wringing out saturated selves: christian education in a secular age

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Wringing Out Saturated Selves:Christian Education in a Secular Age 1

BRIAN R. GUMM

Abstract: Education as practiced by the church must see its primary locus in just that

body: the church. Ecclesial education must also see itself as a formational projectengaging the entirety of the human person at all points of life, drawing on the richintellectual and worshipful practices of the church catholic. As a public expression,ecclesial education must also engage rigorously yet discerningly with a variety of intellectual disciplines and local sites of reflective practice. Such a project is necessaryto restore wholeness to the fragmented, saturated self 2 within the church of the latemodern world. This paper takes a narrative, historical approach with distinctlyAnabaptist qualities toward just such a project.

Preface

Early in the fall of this current academic year, after our in-class retreat for “Formation in Missional

Leadership,” Aaron Kauffman and I sat around a table and tossed out a few ideas for our capstone

integration projects. Aaron and I have shared much these past few years at EMS: we are both in the

academic track in the Mdiv program, and we both seem to sense a call to use our God-given intellectual

gifts in ministry for the fidelity, flourishing, and witness of the body of Christ, the church. Like project

work we had shared before, we wondered if our two capstone projects might be combined. What

emerged out of that table conversation last fall is now on the calendar for mid-April, a mini-conference

called “#Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission.” Pulled from the pages of our capstone

proposal, the promotional literature for the conference now reads:

Anabaptism at its best has been a series of attempts both to live into God's in-breakingoccupation and to faithfully occupy the empires of this fallen age, signaling the shalomto come. Anabaptists have gone about this work by imaginatively patterning their worship and witness after the New Testament communities of Jesus... Come explore

ways in which the Anabaptist tradition can help inspire faithful occupation in today'sworld. Interdisciplinary academic presentations will be infused with worship andtestimonies to open our minds and spirits to where God is calling us into mission in themidst of empire. 3

1 Presented February 29, 2012, for the author's senior capstone presentation in “Formation in Missional Leadership” with Nathan Yoder, PhD, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

2 A term borrowed from Kenneth J. Gergen. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life . New York:Basic Books, 1991.

3 "Occupy Empire." Anabaptist Missional Project.http://www.anabaptistmissionalproject.org/AMP/AMP_Occupy_Empire.html (accessed February 26, 2012).

http://www.anabaptistmissionalproject.org/AMP/AMP_Occupy_Empire.html

http://www.anabaptistmissionalproject.org/AMP/AMP_Occupy_Empire.html



Gumm : “Wringing Out Saturated Selves” : EMS Capstone 2

We are both presenting our capstone integration presentations today, yet not seeing our project's

culmination for another month and a half. Through Jennifer's and Nate's patient, flexible guidance,

though, we think we have a suitable arrangement worked out. I will obviously let Aaron speak to how

he has sorted through these complexities, but here is how I have come to situate it...

As a dual-degree student at EMU these past four years, I have been studying simultaneously

here at EMS and “down the hill” at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. For my CJP practicum

last summer, I had the chance to teach conflict transformation in Ethiopia, at Meserete Kristos College,

a school affiliated with a denomination of the same name, and having historical roots in Mennonite

mission work starting in the 1940s. This was my first substantial teaching experience and I loved every

bit of it, and it began to make clearer a sense that had already been forming throughout my first three

years at EMU: A call to the ministerial vocation of educator, or teacher.

When we got back to the States and began the fall semester this year, I found myself in

somewhat of a funk. Upon reflection, I came to the realization that I was not energized by the prospect

of spending another entire year as a student, especially after the life-changing experience as a first-time

teacher in a radically different cultural context. I wanted to teach again! Through the latter half of the

fall semester, then, as Aaron and I began planning for the conference, I also rearranged my final

semester to consist of a six-hour practicum and this class. Most of that practicum consists of me

teaching conflict transformation again, this time just down the road at Bridgewater College.

