Spiritual Manifestos

Description

Young spiritual leaders are beginning to remove the reasons why
so many of us have kept religion at arm's length.

"Spiritual sagacity does not belong only to seniors like Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, the veteran Desmond Tutu and the aging Dalai Lama. Let's hear from a generation that is marked by new experiences."
—from the Preface by Martin E. Marty

By transforming our faith traditions in light of today's increasing diversity, the search for community, the Internet and our changing lifestyles, these young, visionary spiritual leaders are helping to create the new spirituality.

Ten contributors, most in their mid-thirties, span the spectrum of religious traditions—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Unitarian, Buddhist—and offer their "visions," bold spiritual manifestos, for transforming our faith communities and our lives.

Hear how one Catholic priest proclaims "all religion and spirituality ought to be zesty, passionate, rich and deep"; how one rabbi serves a "congregation" on the web for Microsoft and rides in squad cars on drug busts in New York City; how a self-described "Zen priest" is serving an Episcopal church in Alaska; and how a talented young woman lives her "wild and precious life" changing the world as a nun.

These stories, and others, will challenge your assumptions about what religion is—and isn't.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Catholicism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594735349
• Langue: English

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The Lord said to Abram,
Go forth from your native land
and from your father s house
to the land that I will show you
(Genesis 12:1)
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Martin E. Marty
INTRODUCTION
Niles Elliot Goldstein
SPIRITUAL DINING AT THE AMERICAN CAF
Father Brett C. Hoover
Roman Catholic
MAKING IT YOURS: JUDAISM AT THE CROSSROADS
Rabbi Sara Paasche-Orlow
Conservative Jewish
THE CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY OF DIALOGUE
Reverend Father Greg Kimura
Episcopalian
MY VISION OF THE NEW SPIRITUAL LIFE IN AMERICA
Roshi Norman Fischer
Zen Buddhist
THE PROTESTANT COUNTER REFORMATION
Reverends Lynn and Mark Barger Elliott
Presbyterian
CREATING AN ORTHODOX JUDAISM THAT MATTERS
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky
Orthodox Jewish
A GOOD TIME OR A GOOD LIFE? THE BLACK CHURCH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Reverend Brad Ronnell Braxton
National Baptist
THE JEWISH FRONTIER
Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein
Reform Jewish
THEOLOGICAL DEMOCRACY IN THE LIBERAL CHURCH
Reverend Stephanie R. Nichols
Unitarian-Universalist
THE CHURCH AS MIDWIFE: USHERING IN LIFE AND HOPE
Sister Theresa Rickard
Roman Catholic
CONTRIBUTORS

