also learning to make room for my work to live in dialogue, and bounce off of what I encounter while living in cross cultural relationship with Christians in the Andes Mountians of Peru. In my internal dialogue I am asking what does this society, and church have to teach me and what do I have to teach it? I have found it very helpful to allow my environment to teach me, which is not always an easy thing to do. It requires humility, and admitting that I am not neccessarily always going to be the one at the center or a part of the dominant culture. This idea about dialogue sprang from a sermon on Claudio Carvalhaes´blog (one of my seminary professors). Claudio was talking with artist John Shorb who said ¨Dialogue invites exploration, questions, and a search for deeper meaning, a search in which there may be no answers and usually there are no absolutes.¨ I think that dialogue invites you and others to think about what you know. Finally, there is sacred realism or the discipline of holding truth in one hand and faith in the other. I like this, but just like the other three ideas I am still letting them marinate, so more on these four later as the year progresses.
**As I reread this entry I am begining to think that these four ideas, thoughts or theories seem to have common threads**
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