I sometimes wonder if many ‘emerging groups’ are sectarian, culturally exclusive, in their post-church doctrines?

Living faithfully in consumer culture, might entail sectarian like behaviour. How do you opt out of the consumer narrative and anthropology? I think Cavanaugh, provides ways to reconcile oikos and polis, and oppose the hegemony of individualized god spaces, that are the new civiv religion.

Have you seen he has a new book on Globalisation coming out in the next few weeks?

I am more inclined to anglo catholic ecclesiology these days, and was greatly impacted by Healy early last year. His ‘blueprint ecclesiology’ seems to inhere with much of the lack of concrete mission by groups that want to be missional.

I am going to read some O’Donovan next month for his political and public method.

Sounds like there are many intersections between our studies, I hope yours are going well. Great to hear from you, and thanks for the encouragement.

The Catholic tradition has huge resources here and Nicholas Healy is worth looking at as someone who I think avoids Cavanaugh’s sectarian direction (a Catholic influenced by his teacher Hauerwas?)and talks of “theodramatic theory” (after Bon Balthazar) as a way of exerting Christian distinctiveness and the prophetic critique whilst being able to affirm the good and the godly in modernity.

Anyway, stimulating stuff Jason….

(1) Unlike Cavanaugh his view is open to more than the eucharist, but does need a lutheran, or at least some sacramental understanding of worship.

(2) He is vague, and I think it’s outside his remit, and it’s up to us to establish the public formation practices of our church communities, if we understand the as doing and being as such.

I think Cavanaugh is the link from Wannewestch into an understanding of the universal church. or maybe that’s because I read them back to back :-)

As for Zizek, best place to start is with The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. 48 pages, pure gold.

Think RO offers something from it’s neo-augustinian well, that could offer a great deal to ecclesiology, that they have failed to develop. That will be part of my PhD work, probably, maybe ;-)

There is certainly a strong distinction between RO, CST and the AnaBaptists, hence my desire to explore my problem area from these three key discourse perspectives.

I’m not familiar with Zizke, any good places to start with them/him/her?

If I can articulate an institutional hermeneutic, that would be great…any ideas from you?

I’m not an expert in Newbigin, I have read a few of his books, and like you I do think the church emerges in the context of life and culture, as an alternative and reconciliation of the other spaces of life, without the collapse into the private or the public that we see so often happen.

Well, from one church planter to another: everything, something, nothing.

Except perhaps that “to convert to that form of life” is a “testament betrayed”: Kundera (Village Voice): “Intimate life .. understood as one’s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one’s originality.”

Or, as Dave Kahn once admonished me in a totally chance encounter involving beer and a flat tire from a nail dropped a century ago from a pioneer wagon at a natural hot springs in the Eastern Sierra: about the Inuit’s Great Spirit, “there is only secret (implicitly agreed between two or more), sacred secrets (between intimates), and Secret Sacred (God).”

The church plants can figure it out for themselves.

Larry Kreider’s naive apostolic simplicity of the recipe of variety in church plants is their freedom to testify without their testaments betrayed (Kundera).

And this from a modernist on third probation!

Cheers,

Jim