Christian Scholars Review Review of Essary Slavoj 2013
Who is My Neighbor? Being a Practiced Samaritan in a Connected World
Published by NavPress in 2011
The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door
Published by Baker Books in 2012
The Neighbor: 3 Inquiries in Political Theology
Published by University of Chicago Printing in 2006
Jeffrey P. Bouman is the Managing director of the Service-Learning Eye at Calvin College.
My neighbour Don strolled past my house ane early evening last June while I was out forepart in my urban neighborhood, reading the newspaper. We shot the breeze, talked most coming together new neighbors, the weather, the ethics of drone strikes, and Don's summertime pace teaching piano lessons, before he went on with his evening walk. June evenings in my neighborhood afford a clearer window than other months into who my neighbors are and what it means to be a good neighbour. The almanac Quaternary of July neighborhood parade brings united states together, and each year someone once more has to walk the neighborhood making sure new neighbors know that the parade is coming, and reminding old neighbors nigh our annual practice of organizing a potluck in someone'southward backyard. I'm that guy on my street, Calvin Artery, and so perhaps it is fitting that I spent this past year pondering the deeper questions nigh the second great commandment.
Summertime always turns to autumn, and then inevitably, to winter during which, in my neighborhood this year, snow cruel almost daily during the entire month leading up to Christmas. My first rule of being a skillful neighbor is to keep your sidewalks shoveled clear and well in the wintertime. This is my hard and fast dominion. Pay attention to this rule, and you lot will know what it means to "neighbor" well. No snow in your forecast? Interpret for your climate. The fundamental rule remains the aforementioned – a good neighbor thinks of others kickoff, and acts on that thinking. Being a skilful neighbour is a corollary of the golden rule, is information technology not? Treat others every bit you would have them care for you, and you are well on your way to understanding this basic homo commandment.
Another good mode to remember what it means to be a good neighbor also e'er comes in the wintertime, at Christmas. The gospel author John, paraphrased by the Bible scholar Eugene Peterson in The Message, said that "the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood" (accent added). Christ moved into our earth-neighborhood when he took on flesh and became human being, the event nosotros celebrate each year every bit the church year begins, with Advent leading us to Christmas. A neighbour, get-go of all, is present among neighbors.
My job in this essay is to review iii books that delve more deeply into questions about who neighbors are, what it means to exist a neighbor, the art of neighboring, and how the question of the neighbor has been complicated by the horrors of the twentieth century. I tried to practice so in a fashion that fundamentally respects each of the half dozen authors starting time every bit neighbors of mine in the global village, and also by appreciating each as differently gifted writers. Cartoon on twenty-v years of leadership and mentoring alongside college and university students in religion-based college education, likewise equally the by twelve years directing the Service-Learning Center at Calvin Higher, I bring many different experiences as an intellectual, spiritual, and geographical neighbor to interesting people with fascinating stories.
The three different books, with iii different sets of authors, bring iii varieties of assumptions to their writing about neighbors and neighborhoods. Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon, Denver-area pastors who together wrote The Art of Neighboring (2012), work on the basic assumption that their readers will by and large be living in plotted subdivisions in typical American suburbs, complete with garages and grills, Trivial Leagues and grass. Lifelong missions leader Steve Moore writes his book Who is My Neighbour? (2010) on the premise that the world is a global hamlet shared by rich and ultra-poor alike with many opportunities to love neighbors with both meaningful service and the adept news of the gospel. And Kenneth Reinhard, professor of English at UCLA, Eric Santner, Germanic Studies professor at the University of Chicago, and Slavoj Žižek, Folklore professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, together published their book, The Neighbor (2005), mindful of the neighborhood of academics, philosophers, and theologians who wrestle with the massive spiritual, psychological, and basic man questions that have resulted from the bloody and inhumane atrocities committed within the human being customs, peculiarly in the twentieth century. Each of these books derives its fundamental question from the biblical injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves establish in Leviticus 19:eighteen: "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but y'all shall love your neighbor equally yourself: I am the Lord" (NIV) and repeated in Matthew 22:38-xl: "This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is similar it: 'You lot shall honey your neighbour every bit yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (NIV). A fundamental question to brainstorm, and so, is whether the keeping of this commandment is even possible.
