Faith in Context

Seventh-day Adventist Church Refuses Ordination to Women

By Loren Seibold

The latest conservative denomination to deny women ordination is the Seventh-day Adventist church, a denomination whose single most significant shaping force was its 19th-century prophetess and co-founder, Ellen Gould Harmon White. 

White's role in the church might have suggested that women's spiritual leadership would be welcome. But that assumption wasn't tested until the push to strengthen women's rights in the 1960s and 70s. In the 1985 meeting of the quinquennial world convention, delegates voted to allow female pastors to work under a limited "commissioned minister" license, and congregations to ordain female lay elders. The decision was welcome in many parts of the American, European, and Australian church but sat uncomfortably with others, sparking three decades of campaigning against any further moves in that direction. 

Delegates in 2010 requested a Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) with the hope of settling the question. Impetus was provided by a few smaller judicatories in the United States and Europe that pushed ahead with granting full ordination to the women ministers in their territory. The TOSC convened in 2013. Though the result of that committee's work was encouraging about the possibility of women's ordination in those parts of the world church that wanted it, a motion was presented at the 2015 meeting of the world church without the recommendation from the TOSC.

Three things worked against its passage. 

1. 

   Ted N.C. Wilson
   The shifting of the church to the global south. About three quarters of church membership is now from cultures with traditional roles for women, like Latin America, Africa and southern Asia. 
2. The selection of Ted N.C. Wilson as church president. Wilson, though a North American, won the loyalty of the conservative delegates by promising to fight against the liberalization that many feared was happening in the American church. Wilson is a skilled politician with an authoritarian style, which he used to good effect against the women's ordination movement. 
3. A new theology of male headship. Opponents made a Biblical case for male leadership while also succeeding in grouping women's ordination with homosexuality, which frightened many in the aging demographic of the church.

On July 8, 2015, at the world conference in San Antonio, TX, the motion to allow large geographical regions (divisions) to decide for themselves about women's ordination was defeated 60% to 40%. (To the disappointment of many, who hoped this vote was a referendum on all female church leadership, female commissioned ministers and female lay elders were not eliminated: the motion was confined to the question of whether divisions could grant full ordination to women in their territory.)

The denomination has tried hard to maintain uniformity in both theology and polity throughout its approximately 175-year history. In the latest session much was made of an 1875 statement by Ellen White (ironically) that the General Conference session is the highest authority of God on earth, meaning that the July 8 vote was an ex cathedra decision binding all parts of the church.

Yet some of the judicatories that had already begun ordaining women have said they'll continue to do so, in defiance of the session vote. Which leads most observers to conclude that the question is far from settled.  

 

 

 

 

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Is "Spiritual But Not Religious" Real?

By Monte Sahlin

Nancy Ammerman's new book, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes is excellent. I recommend that you read it! One interesting question she raises is about the category that is currently getting a lot of attention, the people who say, "I am interested in spiritual things, but I am not interested in religion." So much study is currently focused on this category that it now has a label among scholars and professional research writers: SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious)

Dr. Ammerman calls SBNR a "unicorn," a species that does not exist in real life. Closer examination, she reports, finds that the people in her surveys who were "most active in organized religion, were also most committed to spiritual practices and a spiritual view of the world." She suggests that the SBNR thing is simply a device for people to tell their zealous friends to back off and leave them alone on topics related to values, spirituality and religion.

A reviewer in the Feb. 4 issue of Christian Century makes the observation that SBNR may be a media invention. "Dominant U.S. media don't seem to know how to talk about religious congregations" or spiritual life in general, so "lacking such capacity" they pretend that places exist that are not there in reality, observes Anthony Robinson, a UCC pastor.

Unlike Ammerman and Robinson, it seems, I have met a lot of people who are SBNR. Once they trust you as a friend, they are more than happy to talk about both religion and spiritual life. They express concerns, beliefs, emotional connections with the Divine; they pray, express spiritual sentiments and ask religious questions. They are turned off or simply unimpressed by the usual round of things we religious people do to express our faith both in the context of congregations and in our private lives.

Let's be honest, a lot of what we do is tradition and ritual, and not all that vital or vibrant even to those of us who enjoy it. To make faith real requires a level of creativity and authenticity that we are usually not willing to invest in. It breaks through at funerals, weddings and similar very important occasions, and sometimes even unexpectedly, but it is almost impossible to sustain daily or weekly or even once a month. That is why many religions invest so much value in "revival" or "renewal" or "reformation."

