I have just returned from a 9-day whirlwind tour of the state of Washington. My wife and I visited three national parks, two national forests, a national recreation area, and in addition to taking in all the jaw-dropping views of mountains and lakes, we saw some cool stuff in Seattle.
Many of the people we met (most of them retirees) were very friendly and chatty. Inevitably they would ask us what we do vocationally, and so I kept repeating that awkward moment that comes for all of us in ministry or politics—being forced to bring up religion or politics with a stranger. “I’m an editor at a magazine. A... progressive [wait for reaction], Christian [wait for reaction] magazine.” But these conversations weren’t so awkward after all. A lot of the people were, I think, like Alejandra Oliva’s description of herself in a recent column: perhaps not practicing Christians, but brain-soaked in this religion’s brine.
“It is because Jesus is absent that the church can arise as his body; it is because his voice has faded into silence that others can tell of what he made possible.”
“Again I bowed my head—praying not that I would be filled with the spirit of the living Christ but that no one was watching as I stealthily slipped his bloodless body into my pocket.”
“All thinking, says Donovan Schaefer, is also feeling. Feeling thinks and thinking feels. And secularism is based every bit as much on the interplay between thinking and feeling as religion is.”
