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| Religion Forum Index » Christian Methodist Forum » CIVIL RELIGION OR THE BOOK OF ACTS....... |
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| Sword of Laban... |
 Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 7:06 pm |
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Evangelicals and Mormons in dialogue
By Rosalynde Welch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
November 6, 2009
Civil Religion is an attempt—a successful one, in my short experience—
to foster mutual understanding among members of disparate religious
(and nonreligious!) traditions. The advantages of the blog format are
its convenience and its transparency: readers can easily access
posts, participate in the comments, and readily search, recover and
distribute the content. These are good things, mostly. But because
blogs expose participants to a potentially hostile public gaze, there
can be a reluctance on the part of bloggers to engage in the kind of
mutually self-disclosing dialogue that leads to real understanding. If
one fears that reflective self-criticism will be exploited by bad-
faith opportunists, one is less likely to engage in open discussion. I
know I’ve felt a bit of that in my short tenure as a participant here,
though, happily, that fear has been largely unrealized.
That’s why I was interested to read about an interreligious initiative
that has taken a very different form. Christianity Today reports on a
series of private meetings between Mormon and Evangelical
representatives working toward a shared understanding and relationship
of good will:
Not many years ago, evangelicals would have deemed substantive contact
with Mormonism … improbable. Yet since 2000, small scholarly teams of
Mormons led by Millet and evangelical teams led by Fuller Theological
Seminary president Richard Mouw have managed to hold 17 intense,
closed-door dialogue sessions.
I would imagine that the intimacy and privacy enjoyed in these
conferences allows the discussants to develop genuine trust, which in
turn encourages the openness necessary for fruitful interchange on the
most difficult topics. The article goes on to describe a variety of
other initiatives jointly undertaken by Evangelical and Mormon groups,
including an Evangelical revival meeting held in the Salt Lake
Tabernacle, many of which seem to be fostering a more positive
relationship between the two traditions. It makes an interesting
read, and I recommend you take a look.
I don’t think that Civil Religion will ever be an entirely safe
discursive space; there’s a genuine and inescapable tension between
freedom and security, and blogs definitely skew toward freedom. But
we’ll do our own good work here in this small corner of the universe,
and we’ll learn from the work done in different ways and in different
places.
http://www.truthandgrace.com/Mormon.htm |
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