The incongruous thing about the emphasis on "revival" is that often the people who talk the most about it are the largest opponents to real change. We want the benefits of an edgy, powerful relationship with God while keeping it safely under control and limits. That is the real unicorn! I got news for you; there is no such animal. Either your experience with God is risky and upsetting, turning over things you would like to cling to, or it is boring and meaningless ritual that most of the people around you will not see a reason to give particular respect, time or energy.

SBNR is simply one aspect of being people real about organized religion. We want the riches without paying the price. We are just a little bit cheap and fraudulent, but we want people to treat it as if it were the wonder of the universe. Get real .... one way or another.

Lennon the Prophet

by Loren Seibold

I am still astonished when I recall the instant appeal that the Beatles had to my friends and me. I was in the third grade, and had only heard the song once or twice—popular music was switched off by my conservative Christian parents—yet I remember singing and miming “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” with my cousins as though the song belonged to us. This despite being too young to really understand what it meant, and knowing how much our parents disapproved of everything it represented.

Today the music is uncontroversial—quaint, even. We’ve mostly forgotten how threatening the Beatles were to Christians back then. The screaming girls and long hair were alarming enough. But John Lennon clinched the animosity in an interview in the London Evening Standard:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first—rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

Lennon claimed to have been misunderstood, and apologized, sort of: “I'm all for Christ, I'm very big on Christ,” he said. “I've always fancied him. He was right. As he said in his book, 'you'll get knocked if you follow my ways.'" But in the United States the statement had already triggered pickets, boycotts, record burnings and concert cancellations. The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles album to a cross.

It left good children like me racked between my love for Jesus and the strong draw of the new popular culture. I didn’t want to use drugs or be promiscuous. But how appealing the fashions, sounds and energy!—especially over against the stern, fearful world of apocalyptic Christianity in which I grew up.

Nearly 50 years on, what Lennon said still sounds a prophetic note about the conflict between religion and culture: religion, with its bulky-foundationed authority claims, against creativity and change. Lennon was arrogant, to be sure, this freshly-crowned pope of the young, but he was also right. Today Christianity in his home country is nearly dead, and in the rest of the Western world it is declining. Lennon described the feelings millions of today's spiritual-but-not-religious when he said that Christ was admirable, an agent of peace and love, but that his “thick and ordinary" followers ruined it by twisting His message into something supportive of opulent cathedrals, exclusive hierarchies, and a selfishly-selective Biblical message.

“More popular than Jesus” didn't last: the Beatles, as significant as they were, were subject to the same diminishment that happens to all who float in a stream of rapid change. Change, after all, is a movement, not a state. How can prophets compete with gods, the symbols of immortality, or even with their human agents? Lennon seemed to understand, at least for a time, that he was a spiritual figure, pursuing religious experience and even affecting a Jesusine appearance. He placed his considerable influence on the side of peace and freedom, as had Jesus, and (as he’d noted about Jesus) was opposed for it. (It wasn't a coincidence that he chose to describe his situation,  "The way things are going/ They’re gonna crucify me.") The dominant culture was correct that a new kind of libertinism followed in the wake of Lennon and his peers. But like all power structures in all ages, they had (and have) enough sins of their own. Years later Lennon noted in passing that his saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus had “upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan"—not to mention religious hypocrites and warmongers of all sorts.

In the end he was killed not by the powerful for the sake of truth, but by one mentally ill stranger. By that time Lennon's identity as a spiritual figure had diminished. The world remembered, but had moved on. Lennon and his wife had themselves become part of the cultural elite, even while embittered against his former friends over (what else?) money.

It is, at least, a lesson in the timing of martyrdom.

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Will the Last Person to Leave the Cathedral Please Turn Out the Lights?

by Loren Seibold

Last week my brother and I attended morning mass at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist in Brecon, the seat of the bishop of Swansea and Brecon in the Church in Wales. For those of us with a taste for such things, the service was lovely, not to mention extravagant by the standards of most churches: choir, pipe organ, incense and three priests in posh frocks. It's hard to beat the grandeur (and the acoustics) of a cathedral built in 1538. 

My observations probably won't surprise you if you know anything at all about Christianity in the UK. In this massive edifice were seated perhaps 30 worshipers, all of them elderly. From an announcement sheet in the missalette it appears the church has other ministries, such as a food distribution center. Yet that doesn't translate into participation in weekly worship. What the priests and musicians were doing was beautiful, historical, venerable, but apparently not especially winsome to the people of Brecon. 

