From Jan:

“Most of all, we just want a community/spiritual connections to be real.”

Yup.

Amazon brought me some goodies today, including Rob Bell‘s newest book, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality. Since starting this blog almost a year ago, nothing has generated more links traffic here (besides my participation on the PCUSA Blog and BlogRing) than my posts on Bell’s Nooma series. I’m excited to read Sex God, having just finished Bell’s very good Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith.

Also part of this Amazon shipment: Mark Labberton’s The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice (IVP), Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives (ed. Robert Webber, with contributions by Karen Ward, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball, John Burke, and Mark Driscoll) (Zondervan), Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch’s The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church (Harper), Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (IVP) and another Sacra Pagina commentary, this one Frank Matera’s Galatians.

Lots of good stuff to read soon…

Adam Cleaveland of pomomusings has created a new website venture, presbymergent. Here’s the site description:

Presbymergent is the online community for those who live in both the Presbyterian and Emergent/emerging church worlds and want to try and find a balance between the two.

We are pastors, lay people, seminarians, theologians, youth directors and people who generally care about both the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Emergent and the emergent conversation.

Feel free to join and post articles, questions and thoughts to the community. Grab the RSS feed and stay updated with information about presbymergent news. Post, discuss, share and support those who are working in and thinking about ministry in the margins.

It might be of interest. Check it out…

Like with most Christians, I suspect I share quite a few things with Scot McKnight; more than I differ with, at any rate. Scot is a professor of New Testament at North Park University in Chicagoland, worships at Willow Creek, converses among the emergent folk, and has a really interesting blog.

I was re-reading some recent blog entries I had saved over the past few weeks and found this gem from his blog Jesus Creed, where he talks about his connection with emergent Christianity:

Second, on those four rivers I detail in the WTS paper, and they are Postmodernity, Praxis, Postevangelical, and Politics:

I’m a critical realist: I think there is an object out there that is objective, and that making knowledge is not simply spinning a story in my head; but I think I’ve got a “cracked Eikon mind” and that means that my “story” or theology will never be purely objective, it will never be identical to that objective reality out there, and that I need to hold my story in tension with other stories and with ongoing learning. …

Scot continues to summarize his views on (ortho)praxis, evangelicalism, and Christian political action. Its a good blog entry, and a helpful WTS paper.

The phrase I’ve used to describe my stance towards epistemology isn’t critical realist but hermeneutical realist, which without having put a lot of thought into it yet seems to be getting at the same point: its a realist position insofar as it posits that there is truth outside of us that isn’t purely subjective; its hermeneutical, insofar as it argues that human beings are interpreting creatures with their own subjective frameworks that they bring to their understanding of reality. The term hermeneutical realism I get from William Schweiker (see particularly his dense but important book Responsibility and Christian Ethics),but I think that its pursuing the same point as McKnight’s phrase “critical realism”: it rejects relativism and yet argues against purely objective realism.

It helps me to see Scot argue this and against a more robust relativism, which is one of my major concerns with postmodern philosophy, at least in its early incarnations.

I don’t have enough time this holy week to cogitate extensively on Michael Kruse’s good post, but I wanted to commend it to you for your meditation. Here is how his post starts:

Disconnect: Mainliners and Evangelicals in “Emergent” Conversation

I have been around the emergent conversation for about eight years now. My contact in the first few years was mostly isolated to an emergent group (Jacob’s Well) meeting in our church building. Over the last four years I have read more widely, attended an Emergent YM conference, hung out at Glorieta, NM, and involved myself in a variety of websites and blogs.

From the beginning, it has struck me that the emergent conversation was an evangelical and ex-evangelical phenomenon. Most of what I have experienced and read over the years confirms that perception, at least for the USA conversation. In more recent years, the conversation has
begun to spread beyond evangelical circles. Folks from mainline denominations have been entering the discussion. While attending the Emergent Convention in Nashville last year, I was in a group with about 300 randomly chosen people when we were asked how many of us were from
mainline denominations. Full two-thirds of the people raised their hands.

I hope to think about this when my head gets out of holy week…

…meanwhile, be sure to check out the discussion at emergesque about some other different ways people are approaching the emergent movement. Very interesting.