Worship in Crisis

We've moved!

2010-02-25T16:16:00.002-06:00

We've moved!
Come visit us at our new blog page : http://worshipincrisis.wordpress.com/

2009-10-10T15:23:00.001-05:00

Save the Date

2009-10-10T15:19:00.003-05:00

The 2010 University of Chicago Ministry Conference is scheduled to take place on Friday, April 23rd.
More info coming soon!

Lamin Sanneh Interview

2009-03-11T11:56:00.002-05:00

On February 23^rd Lamin Sanneh gave an address at the University of Chicago Divinity School on the topic, “Resisting Mission / Redefining Engagement.” Afterward I sat down with Professor Sanneh over lunch to talk about the Div School’s upcoming 5^th Annual Ministry Conference. He offered some great insights and provocative points that only increase my excitement for the conference on May 1-2. One of the organizing questions of the conference is why isn’t there more academic and ministerial collaboration between Christian communities around the world at a time when Christianity is growing so rapidly? I began my conversation with Professor Sanneh on this topic.

Ministry Conference: The chief question of the ministry conference is, as forms of Christianity are being increasingly indigenized around the world, how do and how ought those affect local Christian practice here in the U.S?

Lamin Sanneh: Well I think one of the obvious ways - and I’ve seen this in practice - is to establish partnerships between churches in the U.S. and churches in Asia and Africa. And that partnership being, you know, senior pastors in churches in the United States should visit however briefly the partnership counterparts in Asia and Africa. And the next stage, I think, is to establish a way in which young people in the church here can engage people in the churches over there. And the third step may be to establish within mission committees in the United States a program in cross-cultural outreach.

MC: What would be the theological impetus for that? What theological understandings say “That’s important” for local churches?

LS: I think it’s important to sort of break down the domestication of Christianity in America, in the United States, where Christianity is a sort of neighborhood project or community project and it doesn’t really think of itself as being connected with anyone else anywhere else. Paul called this cultural idolatry. That you become very narcissitic, that you become concerned only with yourself, not with your brothers and sisters in the wider community of faith.

MC: What would be the aim or goal of those forms of interaction? For instance there’s been a rise in popularity of short-term mission trips where the purpose is not even primarily serving the people that you’re going to visit anymore, but rather to have a profound faith experience for yourself. So, what are the purposes of this kind of interaction?

LS: Short term mission, on the positive side, is a sign of the awareness that Christianity is no longer a Western or American monopoly, and therefore the unilateral way of looking at it – we go there to give them faith – has to be given up. That’s the positive side. The negative side, however, is that short term mission may also be just an extension of American individualism. I’m going there for my own benefit. Too bad about them, but it’s all about me. And that doesn’t really break down any walls or any barriers. It doesn’t really expand what I call the Christian vocabulary of the wider family. Christianity is the most pluralist and most inclusive religion in all the religions of the world. And yet Christians sometimes behave in a very exclusivist way, individualistic way so that our practices don’t really reflect the broader the wider reality of Christianity so short term missions are both and opportunity and a peril.

MC: One thing that I have an interest in is theological education in the third world. There is a large need for training pastors, but, because of expense and of time, pastors can’t afford to travel and go to bible college for three years. So one response has been that a lot of local churches are founding their own bible colleges. There are a number of these schools and hundreds of pastors who’ve been trained in these schools. Do you see any way in which that type of phenomenon does or ought be instructive to Christian practice here in the States or is it just sort of its own thing?

Or for a different type of example, consider the church of North India is an ecumenical denomination that began, I believe, in the 1930s. Churches that were previously mission affiliated essentially dropped their mission affiliation and said “We’re not primarily Baptist or Anglican or Lutheran; we’re primarily Indian,” and they began an ecumenical denomination. So again the same question: What instruction does or should these type of movements provide to Christian theological education in the U.S.?