It's hard to measure religious faith, because what people say they believe differs from what they do about it, and notably from what they say they do about it. UK church attendance estimates ("regular attendance" is usually considered once a month) range between 6% and 10%, depending upon whether you're talking about Christians or C of E members. Earlier this year a C of E press release claimed that a mere .3%  drop from 2012 translated into the guardedly good news that weekly attendance might have hit bottom. Just remember that that bottom is 1.1 million out of 56 million Britons—about 2%. As The Guardian's Andrew Brown says the graphs "look like the cool-down portion of a bicycle ride – the precipitous and frightening descent is over, and now there is just a gentle slightly downward path." He adds, "There isn't really a large portion of hope in the age profile and there is nothing in the figures to supply a cheerful story."

Though I appreciated the worship service, I admit I've never felt so keenly the out-of-touchness of organized religious worship as while watching three men in gold brocade dresses read 500-year-old prayers in Oxbridge accents to a mere handful of grayheads. Yet I'm reluctant to blame it on ritual. People in the UK still turn to churches in large numbers for some very ritualized services: weddings, christenings, funerals. Christmas and Easter attendance is up, too. It might even be that ritual is the best thing the Anglican church has going for it. Just don't expect people to sit through it more than a couple of times a year. 

The preacher in the Brecon Cathedral that morning (who in person bore a passing resemblance to Martin Clunes) blamed a great deal on Richard Dawkins' and his ilk for their arrogant opposition of religion. What crossed my mind was one of one of the most famous ripostes in British history, by prostitute Mandy Rice-Davies when the prosecutor in the Profumo scandal told her Lord Astor denied having even met her: "He would, wouldn't he?" It may not have been a profound sermon, but it was an honestly defensive one: we would say it's someone else's fault, wouldn't we?

This is the cross that we Christians are currently crucifying ourselves on, throughout the cultures that brought Christianity to the world. The system we've capitalized for two millennia fewer and fewer people value. We've too many big buildings, offices, titles, rituals, books, doctrines and degrees to admit easily the irrelevance of what we're doing with them. We know we're losing our audience, yet are at a loss to know how to respond. Andrew Brown says that the question is "whether things are going to change, or whether the church will pootle along, like an exhausted cyclist, until it finally wobbles over and collapses."

American Christianity, freighted by less history and more experienced in business building, has tried to be relevant. Yet successful empire builders like Osteen, Hybels, Warren, and Jakes raise just as many questions of authenticity to the message of Jesus as do the old cathedral denominations. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt instead of a cassock and surplice, building an auditorium instead of a cathedral, having one rich and famous pastor instead of an entire curia, doesn't excuse one from questions of how wealth, power, heirarchy and recognition fit with the message of Jesus. 

Or maybe relevance—that so, so American ideal—isn't even what we should be worrying about. All I know is that there's still spiritual interest out there. Are we in the the church able to help people make something good, truthful and life-affirming of that interest? Or are we too busy being the church?

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Bergman's Winter Light, and the Spiritual Power of Art

By Loren Seibold

A few nights ago while watching TV I happened on to Ingmar Bergman's film Winter Light (thanks, TCM). It's hard to use the word "enjoy" to describe watching a Bergman movie: if there is any joy, it is too subtle for me to detect. It is more like a dose of dark-tasting medicine for the soul.

The central character of Winter Light is Tomas, a Lutheran priest who, because of his wife's untimely death, has lost his faith in God. As the movie opens he is physically ill, morally compromised, and selfishly depressed. His crisis of faith infects those around him: his lover, Märta, an agnostic schoolteacher who adores him but for whom he has only contempt; and Jonas, a fisherman who comes to him for comfort and then commits suicide when the pastor offers him nothing but his own hopelessness. The shocking denoument after all this sadness (made more intense by Bergman's bleak, claustrophobic style) is Tomas standing before an empty church leading worship, at which point you wonder if it is the most cynical thing a man has ever done, or the bravest; whether the gospel is enervated by the man, or whether it is a moment of triumph for word and sacrament in spite of him, or even, oddly, through him.

For any thoughtful, conscientious pastor, watching Winter Light should be painful. Each of us has enough doubts of our own that Tomas is a sympathetic figure. Laypeople want pastors to be role models, while we are painfully aware of our own feet of clay. Tomas makes us question not only the depth and consistency of our faith, but how often we commit malpractice, as Tomas does with Jonas, by our self-absorption. 

