This Monday was Indigenous People’s Day, a refocusing of Columbus Day.
While in Minnesota last month, I had a morning to walk through the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul. I spent the most time in the exhibit Our Home: Native Minnesota. It focused on the long history of the Dakota in the region, and the shorter history of the Ojibwe, who migrated from the East to the Great Lakes, making their way to what is now Minnesota in the 1600s.
Walking through the exhibit called to mind the book...
The September issue of The Christian Century magazine had a monthly theme exploring the topic of the “Earth’s agency,” with a number of articles looking at various aspects of ecotheology. This was a timely read to lead up into last weekend’s Fall Retreat and gave me plenty to reflect on as I wandered the woods of the retreat center or listened deeply to the sermon(s) that Creation was proclaiming to us during our Sunday worship service.
One of the articles introduced me to a new word: solastalgia. It means...
“Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.”
– David Augsburger, Mennonite teacher and author
Throughout the next year Central District Conference is conducting Sacred Listening conversations across the conference. The goal, as I understand it, is for conference leadership to get a sense of where the Spirit has been and is moving among us and how the conference can best serve congregations in light of the effects of Covid. And to share some of these stories across congregations for us to better know one...
This past weekend I was in Minnesota at the invitation of St. Paul Mennonite Fellowship. They have an annual retreat at a secluded retreat center an hour north of the twin cities. The time includes input from a guest and planning for the coming year. I presented about transitions.
The congregation is small – eight covenant members. One member likened the fellowship to a base community, solidary groups that developed within Brazilian Roman Catholicism. They have had children amongst them in the past but now range in age from 50s to 80s. The fellowship was one of the first...
“Ritual is a very ancient social technology and it fulfills the exact same roles today as it did for our ancestors thousands of years ago.”
These were Dimitris Xygalatas’s closing words in an interview that aired on NPR’s All Things Considered last evening (8 minutes audio). Host Ari Shapiro had asked him what he might say to his younger self who grew up in Greece questioning the value of the religious and secular rituals in which he participated. Xygalatas...