LS: We come to religion, the study of religion but the point of view of the text, studying the text, studying books. I’m a great believer in doing it the other way around. Actually, practice of the Christian faith informs your understanding in certain ways. Text by itself can come alive in ways that it would not if you merely look into the text; it remains a kind of inorganic information which it depends for you to bring to life. The bible is a book of faith but we made it a text of study. And look at someone like Augustine, bishop of Hippo. University of Chicago students have access to a much larger, greater library of books than Augustine ever did. And yet, you look at his work and what he was able to accomplish, and you say how did he do it? Well the reason mainly was because he was a parish priest.

MC: Wow. That’s really great.

LS: He was a parish priest. And the same thing with the others, Origen and the others they were priests; they were pastors. They had great erudition because there living experience of the Christian life - their practices - helped to sharpen their minds and their ideas so that language itself became for them means of witness, of being faithful. And so you couldn’t be frivolous, with language. Augustine said that he met many people who wanted to deceive, but he didn’t know anyone who wanted to be deceived. So the academy itself can benefit from the exposure of these ideas to the field, and I believe that what happens in the field takes up new life when you have the opportunity, the privilege of reflecting on it. So the two are not necessarily opposed. They go together. Only you have to change the combination of them.

MC: One final question: So with some of these ideas of theology being deeply embedded in experience, in the parish, in meeting needs and being amongst the people. With these ideas in mind do you see a need for the work of theology itself to change, and, if so, in what ways?

LS: I think theology has to grasp the significance of the boundary or the margin. Not just marginality as an economic issue -those who are poor. Or marginality as a physical issue - those who are handicapped. But marginality as a kind of moral consciousness - that we have a responsibility as scholars not only to consume values but to produce values, to create values. Not only to take what is our right but to give something back. And I think we have this idea that we should press for human rights, the rights of minority, the rights of those who’ve been denied their rights and so on. That is true, but the heart of Christian theology should be this task of producing not consuming values. Producing value. Creating values. Often by taking mainstream establishment values or ideas and redeeming them. For that way, the task of theology would be the renewal of society, the revitalization of intellectual thought, the renewal of society. So that business people architects and professional classes don’t get away with the idea that knowledge is value free and therefore they are not accountable to anybody.

MC: Yeah, that’s a critical point.

LS: And that’s a big task for us to do. And I can’t see history doing that. I don’t see geography doing that. Or physics or astronomy. But theology can do it.

MC: So is it problematic then to have both a theology and a theological ethics department.

LS: Yeah.

MC: Well I guess we’ve got some work to do here at the Divinity School then!

Case Study

2008-04-06T18:05:00.001-05:00

The conference is 2 weeks away! Our case study for this conference will have to do with the possibility of the 2016 Olympics coming to Chicago; what that might mean for this city and its residents. Our panelists will discuss this topic from perspectives in theology, ethics, public policy, issues of ministry, and social sciences, among others.

Post from February 2007

2008-02-25T16:04:00.000-06:00

This year’s keynote speaker is Lauren F. Winner. The former book editor for Beliefnet, she is the author of three books, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and, most recently, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. She has appeared on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and Christianity Today. Her essays have been included in The Best Christian Writing 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Winner has degrees from Columbia and Cambridge universities and is currently at work on her doctorate in the history of American religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Griff Gatewood. Her appearance is co-sponsored by Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Lutheran Campus Ministry of Hyde Park, and Brent House Episcopal Center.

Dr. Amy Black teaches in the fields of American Politics and Political Behavior, teaching courses focusing different political institutions and seminars that consider how we interact with our government. Believing that practical experience is a great teacher, Dr. Black served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, working in the office of Rep. Melissa A. Hart during the 2000-2001 academic year. She continues to follow recent Congressional activity through ongoing consulting for Rep. Hart's office.She recently completed From Inspiration to Legislation: How an Idea Becomes A Bill, for Pearson Prentice Hall. Dr. Black's other recent work examines the politics of faith-based initiatives. She recently completed Of Little Faith: The Politics of George W. Bush's Faith Based Proposals (with co-authors Doug Koopman and David Ryden), a study that draws upon interviews with key lawmakers and policy advocates who worked on faith-based issues.

