It’s amazing what you can find randomly wandering around the Internet. Usually, you don’t (or at least I don’t), but there are times when Web panning turns up a nugget. I was surfing aimlessly yesterday for a couple minutes while my brain tried to track something down, and I landed at Doug Hagler’s blog, only to find myself in the blogroll. I would not have expected that. Doug’s good people from what I can tell—we’ve never met personally, I only know him from around the blogosphere, and primarily from his comments on Jim Berkley’s blog—but he and I don’t agree on a whole lot. (I would have said we don’t agree on much of anything, but from his blog, it’s evident we agree on Tolkien, anyway.) Doug’s one of those folks in the More Light/Covenant Network stream of the PC(USA), and I’m . . . slightly not. Still (especially these days), one is always grateful for those with whom one can disagree intelligently and civilly, because there can be real value to those conversations; and I’d certainly put Doug in that category. (Besides, you have to like someone who can write, “You’re only allowed to take me as seriously as I take myself. That should serve to restrain both of us.”) As such, I’m happy to return the favor and add him to the blogroll. I’d especially recommend his post on eucatastrophe, which is perhaps my favorite of Tolkien’s concepts. (This all ties in with my earlier post on Alison Milbank’s book.)
I should also note, I’m grateful to Doug for tipping me off to a development I’d missed during the whole packing/moving process: Peter Jackson has settled his legal squabble with New Line Cinema, and he and Fran Walsh are back on board to do The Hobbit (and also a sequel; my wife was wondering if they’re planning to make a movie of the journey back home, which Tolkien completely glossed over). There are legitimate criticisms to offer of the work Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens did with LOTR, but that said, I can’t come up with anyone who would have done a better job. Jackson et al. doing The Hobbit is clearly the best-case scenario, and I’m glad to see it.
Thanks for a post. The first paragraph offers one way that we just MIGHT be able to not just coexists, but actually appreciate where the other comes from without having to necessarily accept what the other believes. Tough stuff for sure!
I’ll agree it’s never easy; but it begins where we ought to begin, with the humility to remember that we’re limited and that we aren’t infallible–by definition, some of the stuff we’re sure we have right, we have wrong. Once we really internalize that, then we come to see that those who disagree with us are really a blessing to us, because they’re the only ones likely to challenge us enough to point us to those places where we’re wrong.
I should probably do a post on this sometime soon, since I keep coming back to this. For right now, I’ll just note that I appreciate the way you put it, too:
“As much as I would like to think I am done growing, being part of a mutual admiration society does nothing in the whole ‘challenging area.’ The fastest way for us to live out our brokenness is to think we are not broken in the first place. When we begin to believe our own hype we will fall right back into patterns of oppression and exclusion without even knowing. I appreciate the fact that there are people who disagree with me constantly pushing and pushing back as i continually try to discover and rediscover my own faith.”
Anyway, thanks very much for your comment, Bruce. You’re stepping into quite a vortex here, being willing to stand for moderator; either God is calling you or you’re crazy, because I can’t think of any other reason to volunteer for that job. I recognize that it needs to be done and we need good people to do it, but that doesn’t make it any safer. At least (and I say this as one of those “moronic wackos” 🙂 ) it looks to me like you’re doing it for the right reasons and in the right spirit.