In The Art of Neighboring, the two Denver pastors, Pathak and Runyon suggest that not only is it possible, but it is easier than we sometimes retrieve. Drawing on their experience in recent years bringing neighbors and neighborhoods together throughout the greater Denver area, Pathak and Runyon provide an array of practical guidance for people who want resources and encouragement for getting to know their neighbors. Submitting your story of "neighboring" on their website (theartofneighboring.com) enters you into a drawing to win a sugariness new grill (the better to invite your neighbors to share!). They offering suggestions based on the premise that most Americans exercise non know their neighbors the mode they did in a previous age. They suggest developing a map of your neighborhood, finding mutual areas of interest, like watching or playing sports together, and the simple deed of inviting neighbors together for a picnic in someone'southward backyard equally opportunities to "build genuine relationships right outside your door." I institute their general style accessible and encouraging. Equally someone who intentionally chose to buy a home in an older, more urban neighborhood with a diverse community of neighbors, I found most of their examples difficult to utilize to my ain questions nearly what information technology ways to exist a neighbor on a practical level. My neighbors are new immigrants, older African-American couples, young millennial parents, Eastern European dissidents, professors and cycle shop repairmen, engineers and artists. The almanac parade and an occasional potluck have brought a few of u.s. together, but sports and cookouts will have a limited reach. And then the helpfulness of the book will be restricted by the scope of their target demographic.
The authors do not raise fundamental philosophical questions regarding the nature of how difficult the commandment to beloved neighbors might be. They presume nigh American Christians will be coming from the perspective of a post-Enlightenment individualism, and that they will have purchased a suburban home with a two-machine fastened garage, and are spending well-nigh of their leisure time focused on their ain children, watching and playing sports. Circuitous and intractable societal questions regarding race and racism, homophobia, white flight, suburban development and urban decay, materialism, militarism, gender problems and sexism, urban or domestic violence, sustainability and global climate change – and many others – are simply left out of the discussion in a largely successful attempt to offer a elementary set up of guidelines for the do of neighboring to a particular population of American Christians. They follow affiliate topics such as:
- Who is my Neighbor?
- Taking the Great Commandment Seriously The Time Barrier
- The Fear Gene
- Moving Downwards the Line
- Baby Steps
- Motives Matter
- The Art of Receiving
- The Fine art of Setting Boundaries The Art of Focusing
- The Art of Forgiving
- Amend Together
A simple study guide with leading questions for a small group leader is provided for each chapter in the back of the volume.
One specially interesting thread I found valuable was their suggestion that every neighborhood might take in it a "person of peace" (147). Their thought is rooted in the passage in Luke 10 where Jesus sends out 70-two disciples, and stems from when Jesus instructs the disciples to look for a person of peace in each particular city, and to stay with that person. Their awarding of the idea seems to exist that every neighborhood locale volition accept such a person, and that these types of people are worth getting to know, especially in the service of sharing the gospel. Especially in neighborhoods with college than boilerplate concentrations of violence, both physical and virtual, this idea could have been explored more than deeply. In fact, the volume series published over the past several years by the Duke University Center for Reconciliation would exist an excellent companion to this idea, particularly the 2011 volume by Sam Wells and Marcia Owens, Living without Enemies: Being Nowadays in the Midst of Violence. ane
Pathak and Runyon's idea that there might exist a person of peace in each neighborhood implies that neighborhoods, similar all groups of people, endure violence and broken relationships, and crave reconciliation. They offer 1 particularly helpful chapter, "The Art of Receiving," every bit a prepare of suggestions for building reciprocal, rather than one-mode, relationships. In an instance they requite, a couple of well-significant and resource-full neighbors are presented with the challenge of an offering of help from a unmarried mother in their neighborhood who they know to be resource-challenged. They write:
When giving is 1-sided, it robs the "needy" i of his dignity, because it makes him dependent. Merely when giving is 2-sided, everyone feels a sense of worth. Nosotros demand to sympathise that everyone on our block has something to bring to a relationship. What'southward more, skillful neighboring is non about doing charity work. It's not simply about doing for others and looking for ways to give and give and give. Rather, good neighboring is near helping to create a sense of community inside your neighborhood. It's about empowering people and breaking downwards walls. Information technology'due south well-nigh everybody doing something together for the common good. (121-22)
In Living without Enemies, theologian Sam Wells suggests four models of engagement that put this idea into a unproblematic and valuable framework. He writes well-nigh
working for
working with
existence for, and
existence with others in service and advocacy. (26)
These are important distinctions to understand in the art of neighboring. Wells takes this model a step further in a 2012 essay, "Rethinking Service," where he suggests that the well-nigh of import word in the Bible – "the word that describes the eye of God and the nature of God's purpose and destiny for united states of america" – is the give-and-take "with." 2 According to Wells, we are tempted to think that the discussion "for" is the operative word in service and mission, simply too oft it is only the way of service that is easier, and requires less of us. "Being with" and "working with" others is much more difficult, but likewise much closer to the design for service offered in the gospel and the incarnation. And so Pathak and Runyon provide an fantabulous but limited resources for American Christians interested in fulfilling the second great commandment to love our neighbors at the very least by getting to know them. And that is an splendid place to start.
In his book, Who is My Neighbor?, Steve Moore, a lifelong missions advocate and leader in the curt-term missions motion, asks what information technology means to be a neighbor in a world that is increasingly continued and informed. If the question of to whom we are responsible hinges on proximity, urgency, and capacity to respond, then the questions of who our neighbors are, and how we are to be practiced neighbors, becomes that much more complex. Moore centers his text on the parable Jesus tells in the gospel of Luke, chapter 10, commonly referred to as the Good Samaritan parable. Arguing that technological connectivity has changed the mural of our reality since the Bible was written, Moore suggests that in order to be good neighbors, we have to larn to "zoom in to personalize the needs of others and zoom out to get perspective on the large movie" (18). He uses language adopting our technical reality throughout the book, suggesting a job he describes equally "assigning a meaningful page rank to the virtual tsunami of man needs that flood into our lives from every corner of the world" (18). Page-ranking becomes, for Moore, a skill that helps make sense and requite club to the chaotic array of brokenness, right in front of us, and brought to united states of america via the Cyberspace and our myriad news outlets.
He suggests a formula for responsibility, calculation 1'south proximity to the need of others, and the urgency of the others' demand, together with one's capacity to help with skills and resource equaling our level of responsibleness [ proximity + urgency + capacity = responsibleness ]. This formula makes sense upon outset reading, just Moore quickly raises the stakes by also request what happens when the needs of others are not only tragic, simply likewise chronic and epidemic. In other words, how are those of the states with resources supposed to empathise our responsibility with those resources when the needs of the world's many "others" are so overwhelming in their vastness, their tragic proportions, and their never-catastrophe waves of human being and ecological suffering? The technological historic period in which we alive, Moore argues, is filled with the possibility of an awareness of the particularity of homo suffering to a degree previously unmatched, and with the effect of paralyzing many in the face of what he calls a "tidal wave of shame and guilt."