Dr. Black joined the Wheaton faculty after serving four years on the faculty of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She is active in a local church where she serves as a Stephen Minister, co-teaches confirmation classes, and participates in a women's Bible study. She is married to Wheaton professor Daniel Treier.

As news correspondent for Chicago Public Radio, Jason DeRose reports on a wide variety of cultural issues with a particular emphasis on religion, ethics, and spirituality. His reports can be heard on "Morning Edition", "All Things Considered", "Weekend Edition", and "Eight Forty-Eight". He also teaches in the Religious Studies department at DePaul University.
Prior to joining the staff of Chicago Public Radio in 2002, Jason held a variety of reporting, editing, and producing positions at NPR member stations in Seattle, Minneapolis and Tampa. He work at NPR has included stints on the Washington Desk, the Arts Desk, the National Desk, "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day". Outside of public radio, Jason worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the International Center for Journalists-an organization that trains foreign journalists in Western reporting practices.

Jason has a master's degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, with majors in English and religion. Additionally, he studied religion reporting at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Edward Foley is Professor of Liturgy and Music at Catholic Theological Union Seminary, and has been on faculty there since 1985. His interests include practical theology, the interplay of worship and the arts (especially music), ritual performance, and medieval Christianity. He studies the history of worship especially from the viewpoint of the action of the assembly. He is co-author, with Rev. Herbert Anderson of Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: The Intersection of Worship and Pastoral Care and author of From Age to Age: How Christians Celebrated the Eucharist . He has degrees from St. Francis Seminary (M.Div.), University of Wisconsin (M.Mus.), and University of Notre Dame (M.A. Ph.D).

We will continue to post more pictures, speaker biographies, and culture commentary as the date draws near so please stay tuned!

Posts from March 2007

2008-02-25T16:03:00.000-06:00

Preaching to the Choir (links, 3-29-07)
A blog-heavy set of links today:The Chicago Tribune has a new blog (or Web log as they continue to insist on calling it) on religion: The Seeker. This is mostly news-based. It's an interesting development. I'll check later to see if other newspapers do something similar. An online acquaintance (and sometime debating partner) writes the thoughtful and genuinely curious evangelical blog Brain Cramps for God. He doesn't post prolifically, but what he writes is usually well written and consider. He's also an unusually graceful person to argue with. Fr. John Fenton, formerly of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and now a priest in the Antiochan Archdiocese of the Orthodox Church, maintains Conversi ad Dominum, a blog for liturgy and tradition enthusiasts. I've often enjoyed it.For something a little less doctrinally precise, check out the sometimes moribund University of Chicago divinity students' group blog, Habakkuk's Watchpost.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 5:35 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Speaker: Sister Julie Vieira
Yesterday I posted a link to the exciting blog A Nun's Life. Today I learned that the blogger Sister Julie Vieira, IHM (that's the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, her order--a new one to me), has accepted our invitation to speak at 'Through a Glass Darkly.' She's been a member of her order for ten years and currently works at Loyola Press in Chicago. We are very pleased that she'll be joining us. Check back for more information.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 1:02 PM 0 comments

Our Preacher
Meet Dr. Doug Sharp, our preacher for the May 4th conference. He is Professor of Christian Theology at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is currently teaching a class called "The Cultural Captivity of the Church" (an appealing title to my Lutheran ears). He is the author of The Hermeneutics of Election: The Significance of the Doctrine in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics and No Partiality: The Idolatry of Race and the New Humanity. He brings extensive academic and parish experience to the pulpit of Bond Chapel.His faculty website, linked above, includes some interesting links. Check out the Gospel and Our Culture Network in particular. We are pleased and proud to welcome Dr. Sharp to the conference.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 12:53 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Church Online (links, 3-27-07)
A Nun's Life is the blog of Sister Julie Vieira, IHM. It's attracted a lot of attention lately as a fascinating union of monasticism and modern web-based media. It's not to be missed.Asbury Theological Seminary New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III has a personal website with a lively and informative blog. Blogging has produced academic stars in many fields, but scholars of religion seem not to have made as much of an online impact. Our own Martin Marty Center is something of an exception, with a monthly Religion and Culture Web Forum on various topics. Our keynote speaker, Lauren Winner, has a good site with information on books and upcoming appearances. Political liberals who want to talk and read about faith have a great site in Street Prophets. While there does not seem to be any equivalent group-driven site of similar status for politically conservative Christians, there are a vast array of individual blogs that address politics from that perspective. Evangelical Outpost is a prominent example, from which you can link to many, many more.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 6:23 PM 0 comments
Monday, March 12, 2007