So the conference in mid-April is but a piece of a larger project of vocational-ministerial

discernment that I have undergone throughout my time here at EMS. That larger project is what I have

in mind in this paper, and what follows is an attempt to sketch out the landscape and tasks at hand for

someone who has sensed a call to the ministerial vocation of educator. While my focus will be at first

on the world of higher education, especially Christian or church-affiliated schools in North America, I

will be somewhat vague about how, in a professional sense, something like this might look. The most




immediate reason for this is based on my own uncertainty for what comes after graduation in two

months, less one day. 4 My family's future still looks to be very much up in the air, something which

consumes much of our thoughts and energy on any given day, but something I hope to keep as much in

the background as possible in this paper. But I am also committed to the notion that Christian education

should happen everywhere in the church; not just in colleges and seminaries, but also Sunday school

rooms, sanctuaries, living rooms, prisons, and restaurants – and I may someday find myself in any

number of those sites in the vocation of educator, regardless of the prospect of me doing PhD work and

being a professor at some point.

In the next two sections I will quickly and tentatively lodge the argument that, to turn a phrase

from Mark Thiessen Nation: The first word Christians have to say about education is “Church.” 5 My

first step is negative, describing some of the content and context of higher education in America as

concrete sites of intellectual, political, and economic liberalism at work. Taken together, these forces

cause institutions of higher learning to fail in the task they set out for themselves (i.e. educating young

Americans), while simultaneously, perhaps unwittingly, succeeding in the task tacitly absorbed from

the broader culture of late modern hyper-capitalism: i.e. the formation of consuming automatons who

contribute to the health and wealth of the corporate-sponsored, militaristic nation-state and the elites

who benefit from such an arrangement. 6 If this read of the situation has any trace of veracity, the church

and its task of education are in a tough spot.

My second step will then be to help the church re-imagine itself as the primary location of

Christian education, using a theological anthropology that reaches back before the Cartesian cleaving

4 But, hey, who's counting?5 Cf. Mark Thiessen Nation. “The First Word Christians Have to Say About Violence Is 'Church': On Bonhoeffer, Baptists,

and Becoming a Peace Church.” In Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversations with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas. Edited by Samuel Wells and Mark Thiessen Nation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.

6 Which sounds really cynical. I'm being somewhat hyperbolic in such a statement, but I stick to it. Cf. “SacrificialViolence: The 'Military-Entertainment Complex'” and “Excursus: On Patriotism” in James K.A. Smith. Desiring the

Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Vol. 1, Cultural Liturgies. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009, 103-112.




and isolation of the self to reclaim a more embodied and communal vision of education as formation in

character, specifically formation in discipleship to Jesus Christ, membership within his body, and the

“habitations of the Spirit” 7 which enable such virtue to be cultivated. My neo-Anabaptist impulses will

come through here, as I employ a Yoderian, canonical-directional read of Old and New Testament

Scripture to trace the lines for the church as radical ecclesia. Through both sections I will make use of

the work of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue , both his critique of the Enlightenment project as well as

his constructive work for reclaiming the virtues for moral living. 8

Discerning the context: Secularity in Christian higher education

Problem statement: “Catholic schools seem more adept at creating lapsed Catholics than anything

else.” 9 The religious studies professor who uttered this, Donna Freitas, is herself Catholic and makes

this terse assessment in the midst of a book about “juggling sexuality, spirituality, romance, and

religion on America's college campuses.” 10 Among the important findings of her interview-based

research across a range of American colleges and universities, “sacred” and “secular” alike, Freitas

makes the observation that most of these schools have an inability “to effectively empower youth to

resist the sexual excesses of both college hookup culture and mainstream American popular culture.” 11

Commenting on the increasingly common self-description by young people of being “spiritual but not

religious,” Freitas comments that “I suspect that what is appealing about 'spirituality' as opposed to

'religion' is precisely that it is undefined – spirituality appears to be a symbolic label adopted to free

oneself from the moral obligations and rituals of tradition.” 12

7 Craig Dyksta. Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices , 2 nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster JohnKnowx Press, 2005), quoted in Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning. Edited by David I.Smith and James K.A. Smith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011, 15.

8 Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre DamePress, 1984.

9 Donna Freitas. Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's CollegeCampuses . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 12-13.

