our workshop, his workmanship

The reverberation of hip-hop rhythms through pop culture has lent a fresh relevance to various “spoken word” genres of writing and performing. Poetry slams have become a fixture of the cultural scene in cities like Flagstaff and Corpus Christi as well as New York and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, even in the face of a national love affair with standardized testing, creative writing still has its defenders. Believing that young people will learn literate practices when those practices are in the service of their own purposes, these educators favor workshops over worksheets.

A handful of organizations squat at the intersection of these two cultural streams: they aim to cultivate youth literacy by initiating teenagers into the craft of slamming. Some of them simply run slams and invite young people to participate. Others want to midwife new poets into being, so their goal is to bring “free, safe and uncensored” writing workshops to young people.

“Free, safe and uncensored” turns out to be quite a trick.

PSPC Fall Retreat 2005

The Way of Our Flesh

The Gospel is addressed not only to individuals, but also to the communities to which these individuals belong, because these individuals are what they are largely because of their life in their communities. Communities have a corporate identity. They can think and act together. If you take an individual right out of his community he becomes a different person.

Lesslie Newbigin, British missionary to India

In 1970 or thereabouts, Newbigin was invited to join a group of clergy in the Church of South India, and teach them from the Scriptures before the serving of Communion at their monthly worship services.  These talks were collected into a book, The Good Shepherd (Oxford: Mowbray, 1977), where I read the comment quoted above.  As it happens, Newbigin was talking about the Christian mission to industry in the city of Madras, but his words would have been equally at home in the middle of Park Slope Presbyterian’s first retreat.  This past fall, a few dozen of us gathered to sing songs, eat and drink, taste wines and pick apples, in the hope that God would be molding PSPC’s corporate identity as we thought and acted together.

The Fourth Vow

Do you promise to support the church in its worship and work to the best of your ability?

Thinking about transsexuality

Back in April, I read a piece from the McSweeney's periodical, The Believer, called “Transmissions from Camp Trans,” by Michelle Tea.  The reader may already be familiar with situations where men-stay-out spaces don't know what to do with trans women.  This is one of them.

Struggling with Homosexuality

This started with a posting in the “Christian Citizen” forum at my church’s old website, in the midst of a discussion on same-sex unions. The writer, whose tag was Isaiah56, was criticizing those of us who had been discussing the issue for revealing an ignorance about (amounting to hostility towards) queerness:

….there are people steeped in conservative Christian culture who are willing to acquaint themselves with both these Biblical issues and “gay/lesbian issues,” and your church should do the same. (Until you do, you should clearly state every week in your church bulletin that you do not accept gays and lesbians as members, so that gay Christians and those who respect and support them can be warned to go elsewhere.) [Isaiah56]

Of course, I had to noodle on that one for a while.

here there be dragons

Some reflections on my community group – the “cell” group or whatever of people from my church.