The first department of the book revisits the parable, and introduces readers to the story in depth. Moore summarizes his distillation of the story by saying "God expects us to take the initiative, crossing boundaries and overcoming barriers, to show His mercy by serving others" (34). He suggests that by shifting the question from "Who is my neighbor?" to "which of these was a neighbour to the human?" Jesus moves the burden of proof for neighbour identity from the other to ourselves: from a passive to an active question. Similarly, in guild to aid usa bargain with the growing firsthand awareness of brokenness and injustice in all corners of the world, Moore suggests an paradigm of our neighborhoods growing bigger, while our world grows smaller to usa. Jesus'southward invoking of a Samaritan for his story of how to think about being a neighbour was intentional and provocative. Samaritans were invisible and disrespected by those listening to Jesus, and at the same time they served equally the perfect example of how radical the suggestions of Jesus were. And according to Moore the term "neighbor" would have been typically used in the Mishnah, the summary of Jewish law, every bit a term for friend, or to describe a fellow Jew. Jesus tells the story every bit a manner of outmaneuvering his questioners and demonstrating the inadequacies of their understanding of how language and beloved interact. Moore points out that the way the parable ends, with Jesus asking the question "which of these was a neighbor to the man?" demonstrates the commitment Jesus had to encourage his followers to take the initiative in friendship and in crossing boundaries.
Moore provides another formula from the parable that suggests a progression from awareness to feeling to activity. He uses the terms "information," "compassion," and "action." The Samaritan human commencement saw the injured homo, and so he took pity on him, then he went to him. He identifies four common "leave ramps" that more often than not enable usa to avoid the necessary action: intention, deflection, rationalization, and justification. Each of these generally shows up between our experience of compassion and our action, but Moore argues that with plenty cases of inaction considering of these go out ramp detours, these excuses begin to evidence up even before the feelings of compassion arrive. He allows that, in the age of Google© and YouTube©, we take the danger of information overload to worry virtually, and the subsequent feel with what he calls "compassion fatigue." Compassion fatigue might alter the in a higher place formula to something like: "he saw the injured homo, he felt burned out, and he almost acted to help." This describes many of our experiences with today's needs. Especially in the month of December, when our email inboxes and our bodily mailboxes are filled with year-cease requests for giving, we tin throw abroad most of these appeals without fifty-fifty looking at them, knowing in advance that it is beyond our limited capacity to assist even a small percentage of them.
In the 2nd department, Moore spends quite a fleck of fourth dimension dealing with individual passions and ane'south vocation, suggesting a "passion pyramid," and explaining that there are 4 domains of passionate engagement: service, justice, discovery, and advocacy. He paints a picture of one'southward destiny that includes an interconnected circle around which lie ane's identity, one'south history, and one'south opportunity inside which are found a recipe for understanding passion and destiny.
Finally, in section three, Moore moves from understanding our ain passions to "Connecting with God's Passions." He argues that God has a passion for the ultra-poor, equally demonstrated time and fourth dimension again in Scripture. God's people, and the many role models and voices God chose from inside this people, and also from outside it, by and large came from among the marginalized and the poor. He offers an analysis of poverty that explains its root causes (crisis, abuse, consequences, and option), and and so details some current bug threatening justice globally (illegal state seizure, bonded slavery, refugees, and human trafficking and the global sex trade). Finally, he closes with a summary:
The goal of faithful Christ followers is non to filter out needs, but to organize and prioritize them, to PageRank event-based passions based on life-shaping experiences that heartlink us with God-ordained causes and intersect with his purposes for our lives. Nosotros are called to take the initiative in crossing boundaries and overcoming barriers to show God's mercy by serving others. (152)
Steve Moore offers some helpful guidance for organizing and agreement our passions and relating these to the needs of the globe, but in the stop he does non answer his jarring opening question related to the question of discernment – in this age of awareness and uneven resources, those with more resources exist in a tension involving a balance between limits and awareness. It is a complex question that deserves a more circuitous answer.
Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek each contribute a standalone essay in their volume which serves as a window into their long-running academic conversation regarding understanding the meaning of "neighbour" and "neighbor-dearest." They introduce the premise of their book as an axiom that understands "that the Freudian revolution is stricto sensu internal to the topic of neighbour and, indeed, provides a crucial point of reference for the project of rethinking the notion of neighbor in light of the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century" (iii). Centering mostly on Freud's contribution to humanity'southward self-understanding, and how the thought of the unconscious opened upward new means of agreement others, the 3 essays delve securely into a complex array of homo questions that circumduct effectually agreement the commandment to beloved one's neighbor. I was non as well far into this cloth earlier noting the irony of attempting to review this fabric, which raises serious and complex questions regarding the potential impossibility of loving one'due south neighbor, alongside the Pathak and Runyon volume which is premised on making this act as simple equally possible. The introduction to The Neighbor points out that
for skeptical readers, both religious and secular, the commandment to dearest the neighbor has seemed far from rational and has, in fact, appeared deeply enigmatic – indeed, as an enigma that calls us to rethink the very nature of subjectivity, responsibility, and community (5).