10 Ibid., the subtitle of the book.11 Ibid., 16.12 Ibid.




These assessments, while primarily concerned with the personally and socially devastating

consequences of college hookup culture, point to broader problems, problems which make such a

devastating social practice thinkable in the first place. Institutions of Christian higher education are in

a state of decline, 13 and schools apparently have a hard time inculcating the kind of social practices the

church, in its various forms, espouses. How is this so? In Desiring the Kingdom , James K.A. Smith

offers us a “cognate portal” through his reading of Tom Wolfe's novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons , which

portrays a young incoming college freshman from an uneducated rural family, full of promise and eager

to better herself through the privilege of a higher education. 14 What Charlotte fails to take into account

in her pursuit of knowledge, though, is role of the body in education at college. Quickly subsumed into

campus party culture, Charlotte gets “educated” in such places as Saint Ray's frat house, “a pseudo-

monastary for the priesthood of self-indulgence,” or around college athletic events which “encouraged

both tribalism and hedonism.” 15 While Christianity is not part of Wolfe's narrative, it does illustrate the

fact that most American universities, Christian or otherwise, see education as being limited to

classrooms and lecture halls, while everything else that goes on at college – activities that are much

more full-bodied in their engagement – is somehow different and not educational. This view implies an

overly rationalistic notion of the human person, severely limiting the horizon of education.

This particular view of the human as primarily a thinker is inherited from the Enlightenment

tradition. Another aspect of this tradition is the notion of individual autonomy and the individual's

supposedly inherent right to pursue – without interference – their own ends, or “happiness” in the

language of a particular U.S. founding document. Smith and Smith offer a fine summary of MacIntyre's

critical project in After Virtue :

what doomed the Enlightenment project from the start was its loss of the concept of

13 David I. Smith and James K.A. Smith. “Introduction: Practices, Faith, and Pedagogy.” In Teaching and Christian Practices , 1.

14 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom , 118-121; literature as a “cognate portal” is found on p. 144.15 Ibid., 120.




telos ... Emphasizing the autonomy of individuals to determine their own ends, and thusrejecting any specified telos as an imposition on libertarian freedom, the Enlightenment

project underestimated the significance of moral formation ... In short, by rejecting thenotion of a shared human telos and extolling individual rationality, the Enlightenment

project had to reject any notion of virtue – for virtue language makes sense only whereone recognizes the formative role of communities of practice that create ethical agents.Enlightenment models of ethical action are allegedly born; virtuous actors are alwaysand only made .16

In so far as colleges and universities inherit and perpetuate this libertarian notion of freedom which

necessarily precludes virtue, along with an overly rationalistic anthropology, they are beholden to its

failures.

Jamie Smith, marshaling the insights from MacIntyre and others, aims to reclaim a more

holistic anthropology that sees the human person as a social, desiring, even worshiping animal; from

“homo sapien ” to “ homo liturgicus .”17 Such a view better accounts for how humans tend to “lead out

with our heart and hands” 18 rather than our minds. This pre-modern, Augustinian view also helps better

account for what goes on at college campuses and the failures of the education-as-cognitive-transfer

model in the face of a highly sexualized popular culture. In fact it is that popular culture that seems to

be somewhat wiser to this more erotic view than higher education. As Smith quips:

In a culture whose civic religion prizes consumption as the height of human flourishing,marketing taps into our erotic religious nature and seeks to shape us in such a way thatthis passion and desire is directed to strange gods, alternative worship, and another kingdom... In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine's secret. 19

In summary, higher education in the Western tradition this side of the Enlightenment inherits a stultified

view of the human person and a misled understanding of that human's place and purpose in the world.

Such views have been inscribed into the very fabric of our social, cultural, political, economic, and

even religious institutions in the West, and are therefore written onto our bodies within the imagined

16 Smith and Smith, “Introduction,” 7.17 Smith , DTK , 39.18 Ibid., 47.19 Ibid., 75-6.




communities of which we are a part. 20 Meanwhile, the powerful economic force of consumer capitalism

keeps an Augustinian card, of sorts, up its sleeve. If any “religion” in the U.S. is an “opiate of the

masses,” surely this is it. The degree to which the church is complicit in such projects, whether in its

educational task or elsewhere, the challenges to its fidelity will be exceedingly difficult to surmount. It

is to the task of re-imagination for the church that we now turn.