* * * * *

A second blessing from Winter Light was an exquisite piece about it that I found, by novelist and memoirist Tobias Wolff. Wolff tells how as a young man he went to see Winter Light at an Oxford church with Rob, a secular and somewhat jaded friend.

"When the movie ended, we all sat there as if stunned. I used the word 'harrowing.' Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface. The minister returned to the front of the church. In his frank, conversational way, he described his understanding of the movie—humanity in peril, lonely, afraid, as we seek power and find only more fear and loneliness, hiding from one another and from what we really want and what would give us true strength and friendship and new life, and yet here it is, all the while, knocking on our door—

"Now the minister motioned to the projectionist, and an image of Jesus holding a lantern filled the screen. I had seen it before, in the Keble College chapel: William Holman Hunt’s painting 'The Light of the World.'

"Let me say that up to that moment I’d been listening, really listening, attentive as the fisherman for an answer to the bleakness of our situation. And this minister was no Tomas: he was clear and confident, he knew he had that answer, and I’d begun to feel a sense of grudging assent—not surrender but the first stirrings—when that picture appeared. And then I lost it.

"Because I really disliked that painting....I turned to Rob. 'Let’s get a pint.' But Rob was intent on this very image. Rapt. He barely glanced at me. 'You go on.' That night—to some extent, that picture—changed his life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa. The same night sent me in the opposite direction, at least for a time. ...

"And what drew me back, some time later, toward the possibility of faith? Poetry. George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot. One night, I was reading the last lines of 'Little Gidding' to a friend, my voice thick with emotion, and when I looked up he was staring at me with kindly amusement. 'So,' he said. 'You really like that stuff?'

Wolff concludes, "We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives."

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What We Believe and What We Feel

by Loren Seibold

I depart today from the usual concerns of this blog to comment on a matter of faith, but this time in a very personal context. Last Thursday Norma Sahlin, the wife and partner of my friend and fellow FiC blogger Monte Sahlin, died. There is nothing more we can do for Norma, except remember her fondly. Monte, in all ways a good and gentle man, is grieving. 

Nearly every religion says that death is not the end. In the Abrahamic religions we picture another life beyond this one, marginally like this one but immeasurably better. In the non-theistic religions each life gets somehow folded back into a collective consciousness. In yet other cultures, the ancestors remain, watching and advising. But few in human history have let themselves believe that death is final. Somehow, we insist, it must continue. 

Yet it is a belief honored more in breach than observance. What we believe, we don't necessarily feel. I have never attended a funeral without tears. And I hope I never shall. Religions mistake when they speak as though this life means nothing, as though it is but an anteroom to… we're not quite sure what. If it is so insignificant, then why do we want so desperately for it to continue? Why do we mourn its end? That Christ stepped down into this life honored it, made it important, perhaps more important than heaven and the hereafter. 

Even Paul (himself treading right on the edge of trying to dry tears with a postulate) admits that we must grieve, but hopes that perhaps rumor of a resurrection—a possibility with little empirical evidence—will temper our grief. But not in the moment. Rarely in the moment. The promises of our faith explain, but only after the tears are gone. And even then, even as we intone, "I believe in the resurrection from the dead, and life everlasting," it sometimes seems as though we're trying to convince ourselves by speaking it in chorus. Will it really happen? Can it? 

I suspect this is why so many words of comfort are so discomforting, even if true. It is why those of us who attend people at times of loss learn (if we are at all wise) not to explain, not to diminish grief with easy words. There are no easy answers. Even the promise of the resurrection is (in the dark moment) too easy an answer. The best we can do is for those of us who still have traction on this narrow place where we plant our feet, to reach out a hand to those who have, for the moment, lost it.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe God reaches with no hands but ours.

I leave you with this anything-but-easy confession from C.S. Lewis, upon the death of his wife, Joy.

"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

"I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

"Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

"Our elders submitted and said, 'Thy will be done.' How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love — yes, in every sense, an act — put on to hide the operation?

"Of course it's easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent — non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it frankly, we don't ask for Him?"

 

Why Do They Hate Us?

Memories of what happened ten years ago bring me back to the haunting question of the time. It still remains largely a mystery. Why do some people have such hate for those who believe differently that they think God has authorized them to kill?