Ane of many dilemmas they point readers to is the puzzling nature of deciding which neighbors to honey, how to love them, and to what extent. Harking to Moore's unanswered question of discernment, the authors point out that with the command to neighbour-love, "one cannot endeavour to fulfill it without taking the take a chance of transgressing it" (5). Such is the complexity of attempting to fulfill the second great commandment – by making the endeavour to alive into it, nosotros risk not merely failure, only violation.
Reinhard's essay begins the volume, entitled "Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbour." In information technology he addresses a basic argument put forth past Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist whose influential twentieth-century writing on state power argued that a leader is identified essentially as 1 with the "God-like power to declare a state of emergency and to act outside the police" (eleven), and who suggested that all political action can be broken down to the relationship between people defined equally "friends" and "enemies." Reinhard walks his readers through a complex maze of commentators on biblical history, and the similarity between the Old Attestation God of Israel and Schmitt's dictatorial outside-the-constabulary true leader. Events like Abraham's call to cede Isaac, and the expiry/sacrifice of Jesus on the cantankerous, provide insight into the development of Schmitt'due south theory of power and leadership. (An important side notation is that Schmitt was born a Roman Cosmic, good his faith until his excommunication in the 1920s later a second marriage, and joined the Nazi party in 1933, providing juristic counsel for the development of his anti-Semitic policies and practices through the 1930s.) Reinhard draws from Žižek's explanation that "Freud's account of the father in these texts provides a theological groundwork for Schmitt'south understanding of political antagonism" (42). Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou all enter into Reinhard'southward dense commentary on the nature of the relationship betwixt the love of self, the honey of God, and the love of the neighbor. Commenting on a set up of lectures given by Badiou in 2003, in which he connected love and politics with the development of a "neighborhood," he writes:
The world that love opens, the new neighborhood, within the political and beyond the familial, is the only place where the two may be encountered as such. Badiou suggests that to honey the neighbour is to create a new open up space, a new universality in a particular identify. (69)
In Eric Santner'south essay, "Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rozenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor," he develops the idea that the ability to love our neighbors according to the law is a kind of miracle. Cartoon from German language philosophers Walter Benjamin and Franz Rozenzweig and from Sigmund Freud and the Apostle Paul'south New Testament writings, Santner develops what he calls a "tentative pace forth the path of… postsecular thinking" in which he concludes that to exist "accountable to our neighbor and the demands of the day," each day is "actually a remarkable, even miraculous, accomplishment that require[s] some course of divine back up – ultimately a grade of love." His point of deviation for the development of this thought is Benjamin's famous apologue of an automaton chess player representing historical materialism, guided by a wizened dwarf representing theology. Santner connects the idea of a miracle with Reinhard'southward understanding in Schmitt of the right of a Sovereign, in this instance God, to arbitrate outside the boundaries of the laws of time, space and physics, as a state of exception. Santner argues that it is only through this divine act that humans have the capacity for true neighbor-love.
