Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Monday, November 5, 2012

Multi-Cultural Pluralism: The Changing State of U.S. Ethnicity

 The changing state of US ethnicity



2 November 2012 Last updated at 20:25 ET

The US has undergone many different immigration trends since the 15th Century, with various ethnic groups rising and falling over time.

This video looks at how the US population has defined itself within government census data, where US immigrants have originated from in the past, and how these patterns could change in the future.

Produced by David Gordon


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What does this mean for Christianity?

Emergent Christianity acknowledges, and widely accepts the fact, that to live in today's postmodern world is to embrace multi-cultural pluralism openly, publicly, and willingly. To realize that the many different people groups coming across America's borders are coming for opportunities their homeland could not (or, would not) provide - whether food, water and shelter; a practical education and livable wage; the benefits of freedom and liberty from fear, abuse, harm and destruction; the active protection to worship as one believes without fear of reprisal; and for many, many other reasons innumerable. Here, in America, the Constitution of the United States binds one-and-all to these many civil liberties and more, and it is to the church of Jesus Christ to likewise shoulder the burden to welcome and accept all who come.

Consequently, the gospel of Jesus was never intended to only the predominant people group of any nation, but to all people groups, tribes, and nations of every country. As such, Emergent Christianity welcomes the opportunity to listen and participate with all religions and faiths in whatever manner possible so that every man, woman or child, might have the additional opportunity to hear about Jesus. This may mean that traditional practices and messages of the Christian faith be altered from a Western flavor to one more Eastern, Asian, or Islamic. Hence, orthodox practices must become more accommodating - if not outrightly transformed - in dress and worship style, language and expression, practices and heritage.

This would also include the theology of the church... not in content but in translation. For example, rather than speaking in a doctrinal language requiring theological precision and historical acumen as we are use to in our Western traditions, perhaps we might adjust telling the gospel through the many story forms provided by Narrative Theology that can easily transform the biblical language into readily adaptable cultural narratives. That is, by fashioning salvific stories created within the cultural language, idioms, and worship styles of that minority's heritage so that the gospel of Jesus might become truly missional rather than culturally conversional.... By this is meant that the missionizing group must be willing to resist the cultural urge to transform another culture into its own style of worship and way of thinking. But rather allow minorities to adapt the gospel into their own predominant language and practices. To understand that successful evangelism does not mean Americanizing or Westernizing new converts to Jesus. But allows new converts their own assimilative practices of apprehending Jesus in their own ways and observances that is meaningful to them. That to missionize a minority people group is to actively promote the transformational state of non-native assimilation. And in the bargin discover a depth of Christian fellowship few experience between dissimilar peoples and cultures.

Furthermore, America's history has been no less awash in cultural movement than what has been experienced by other nations across all the continents of the world. If anything, history has shown how people groups have created societal upheaval and mobile disbursement when incoming refugees have fled for help, assistance, and protection. And it has been to a nation's test of strength and honor to proffer aide and assistance in whatever way that it can to those fleeing death and harm. By actively promoting the humanitarian equality of displaced populations is to strengthen a nation rather than divide it. To share the wealth of stability, protection, community, equality, and service, to those desperately in need of life, liberty and justice, is to that nation's honor and call. Yes, it will be messy. Yes, it will create displacement and stretch resources. And yes, wisdom will be required against a political will that may secede from the task at hand. But if a government and its church communities rise to the gospel challenges of compassionate welcome, aide and cultural respect, it will create a three-corded union unbreakable and strong.

And so must the believer in Christ be as welcoming and gracious to those aliens and strangers amongst us wishing to adopt our homeland as if they were our own kinsmen. And we were their own adoptive relatives. For the human race is but one tribe of many people. Let us learn to revel in our differences and be united as one people before the God of all nations seeking to aide and assist as we can. Jesus once said, "Go out into all the world and make disciples."We now have the added blessing that the "world" has come into the church's own backyard and must recognize that the "task is no less the same as it ever was." "That the mission of the church is the same as it ever was." "And that the message of salvation is still the same as it ever was." But that our community values and attitudes can, and must, changed towards welcoming all in, be they nomads or unwanted, spurned or unloved, refugee or stranger. Let the followers of Jesus be about the tasks of sharing the love of Christ to all the world without regard to color of skin or practice of belief.

Jesus' love and atonement was colorless and without discrimination. He accepted each person as they were and not as they must become in order to be received. It is a message worthy of the whole world and not to just some of the world. It is a message of God's love testified in the communal sharing of dissimilar lives one with the other in the divine cords of fellowship measured by the winnowing threshes of peace and goodwill. And not by the chaff of callousness, bigotry, willful blindness, hardness of heart, or indifference. The church is called to be as the good Samaritan binding up the wounds of others different from ourselves that this burden may then be shared by prayers of charity and grace. Amen.

R.E. Slater
November 4, 2012

see additional related topics -
"Multi-Cultural Pluralism"

Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation:
In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come