Christianity on Film
Sophie Scholl: The Final DaysThanks to a timely promotion on my Netflix queue and two releases at The Music Box, I've been able to devise a brief Lenten film series (or film fastival if you prefer the pun). The first is Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, out on DVD now. I'll follow up with posts on Becket and Into Great Silence in the coming weeks.Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a 2005 German film about the last four days in the life of an anti-Nazi student activist in 1943. The main character (played with terse dignity by Julia Jentsch, which more than coincidentally sounds like Judi Dench), her brother, and two friends write and distribute leaflets protesting the war and the treatment of the mentally ill, Jews, and occupied nations. They take the foolhardy step of scattering their latest publication at the University, where the janitor catches them and hands them over to the police.What follows in the interrogation, near-release, re-interrogation, confession, trial, and execution of the main character is a tight and almost alarmingly unsentimental and unspectacular depiction of tyrrany and martyrdom. Based largely on interviews and transcripts, the film lets the events and words speak mostly for themselves, and what emerges is a portrait of an uncomplicated and deeply courageous young woman. There is a minimal soundtrack, so no music nudges the viewer into deeper emotion; the visual flourishes are few--a recurring image of blue sky through windows, two shots of cascading papers--and the only moment that feels truly over-the-top comes when a relatively sympathetic Gestapo interrogator washes his hands after Scholl rejects his suggestion that she recant, blame her accomplices, and save her life.From a Christian perspective, of course, the film is about a martyr. Sophie Scholl's faith was part of her witness against the Nazi regime, and the film integrates it into the story without weepy or mystical undertones. Viewers must confront the brutal fact of her condemnation without any aids to their piety. From all appearances, she threw her life away on an ineffectual protest. Unlike Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the martyr most often used by Lutherans to absolve the church's hideous sins under Hitler), Scholl did not leave any great works of theology that could be colored in their reception by her heroism. Her life and death were her only witness, her only work.So even more than Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl's is a case that sharpens the analogical meaning of Christian martyrdom. In the Lutheran tradition we tend to revere the saints and martyrs as examples of faithful living rather than as intercessors on our behalf. Those of heroic faithfulness do not earn their laurels by accomplishing anything in particular (it is hard to imagine that the actions of the White Rose hastened the end of the war in any way) or by amassing any merit, but by posing the terrible question to us: What does it mean, in your time and place, to be faithful in this way?Ultimately, I think, this has something to do with Incarnation. In the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther insisted that God can only be grasped while hidden in suffering--i.e., the 'Theology of the Cross.' The hidden suffering of people like Sophie Scholl bore witness to the continuing presence of Christ in a world consumed by hatred. The makers of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days have earned our gratitude by presenting such a life's testament without fanfare or fantasy.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 3:19 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

A Brief Update
Unfortunately, our founding blogger has been injured and may be out of action for a while. I hope to put up some links and posts to stimulate conversation on our topics of the church and the media in the coming days. Stay tuned, and keep Matt in your prayers.