Žižek'due south final essay, "Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence," addresses the neighbor-love question through a critique of Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Lévinas, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and explains how an insistence on the ethical dimension of neighbor-love is the primary fashion to open the political possibilities inside the command to love neighbors. Žižek points out the flaw in separating the beginning and second commandments by noting that in John 4:12 nosotros read, "No man has ever seen God; if we love i another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us," nearly which he quotes Levinas:
The natural preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn past the religious life. Equally long as yous call up merely salvation, you plow your back on God. God is God, only for the person who overcomes the temptation to dethrone Him and use Him for his own ends. (140, citing Levinas, Difficult Liberty, 48)
Again quoting Levinas, Žižek articulates the deviation between the upstanding and the political: "Ethics involves an asymmetric relationship in which I am ever-already responsible for the Other, while politics is the domain of symmetrical equality and distributive justice." Žižek concludes by comparing Judaism and Christianity in the terms of neighbor-love, pointing out that the commandment originally came to the Jews:
It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbour: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her cardinal dimension a faceless monster. It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in guild to arrive at the neighbor: nosotros accept to love, nosotros must pass through the "expressionless" letter of the alphabet of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the "inner wealth of a person" displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject. (185)
Finally, with the lyrics of the Johnny Greenbacks vocal, "The Human being Comes Around," Žižek demonstrates his thesis that God has essentially ii characters, one showing unconditional dear and the other arbitrary and outside the Law. Cash sings almost the judgment as a stock-still and terrible day when "the simply remain but, and the filthy remain filthy still," and Žižek points out that
love that suspends the Police force is necessarily accompanied by capricious cruelty that also suspends the Law. This is also why it is wrong to oppose the Christian god of Love to the Jewish god of cruel justice: excessive cruelty is the necessary obverse of Christian dearest (189).
One of the about honest-sounding phrases Žižek develops is in his articulation of the mystery of the Other:
To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a sure well-defined capacity… but to recognize yous in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This common recognition of limitation thus opens up a infinite of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable. (139)
We are united in our vulnerability – to misunderstand the other, to transgress the Law to dear our neighbors, and to the responsibility for each other in ways we cannot fully understand.
Application for these books to faith-based higher teaching includes an assortment of programs, questions, pedagogies, and dilemmas. First nosotros must ask to what extent a college or university can and must exist a neighbour, every bit an institution or community. Mission statements at most universities typically include the language of service and of citizenship and leadership, so the answer seems always to have been a articulate "yes," even if it is also true that our fundamental purpose is not social service, simply college education. The next question is how most wisely and effectively to appoint the curriculum, the ethos of the institution, and the rhythm of its communal life toward the end of fulfilling this mandate. Keeping the second great commandment coupled with the first – to love God, and too to love our neighbor – has been a fundamental challenge for higher education through the ages, and continues to be challenging even for faith-based colleges and universities. Many organized religion-based universities are nevertheless pretty good, generically, at the 2nd, but accept quite ofttimes decoupled it from the first. Service activity, civic engagement and participation as a skill and something to be learned and taught, is commonplace and growing at faith-based and secular institutions alike; in fact, the leaders in the civic date and service-learning movements are generally elite secular schools. Information technology appears that the endeavor on the role of colleges and universities to remain true to both commandments of the Shema simultaneously has served to distract from the serious business of the second not bad commandment equally a tenet in higher education practice. The ability to do this has simply non been developed well yet. Information technology still may exist adult through thoughtful and true-blue study away and service-learning opportunities, interfaith dialog activities and participation, ecumenism on- and off-campus, and a philosophically honest recognition of our limits and the limits of our students.
And efforts toward being good neighbors accept been strengthened past research and scholarship aimed at the mutual good, by conscientious and thoughtful attention and resourcing of service-learning and community-based research efforts, and by equipping students, while they are even so students, to be skilful neighbors in the communities in which colleges and universities be. Colleges and universities should be addressing questions of whether or non their students (and faculty and staff) are actually existence expert neighbors – shoveling the sidewalks in front of their off-campus houses, bringing meals to neighbors, limiting their carbon footprints through omnibus riding, bicycling to campus, or carpooling, developing meaningful relationships with neighbors, and, among many other academic activities, designing engineering projects that serve the common proficient, nearby and far away.
