Thursday, December 4, 2008

NCC Site: Getting hold of himself, Lara-Braud asked Romeo what he meant by conversion to the Gospel. "To defend the poor as our Lord did."


Jorge Lara-BraudDr. Jorge Lara-Braud, assistant general secretary of the NCC for Faith and Order from 1972 to 1980, was a scholar trained in the intricacies of defining the Christian faith. But the Mexican-born Presbyterian wrote that one the most moving definitions he heard came from Oscar Romero two years before the El Salvador archbishop was assassinated in 1980. Romero brought Lara-Braud to tears with his reports of priests and lay leaders who were imprisoned, tortured or killed in El Salvador. "That is the price of a church converted to the Gospel," Romero said. Getting hold of himself, Lara-Braud asked Romeo what he meant by conversion to the Gospel. "To defend the poor as our Lord did," Romero replied. Lara-Braud, who died last June at 77, was the topic of October's Ecumenical moment.


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In this my personal Christian blog, I hope to be discursive and now and then critical. What I write here is tentative and tensive. I post thoughts, feelings, and observations somewhat randomly and often in immediate response to current events and posts on other blogs.


"Serendipitous Creativity" from Gordon Kaufman

"I suggested that what we today should regard as God is the ongoing creativity in the universe - the bringing (or coming) into being of what is genuinely new, something transformative; …

"In some respects and some degrees this creativity is apparently happening continuously, in and through the processes or activities or events around us and within us(…) is a profound mystery to us humans(…) But on the whole, as we look back on the long and often painful developments that slowly brought human life and our complex human worlds into being, we cannot but regard this creativity as serendipitous …

"I want to stress that this serendipitous creativity - God! - to which we should be responsive is not the private possession of any of the many particular religious faiths or systems …

"This profound mystery of creativity is manifest in and through the overall human bio-historical evolution and development everywhere on the planet; and it continues to show itself throughout the entire human project, no matter what may be the particular religious and or cultural beliefs."

Gordon Kaufman, Mennonite Life, December 2005 vol. 60 no. 4

Melville is a rational man who

"Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive." (John Updike)

And that is a problem for me.

Fragmented Notions

Fragmented Notions
Copyright © 2007 Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University

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