Re-imagining the context: Radical Ecclesia

Accompanying these circumstances in American higher education, and the historical developments

which made them possible, is the disintegration of Western Christendom. The two are not entirely

unrelated. Late medieval philosophy and Reformation scholasticism gave rise to a situation where the

“[r]ebellious children of Christendom,” as Barry Harvey says, inadvertently act as “midwives to the

birth of the postmodern city.” 21 MacIntyre identifies the Scottish Enlightenment and related Northern

European intellectual developments as the “predecessor culture” to our current society's moral

framework, or rather lack thereof. 22 The ahistorical, rationalistic cleaving of morality from contingent,

full-bodied virtue is something that happened within the halls of Christendom, by mostly Christian men

who all happened to share fairly traditional Christian values. 23

As previously stated, the Enlightenment project – hatched as it was within Christendom – was

doomed from the start. But as both appear to be crumbling in late modernity, perhaps the church can

take some comfort in a Yoderian utterance of: “Good riddance!” Indeed, from John Howard Yoder's

view we should accept the post-Christendom situation as a blessing rather than a curse or a “dirty trick

of destiny.” 24 Yoder even argues that “the Jews of Diaspora were for over a millennium the closest thing

20 Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries . Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.21 Barry Harvey. Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World , Christian Mission and Modern

Culture. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999, 7.22 Cf. ch. 4, “The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality,” MacIntyre , After Virtue , 36-

50.23 Ibid., 44.24 John Howard Yoder. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel . Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,

1984, 158.




to the ethic of Jesus existing on any significant scale anywhere in Christendom.” 25

This post-biblical assessment is not the only way in which Judaism has been seen by Yoder as a

positive, indeed necessary, companion to the church. A burgeoning wealth of Christian scholarship

across various theological disciplines is critically reassessing the church's long tendency toward anti-

Semitism, a development that Jewish scholar, Peter Ochs, describes as “Another Reformation.” 26 For

Yoder, this even reaches back into a Christian reading of the Old Testament. In his recent book, The

Politics of Yahweh ,27 John Nugent synthesizes Yoder's Old Testament writings to offer a systematic

account of how Yoder read the Old Testament and, more specifically, saw the future political and

ethical shape of the church in the experience of the Babylonian Exile of the Jews. The key text here is

Jeremiah 29:4-7:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent intoexile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eatwhat they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons,and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiplythere, and do not decrease. But seek the ( shalom ) of the city where I have sent you intoexile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 28

This “Jeremianic turn” signals two important components of Yoder's biblical hermeneutic and

its implications for our political-ethical life as the church. First, it is a rejection of Israelite monarchy as

an idolatrous will to power, and a precursor to Constantinianism. This view laments with God, who to

the prophet-judge, Samuel, of Israel's insistence on an earthly ruler said, “they have rejected me from

being king over them.” 29 From that rejection of monarchy follows a commitment to diaspora as being

normative for the church, which reconfigures how we read the return from exile and the second temple

25 John Howard Yoder, Michael G. Cartwright, and Peter Ochs. The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited , Radical Traditions.Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003; quoted in Richard Bourne. Seek the Peace of the City: Christian Political Criticism as Public, Realist, and Transformative . Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009, 236.

26 Peter Ochs. Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews . Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011;which specifically addresses Yoder's thought, among others.

27 Nugent, John C. The Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God , TheopoliticalVisions. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011.

28 Note: All Scripture references are from NRSV unless specified otherwise.29 1 Sam. 8:7.




period leading up Roman-occupied Judea in Jesus' day. Yoder notes that “[m]ore than Christians are

aware, Babylon itself very soon became the cultural center of world Jewry, from the age of Jeremiah

until the time we in the West call the Middle Ages... The people who re-colonized the 'Land of Israel,'...

were supported financially and educationally from Babylon.” 30 This historical reality, illustrated by the

influence of the Babylonian Talmud on Rabbinic Judaism, is almost nowhere to be seen in the pages of

the New Testament, leading Yoder to insist that a “palestinocentric reading of the (biblical) story is a

mistake, though a very understandable one.” 31

This commitment to diaspora resonates with the “resident aliens” language found in New