So in the calorie-free of these three books, I am still thinking about, writing nigh, and trying to practice skilful neighboring. I am challenged to ponder the Good Samaritan parable and how it applies to me and to my world. I wonder nearly the possibility, and the complexity of what it means to honey i's neighbor, and for God to command usa to dearest each other. What does information technology hateful that God reserves the right to interrupt the laws of the universe? And if he can so interrupt these laws for our good, does it not then hold that he could also do so for our non-good? And is that not what seems to have happened in some of the most violent atrocities of the past century? When I visited Auschwitz on Remembrance Day in 2011 with eighteen Calvin College students, I wondered, how on world did God allow the 3rd Reich to commit the crimes against God's own people like they did? And what nigh Rwanda, and Argentine republic? What about what is happening on the earth phase over the by several years in Syria, in Egypt, in Uganda and Sudan, and now more recently in Ukraine? And what about hunger and other forms of chronic violence? How are these realities possible in a universe governed by a expert God? Is the Creator also the destroyer – what could this mean? How does the tapestry of pregnant become woven together if not in a combination of God'due south skillful interruptive behavior and God's seemingly arbitrary not-interruptive behavior when information technology seems like the universe screams for God's paw of protection and interruption? Meaning eludes me, and all of us.
And our response toward our neighbor in the confront of this mystery is complicated, and in that location are many faces of how nosotros treat each other. And why should there not be? We are a complicated people with lots of complicated luggage and history of our own, and we have our hurts to heal, and our egos to stroke. And so countries and peoples plant flags and set up guns and seek to bulldoze others out, and to constitute their own superiority over and over again. And we are all cleaved. So I wonder what does my community of employment, Calvin College, what does the Christian Reformed Church to which I belong, what does my little family in my particular neighborhood have to say in the face up of all this inhumanity? Possibly I say, "I'm going to invite my neighbors over to my house for a potluck dinner." Maybe I say, "I'm going to serve on the board of this inspiring arrangement even if it seems like the most idealistic organization that ever existed." Possibly I say, "I'yard going to parent my kids, and honey my wife even if they don't always deserve information technology, and I'm going to take their love even when I know for certain I don't deserve it." And maybe I say, "I want to see a different globe, and I'm willing to plant a flag for a improve reality, and work toward information technology despite all the evidence of how incommunicable information technology is." That is what information technology means, I guess.
I have neighbors who alive in Hungary named Tibor, Enikö, Zoltan, Kata and Dora. I have a neighbor named Karl who serves equally a University Ministry staff member at a Catholic university in Chicago, and who serves students from all faiths and no faith in this place where future leaders are trained. I have a neighbor named Val who serves students at a small-scale higher in California, and who encourages their involvement in service to others exterior themselves, even though many of her students come from privileged lives and are blinded past their wealth to the deep lessons to be learned from the poor. I have neighbors down my street named Michele and Nestor who escaped the Communist regime in Eastern Europe merely before the encarmine revolution in their country, and who now wonder near their life's work in dissident flick-making in their sometime land. I have neighbors named Kurt and Kevin who beloved each other and who bide in a earth where they are only safe in certain pockets of legal and social protection – where basic rights are not evenly distributed. And I take neighbors named Miguel and Juan Carlos who slipped across the border into this country years ago in search of opportunities to feed their families, and who at present navigate the complexities of a wealthy nation with an inhospitable cacophony of immigration policies. Each of these neighbors wakes upwardly every morning and does their all-time to make the world a improve place, every bit practise yous and I. These are the neighbors with whom we, and our students, are in view all of our lives.
A neighbor, per Jesus's definition, is someone you love. If you exercise not honey someone, you are not their neighbor, and they are not yours.
Cite this article
Jeffrey P. Bouman, "Who is My Neighbor? Musings on Christian Higher Education and the "Solidarity of the Vulnerable" —A Review Essay", Christian Scholar's Review, 43:3 , 267-278
Footnotes
- Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owens, Living without Enemies: Being Nowadays in the Midst of Violence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2011).
- Samuel Wells, "Rethinking Service," Cresset (Easter 2013): 10.
Source: https://christianscholars.com/who-is-my-neighbor-musings-on-christian-higher-education-and-the-solidarity-of-the-vulnerable-a-review-essay/
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