Posts from April 2007

2008-02-25T16:01:00.000-06:00

Sister Julie at the Divinity School
Last week Sister Julie Vieira spoke at the Divinity School's Wednesday lunch, and next week she'll be back for the ministry conference. Here are some of her preliminary thoughts on what it means for blogging to be a ministry.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 8:11 AM 0 comments
Friday, April 13, 2007

Something about Mary... Magdalene
So, while I was at home for Easter this past week my dad showed me a History Channel special called, "Something about Mary Magdalene." It was an hour long documentary that followed the work of religion scholars (Rev. Dr. Esther De Boer, Art Historian Susan Haskins, Professor Pheme Perkins, and others). The upshot of the show was that Mary Magdalene was a major disciple of Jesus (first to spread the Christian gospel) and that she could be both the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel According to John. The narrator claims that this argument is more scandalous than the argument from the Da Vinci Code that Mary is Jesus' wife or the argument of the church that she was a repentant prostitute. Mary Magdalene seems to be a fascinating figure currently in pop culture discussion. This is interesting to me, a Catholic, since throughout the history of Christianity Mary the Mother of God has been the major female figure (especially in popular religion). Why is everyone excited about Mary Magdalene? Why not the Mother? I argue that Mary Magdalene is fascinating because she is such a mystery and because she is a sexual figure. Still, Mary Magdalene is in no way able to compete with the popularity of Mary the Mother. I argue as well that feminists who want to challenge the church's attitude toward women would be better off focusing on the Mother than Mary Magdalene. Mary the Mother has many forms in different cultures and contexts. She is a part of Jesus' life from the beginning and to the end. She offers a fuller image for interpretation and development.I wonder as well if this special was meant to be the more orthodox response to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. In a few of the interviews with Esther De Boer she was wearing full liturgical robes; collar, stole and all. I believe that the narrator purposely tried to encourage the viewer to accept his interpretation of Mary Magdalene in opposition to the Da Vinci Code. The viewer is more likely to accept her as the author of the Gospel of John than that she was Jesus' wife and mother of his child. Because the scholars that they present are mostly women and at least Esther is not only a scholar but also a minister, this could be seen as a more orthodox concept. Now, what the heck does "orthodox" mean? What I mean is that Dan Brown and his followers are more and more viewed as either non-Christian (secularly interested in the scandal of Jesus' sexuality) or scholarly un-interested Christians. Can "true" believers find a place for Mary Magdalene? Can the feminist underpinnings of the Magdalene phenomenon find church backing? This may be a new movement in the discussion.
This special is just one of many TV commentaries and presentations of Christian topics. My family also mentioned to me that there was a documentary called, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” As well South Park recently had an episode that dealt with the Easter message and its connection to the Easter Bunny. The big secret is that St. Peter, the first Pope, was really a rabbit (Peter Rabbit). “Hippitus Hoppitus Deus Domine!” There is a TON of this kind of stuff. What does this do to the image of the church or Christianity in American culture? More importantly, how does this affect the way Christians live their lives?
Posted by Megan at 1:08 PM 1 comments
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Sex on Campus