Testament letters, as well as the repeated calls to ancient Israel to care for the alien, the orphan, and the

widow, “for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” 32 William Cavanaugh has pointed out that the early

church's very use of the word ekklesia (“assembly”) as a self-description of their gatherings:

may have its original roots in the Deuteronomic phrase 'the day of the assembly' at Sinai(Deut. 9:10; 10:4; 18:16)... The church saw itself as the eschatological fulfillment of Israel, and hence as the witness and embodiment of salvation to the world. 33

In Yoder, Rom Coles has seen a kind of “reaching back to the early church's reaching back to Jesus,” a

“looping” process that suggests “the shape of traditioning practices and relations within the church and

between (the church) and Scripture,” but also for “relations between the church and those of other

faiths and reasons.” 34 Such a looping, narrative-ethical hermeneutic is what Jim McClendon described

as “the baptist vision,” an approach that employs a “this is that” and “then is now” approach for reading

and applying Scriptures, particularly seen practiced by sixteenth-century Anabaptists, whom John

Howard Yoder studied extensively. 35 The following figure is an attempt to synthesize Yoder's approach:

30 Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited ; quoted in Nugent, Politics of Yahweh , 78.31 Ibid., 78-9.32 Deut. 10:18 and elsewhere.33 Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy , 127.34 Romand Coles. "The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: 'Outsiders' And The 'Otherness of the Church'." Modern

Theology 18, no. 3 (2002): 313.35 James William McClendon. Systematic Theology . 3 vols. Vol. 2, Doctrine. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994, 45.

Also cf. Stuart Murray. Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition , Studies in the Believers Church Tradition.Kitchener, Ont; Scottdale, Pa.: Pandora Press; Herald Press, 2000.




Figure 1: Canonical-directional (Nugent), Narrative-ethical (Coles)

In summary, the church after Christendom should take hints from Yoder's innovative reading of

Scripture and how it informs the political-ethical shape of the church, while also being wise to the

historical intellectual moves following the Enlightenment that serve as a cautionary tale of the

consequences of divorcing moral life from narrative-informed, traditioned practices. A church-in-

diaspora or “radical ecclesia” model is closer to the biblical communities of the Old and New

Testaments, and is thus better situated for robust Christian community and witness after Christendom.

As Hauerwas points out, such a model has built into its narrative logic “the virtues of patience and

hope,” which “are necessary to be a people who must learn to 'live out of control.'” 36 To live out of

36 Stanley Hauerwas. “The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by JohnBerkman and Michael G. Cartwright. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 380.




control in the dispersed communities of the body of Christ is to resist the urges to Constantinianism and

cultivate in us “the sense that we must assume God will use our faithfulness to make his kingdom a

reality in the world.” 37

Conclusion: Tactics, Pedagogy, and Vocation

The approach that I have taken in this paper is itself a kind of looping exercise. By starting with my

capstone integration project and the related developments in my process of ministerial discernment –

sensing in that a call to the vocation of educator – I stepped into a reading of the state of affairs in

American higher education. Stepping further back, I summarized intellectual developments in the

Enlightenment which made such conditions possible in higher education, namely the quixotic quest for

universal rationality and its cleaving of morality from the particularities and contingencies of narrative,

practices, and virtues in traditioned communities. Next I identified the church in Christendom's

complacency with such developments and offered a Yoderian rejoinder, a re-imagining of the church as

radical ecclesia, living out of control and trusting in God amidst the crumbling of Christendom and the

hegemony of global hyper-capitalism. In the process of articulating this alternative vision for church

today, we employed Yoder's innovative canonical-directional biblical hermeneutic to loop back to New

Testament communities, themselves looping back to Jewish experience and Scripture as the People of

God.

In conclusion, I bring the looping exercise back to the start: to the capstone integration project

and the work I have included in it. As a student in the academic track, a lot of that work has been

intellectual, and we have just seen what I attempted to do with that work. The other projects are or have

been pedagogical in nature. I have taught and am teaching conflict transformation in two drastically

different contexts: One a charismatic, Anabaptist Bible college in Ethiopia where I was encouraged to

37 Ibid., 381.




mix biblical theology and conflict transformation every day of class. Indeed, my credibility as a teacher

would have been compromised had I not taken such an approach. The other in an American liberal arts

college with loose, historical connections with the Church of the Brethren, whose dominant intellectual

ethos can now be safely described as “secular.”