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PREFACE
Martin E. Marty
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
The University of Chicago
Let me be eclectic, as the authors of this book tend to be, and introduce it by picking out some words from the title and using them to anticipate the contents.
Beginning at the beginning, and thus appearing to be ordered instead of random and eclectic, let s seize on Spiritual and Manifestos .
By now the word Spiritual has made its mark, bears a cultural stamp, and signals a set of energies that has surprising force at this millennial turn.
It was not always so. While most religious traditions had long spoken of spiritual dimensions and maybe even used the word spirituality, these dimensions and the word had suffered neglect and fallen into disfavor as recently as a third of a century ago. Asked in 1967 to help survey American religion (for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) by pointing to the search for a spiritual style in secular America, I found some slight evidence of searches but little favor shown spirituality. The foremost theologian of America at midcentury, Paul Tillich, thought that the word and concept were too worn out, too far dismissed, too remote, ever to reappear.
Soon after, they were back and have become privileged in the discourse of American cultures. Privileged in the discourse means that you not only don t have to shuffle and mumble and apologize when using this word and concept, but that you will gain favor by doing so. Listen: I hate organized religion. I am not a member of the institutional church. I do not even like religion, and I am not religious. But I am very spiritual. You hear it every day, on television, in campus discussions, among friends, and maybe when listening to yourself.
One of the writers in this book is a bit suspicious of the use of spirituality as a counterpoint to religion. Maybe the spiritual search is just religion dolled up and dressed up for a new time. Someone has defined: Spirituality is what is left after you take religion and then take out of it all the things you don t like. It is true that it is encyclopedists of religion who are likely to include in their alphabet of subjects Spirituality. They see it as a species of the genus Religion.
Perhaps the words religious manifestos would kill the book and chase away its potential market. Only in the subtitle is the R-word to be sneaked in, as in Renewed Religious Life. The authors are sufficiently people of their time-I almost said children of their time-to be aware of the negative coloring religion or religious tends to have on first hearing. They do not fight much over words. They do know that they must somehow capture the attention of people who have privileged a certain discourse or who have walked into a time and place in which that discourse has already been privileged.
The point here is to ask: What are they doing differently about spirituality ? I d answer it by reference to a distinction I have found myself making as I observe the searchers. They converge on and give unity to the book by probing what I call moored as opposed to unmoored spirituality.
Unmoored spirituality is entirely free-floating, directionless, enterprising, individualized. You make it up as you go along. You are purely eclectic. You are on the high seas of life-who isn t?- and there are storms and waves and mists. Now and then the clouds break and you find a polestar, or the glimpse of an island. Then you are tossed and turned. Naming yourself captain of your fate, you boldly take this measure from one map and that from another chart. It is all very daring, quite exciting, and sufficiently rewarding. In any case, the effort beats sinking or being stilled in the waters. The one thing you do not know or have or wish for is a harbor, a mooring.
Moored spirituality does not mean being in dry dock or tied to the pier or safely anchored. In its case, you are also on the high seas, amid storms or afraid of being becalmed. But you know there is a destination and a source for further exploration. You have inherited a compass to help you find the mooring again.
Moorings, in such a picture and as portrayed in this book, include communities, traditions, texts, inherited experiences. There is no way these authors could agree on which mooring everyone should cherish, but they demonstrate that they see advantages in spiritual moorings and tell why. They may well represent the advance guard or, to get back to the aquatic metaphor, they may be sailing the flagships, for a generation that sees the limits of the unmoored way.
Second, Manifestos. Manifestos are public declarations of principles, policies, and intentions, especially in the political realm. Do these chapters qualify? They are public. No one writes a book and tries to keep knowledge of its existence private. These authors put themselves on the line and declare themselves.
They set forth certain principles, choosing autobiographical modes of outlining them: This is what happened to me or people with whom I associate. Maybe something in this happening can help you organize your life. Policies: When you find a mooring, you will find that the waters around it need dredging, the pillars are rotting and need attention, the boathouse is in shambles. Renew them. Intentions: We intend to be of service to you, the reader, in your search.
This is not a conventional manifesto, since it is not the sort of thing you tack on a bulletin board or a door. There is nothing here of the cocksureness one associates with manifestos. Still, the intention to get attention and the hope that the attentive will find their lives changed mark all the essays.
Next, in the postmodern spirit that these authors share, I ll eclectically focus on the word Young in the title. A few minutes ago, it seems, it was 1967 and I belonged to a generation of the then-young who were picking our way among the moorings and sighting the unmoored. Now, a few minutes later, we are retired, and bring the perspective of seven or more decades of life lived to all our observations. One side of me wants to shout to the authors: Stay at it, and use the time well. Careers, vocations, opportunities, and lives hurtle by. Another side of me prompts encouragement: At last, a new generation is beginning to emerge. We hope you are typical.
Spiritual sagacity does not belong only to seniors like Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, the veteran Desmond Tutu and the aging Dalai Lama. Let s hear from a generation that is marked by new experiences.
Jos Ortega y Gasset, his student Juli n Mar as, Karl Mannheim, and other mentors of our century have taught us to pay attention to generations. They represent cohorts of people who have had common shaping experiences. The World War I generations developed neo-orthodoxies, neo-scholasticisms, or existentialist responses to the horrors of war, the devastations of postwar life and, in America especially, economic depression. Their successors, the post-World War II generations, refined these responses, adapted them, worked for renewal, in the midst of prosperity and the experiences of mid-century life. About the generation of the sixties, enough said.
No single traumatic experience unites the generation the present authors represent or serve or would serve. Communist empires fell, leaving spiritual deserts. The market won, and material prosperity has left spiritual vacuums. The motives for the spiritual search of the time are mixed, complex, not easily discerned. These authors are giving a voice to some of the yearnings and pointing to some of the ways to define the spiritual search today. This book makes a contribution to the work of all who are trying to discern what is going on in mind and soul and spirit in emerging cultures.
Two words from the title remain and bid for comment: Many Faiths . This is a book of moorings, not mooring. It can easily be misread. Because the writers are Jewish and