This is a hard topic to broach in this forum, for many reasons. Most particularly, I worry that discussions of sex among the young and unmarried in a Christian context leads to some very false and very destructive interpretations of what Christian faith is and isn't, as if sexual chastity makes someone a Christian (rather than, say, believing in Jesus Christ). An abstinent atheist is no more a Christian than a promiscuous one, and a Christian, though not sexually abstinent, is still a Christian. So nothing that follows should be understood as: discussing/encouraging sex-->more unmarried sex-->fewer Christians/burgeoning population in hell. It just isn't so.That being stipulated, I took note of an item in Chicago's Redeye, the free newspaper published by the Tribune and aimed primarily at a young, single, and more-or-less well-off readership. It was an article of the increasingly feverish genre of hook-up journalism, in which concern, titillation, and bargain-basement sociological and psychological observations collide, forming a compound that will not necessarily leave you well informed but should certainly leave you feeling a little icky. The topic, of course, is the increasingly informal and even casual nature of college and young-adult sexual and romantic liaisons. A new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, by Laura Sessions Stepp, has brought this not very respectable journalistic topic to major newspapers and magazines. From a journalistic point of view, the stories are fascinating as another example of how moralism and luridness can sell much better together than either can separately. But that's not my point here. Accompanying the main story was a sidebar on 'Sex Week' at Yale (starting in 2002) and Northwestern (new this year). Some of it sounds salutary; I'm not the kind of Christian who thinks that sexual ignorance is good for people's souls, and there are a lot of things that need to be talked about more openly than they often are. At the same time, the foregrounding of porn stars and lessons on stripping struck me as . Slavoj Zizek, among others, points out that the permissive 'You may' tends to be come the imperative 'You must' where the superego is concerned, and I wondered how much this has been the case with the 'hook-up culture' and the spirit of openness, exhibitionism, and experimentation that is celebrated by Sex Weeks, elite private school quasi-porn, and so forth. I know women and men who feel vaguely embarrassed by their relative lack of sexual experience or their unwillingness to do certain things that the culture now tells them are all right. Feminists and others complained in the past that sexual repression led to the unfair stigmatization of women who had "loose morals" and had become "damaged goods." Now, I wonder, whether the permissive attitude that an early generation fought for has in fact become an imperative mode in the culture: not, you may if you choose, but rather, you must, unless you want to be considered weird and uptight. Strangely enough, the blisteringly frank gross-out comedy The Forty Year-Old Virgin actually illuminates this question rather well. At first, Steve Carrell's character is depicted as an oddity at best, a neurotic freak at worst. He's an object of pity not just from his sexually exuberant co-workers but also from the audience. As the film goes on, however, he becomes less and less of a caricature and more of a real person, someone who'd had some strange luck and as a result remained both naive (and neurotic) and curiously sweet. By late in the film, he actually looks fairly well-adjusted, while the sexual environment into which his friends have tried so hard to acculturate him looks increasingly disturbing. This is not, I imagine, what many people expected to see from such an explicit film.What all this has to do with Christianity I haven't quite figured out. The church in America needs a way to address a shifting youth culture without reactively holding up bygone standards or passively "affirming" all ways of being (lest the cultural imperative, if that's what it is, go unchallenged), at least if the church expects young Christians to consider their faith in their sexual and romantic decision-making. This is one more area, among many, where church leaders could use a little cultural savvy--something more than is on offer in breathless and/or cynical yellow journalism.As it happens, our keynote speaker, Lauren Winner, has a book on this very topic. If you'd like to learn more about the media and its relationship with the American Christian church, come to the University of Chicago Divinity School Ministry Conference on May 4. Register by emailing ministryconference@gmail.com.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 1:45 PM 1 comments
Thursday, April 5, 2007