In some ways, despite all the cultural and linguistic challenges of teaching in Ethiopia, I

actually felt more “at home” there while teaching and being in community with my students, because

we were speaking, primarily, the Christian language. We prayed before every class session, and in my

teaching I spoke theologically while doing a fair amount of “translation” work from the peacebuilding

education which I received at CJP. The case studies we used in class were almost entirely taken from

ministerial contexts of the student-ministers. I find in my current role, I have to “smuggle in” some of

the insights explored above. Not theology, mind you, which is verboten , but MacIntyrian virtue theory

and Augustinian anthropology that sees humans as “Desiring, Imaginative Animals,” to borrow Jamie

Smith's phrase .38 Even these are incursions I have imposed into conflict transformation, because they

were not part of the curriculum at CJP, though I think both have a lot to offer. Indeed, the narrative

aspects of virtue theory would resonate strongly at CJP, and Smith's work on philosophical-theological

anthropology acknowledges and comports well with some recent developments in neuroscience, which

were picked up in EMU's large conference on Attachment Theory last year.

So while I miss being more “fully Christian” in my role as teacher in Ethiopia, I think there are

some tactical ways that Christian education in the locus of radical ecclesia can happen in a North

American context, and it is my hope that the #Occupy Empire conference can be a place to exchange

ideas for how this might be done. A number of our speakers have been involved in alternative forms of

theological education which might be compelling sites for this kind of formation in Christian character.

Chris Haw, co-author with Shane Claiborne of Jesus for President , is a presenter and both he and

38 The title to Part I of Smith, Desiring the Kingdom , 37.




Claiborne are involved with The Alternative Seminary in Philadelphia. 39 Chris also lives in an

intentional community in Camden, New Jersey. Our preacher for the conference, Isaac Villegas, in

addition to his pastoring Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, teaches theology in the prison system

through Project TURN. 40 Janna Hunter-Bowman has done extensive human rights advocacy work in

South America and is now in the peace studies and theology PhD program at Notre Dame. As a co-

organizer for this conference, I have been treating the process with ministerial intentionality, with the

sensibilities explored above as an intellectual backdrop, put into service for a conference which will

hopefully equip and inspire emerging leadership in the church to faithful engagement and public

witness as the body of Christ in the world. Where this leads us after graduation? I continue to

prayerfully discern this question with my wife, this and other bodies of disciple communities of Jesus,

trusting that by the Holy Spirit, God will continue to inspire, comfort, guide, and correct.

39 Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals . Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan,2008; The Alternative Seminary. http://www.alternativeseminary.net/ (accessed February 27, 2012).

40 “Turn.” New Monasticism. http://www.newmonasticism.org/turn.php (accessed February 27, 2012).

http://www.alternativeseminary.net/


http://www.newmonasticism.org/turn.php







Works citedBourne, Richard. Seek the Peace of the City: Christian Political Criticism as Public, Realist, and Transformative . Eugene,

OR: Cascade Books, 2009.Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church . Grand Rapids, Mich.:

Eerdmans, 2011.

Coles, Romand. "The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: 'Outsiders' And The 'Otherness of the Church'." ModernTheology 18, no. 3 (2002): 305-31.Freitas, Donna. Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses .

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Harvey, Barry. Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World , Christian Mission and Modern Culture.

Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999.Hauerwas, Stanley. The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright. Durham N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2001.MacIntyre, Alasdair . After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory . 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,

1984.McClendon, James William. Systematic Theology . 3 vols. Vol. 2, Doctrine. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.

Nugent, John C. The Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God , TheopoliticalVisions. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011.

Smith, James K.A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation . Vol. 1, Cultural Liturgies. GrandRapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009.

Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning . Edited by David I. Smith and James K.A. Smith. GrandRapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011.

Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel . Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,1984.

Additional bibliographyCavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict . New York:

Oxford University Press, 2009. Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversations with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas . Edited by Samuel Wells and

Mark Thiessen Nation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.Fish, Stanley Eugene . The Trouble with Principle . 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2001.Hauerwas, Stanley, and Romand Coles. Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a

Radical Democrat and a Christian . Theopolitical Visions. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008.Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age . Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.Taylor, Charles. "How to Define Secularism." In Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy . New York

University School of Law, 2010.Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries . Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

wringing out saturated selves: christian education in a secular age

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