Chocolate Jesus
A New York City gallery recently planned a Holy Week exhibit which included a sculpture of Jesus on the cross made entirely of chocolate - 200 lbs of it. The display was titled "My Sweet Lord." See the following links: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6509127.stm & http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11669242/Unsurprisingly, this angered certain Christian groups, and called forth the typical hyperbolic and apocalyptic comments that are often made in such situations: "...one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever."This may illustrate my own depravity, but I have not been able to drum up any feelings of righteous anger of my own. In fact, I find the idea perfectly hilarious. It's kind of like I have to admit, "Hey, Cavallaro [the artist] has me on this one; his point is well taken." Every Christmas and Easter Christians bemoan the commercialization of the holiday, but it's not every Christmas or Easter that something actually gets us to act and spend more thoughtfully. Maybe this will.
Posted by M.R. at 6:16 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Worship Resources (links, 4-4-07)
Todays links are for the preacher or pastor who maybe put the sermon or the liturgical preparation off a little longer than he should have (I've heard this happens) and needs information, exegesis, images, or anything else to make the sermon and the worship come together right. The internet has made this a lot easier than in the old days, when you actually had to read books and know things. Now you just need some good sites in your bookmarks. Here are some:TextWeek is a lectionary-based (RCL) site that is very popular among mainline Protestant pastors. The have good resources, including artwork and film illustrations, and a wealth of links, including to Lectionary.org, which itself has a nice set of links. For those who would like to know more about the history and theology of the church's calendar, ChurchYear.net is a great place to start. It's a mostly Roman Catholic site that gives the background for a lot of practices in a user-friendly way. It has excerpts from patristic homilies and lots of artwork as well.The ELCA sponsors the subscription-based site Sundays and Seasons, which has a whole lot of liturgical and homiletic resources of widely varying kinds. Free tours are available.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 2:17 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Christianity on Film: Into Great Silence
The Music Box Theatre is currently showing a rare and beautiful film, Philip Groening's Into Great Silence. It is something like a documentary, but it has no voiceover and few titles. The setting is La Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian Order. This Order is famous for its austerity: apart from the three communal prayer offices, silence is maintained (except for Sunday and festival afternoons); in contrast to some orders, life is largely solitary rather than communal. Sixteen years after his initial request, the house granted Groening access to its inner life. Wisely--or perhaps inevitably--he chose not to make a traditional documentary with interviews, historical material, or traditional narrative and characterization. Near the start of the film, two novices enter the house, and it's easy to imagine a filmmaker trying to turn the film into the story of their initiation, but Groening doesn't do that.It's much easier, I find, to say what this movie doesn't do than what it does. It captures images--of the monastic labor, of prayer, of study, of the Alpine valley surrounding the house--and sounds, all the more striking since there is no soundtrack and very little in the way of dialogue. The film had me early on when it showed the brothers preparing for the long night office, each at a place in the oratory. One by one they extinguished their lamps, leaving the sanctuary utterly silent and dark except for the eternal presence candle. Then came the sound of dozens of kneelers being lowered and knees coming to rest on them, followed by the hypnotically sonorous chanting of the office. I've never seen (and heard) anything quite like it.The film has a large handful of such poignant moments, from the scene of monks sliding down a snowy hill to the garden's early spring growth to the almost tactile squares of sunlight through which the hooded monks walk to and from the chapel. My hunch is that this film has two potentially rapt audiences: church/monasticism enthusiasts and cinematography buffs. Groening has linked these enthusiasms brilliantly by making a contemplative film that focuses obsessively on the concrete, particular, and visible.While the film has generally met with rapturous reviews, Noel Murray of The Onion finds fault with the silence:It's hard to watch Gröning's lone interview—with a blind monk, talking about mortality—and not wish that he had made more of this rare opportunity to pick the brains of inaccessible men. How do they regard each other? What do they regret? Is it really a selfless act to remove yourself from the world at large?Mr. Murray's curiosity about these questions is admirable, but there is a wealth of monastic literature that can answer those questions. Writing is one of the great monastic pass-times. What Groening has done is something much more difficult, and perhaps suited uniquely to cinema: he has given those of us who will not (and indeed may not) set foot inside the home of Christendom's most austere monks the chance to see their lives. My own slight acquaintance with the monastic life gives me the suspicion that you will learn more about it from that silent observation than from all the interviews in the world.To hear more about Christianity and its relationship to the media world, register for the Divinity School ministry conference, Friday, May 4 at the University of Chicago. Email us at ministryconference@gmail.com to register or for more information.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 5:17 PM 0 comments

Speaker: Margaret Mitchell
Meet Margaret Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the University of Chicago Divinity School and also in the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. She is speaking at this year's Divinity School ministry conference. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Professor Mitchell has also taught at McCormick Theological Seminary. She is the author of Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians and The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation, and editor (with Frances M. Young) of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1. She teaches the Introduction to the New Testament course at the Divinity School, a required course for ministry students. She also has taken a recent interest in aspects of Christianity in popular culture. She has written pieces on The Passion of the Christ and The DaVinci Code as well as the approaches to Scripture found on Christian websites. We look forward to hearing her talk!To register for the ministry conference, taking place May 4 in Hyde Park, please contact us at ministryconference@gmail.com.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 5:08 PM 0 comments

Speaker: MaryBeth Morehouse
We are pleased and excited to welcome MaryBeth Morehouse to the University of Chicago ministry conference on Friday, May 4. She is the director of communications and marketing at Willow Creek Chicago, a central-city branch of the legendary suburban church. She will be speaking on our second panel, which addresses the topic of discipleship and how the church can use popular culture and modern media to cultivate it.To register for the conference (lunch is free for the first 100 registrants), contact us at ministryconference@gmail.com.