This is not a Muslim problem, despite the slander believed by some. Christian fundamentalists bombed the Federal courthouse in Oklahoma City before Muslim fundamentalists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In fact, it seems most religions have a very small percentage of people who are insanely, violently zealous. There are Christians willing to kill people they disagree with over abortion despite the fact that Jesus clearly taught us to "turn the other cheek" and not resist evil with evil.

Ultimately this kind of hate does not come from God. It is not about piety or devotion in any religion. It is rooted in evil. It is a marker of all the God is against. There is a word for this in all religions; sin. Anyone who thinks they can rid the world of sin by resorting to violence or injustice is overcome by the very thing they are supposedly fighting against. It is like the old folk tale of the tar baby. The more you hit it, the more you are stuck in it.

The only thing that is victorious over sin is divine love. God chooses to struggle against sin by extending mercy, forgiveness and grace because He is wise enough to know there is no other way to actually overcome sin. Hate and terrorism ends when I decide to quit hating those with whom I disagree on the most profound topics, the most cherished truths.

Why do they hate us? Because we hate them. The only thing that disconnects this vicious cycle is when we choose to join God's side and love the hater. That takes far more courage, a far more fearless moral stand than anything else. The Son of God gave His life to demonstrate this reality.

Will Selfishness Sink Us?

One of the basic purpose of Christian faith is to encourage people to be less self-centered, despite the fact that this is often degraded or deformed. That appears to be especially needed right now as America attempts to work its way out of the financial hole it has slid into. Much of the negative reaction to plans to bail out the banks, the auto industry, people having their mortgages foreclosed, etc., revolves around the fundamental notion, "Why should they get some of my tax money?"

This is a selfish motivation and under the circumstances it could destroy us all. All of the references to "your tax money" and "my tax money" are fundamentally dishonest. Tax money (no matter if it is too high or too low) belongs to the country, not to me or you. If you live here, you have an obligation to help pay for the legitimate cost of being a nation or community. Americans actually pay lower taxes than almost all industrialized nations. We consume far more than our fair share of every resource on the planet, even when the comparison is based on share of wealth instead of population or other bases.

Greed and selfishness has got America into the predicament it is in and if selfish continues to guide our attempts to work our way out of it, we will fail! Unless preachers, devotional authors, religious teachers,theologians and other religious leaders focus in on this reality right now and push their people away from selfish attitudes, they contribute to this potential failure. In the 1930s many preachers pointed out that the Depression was a kind of "punishment" for the excesses and vices of the 1920s. It is time for the same kind of prophetic voice to be raised for the good of America.

Do Evangelical pastors have the spiritual grounding and prophetic vision to raise the needed prophetic voice? Or, have they been bought off by the system? Have they given in to the self-centered values that motivate both conservatives and liberals in America today? Is God allowing America to suffer because His people have so completely drunk of the wine of greed and narcissism that they are no longer able to discern truly Christian ethics?

Thanks Be to God

Most of the world would agree that Americans have much to celebrate on Thanksgiving Day. It is a uniquely American holiday that we share only with Canada, where it is celebrated in September.  Yet, various surveys show that most Americans feel down this year. Although we are the richest nation on the globe, most Americans are going to hold back on Christmas gifts because we have contrived a situation where only a few share so fully in the wealth that they feel they can ignore the manipulative and dishonest practices in home mortgages, the decline in cheap gasoline, the inefficient and unnecessarily profitable health insurance industry, and the widespread irresponsibility of employers. We are bogged down in wars we cannot win in Iraq, on our border with Mexico and on drug abuse. We are caught in destructive, polarizing politics where leaders are more interested in manipulating their opponents so they can "win" than in negotiating wise policies for the future of our country.

Americans are not happy this holiday because of the deep sense of loss they feel deep down inside; the loss of a time in which compassion was more widely practiced, there were at least a few leaders with integrity who managed to keep the herd of politicians in hand, most businesses could be trusted to provide decent products and services, and people had more faith in both God and one another. Today most Americans feel they are simply fodder for the manipulation mill of the government and prey for the large corporations with no morals, no patriotism and a deadly robotic focus on immediate profits.

What is there to celebrate? Unlike Darfur, it is not likely that a crowd of men will come this evening and kill us. Unlike Baghdad, it not likely that a bomb will go off in the crowded stores tomorrow. Unlike Burma, the police will not intervene when large numbers assemble to worship God this coming weekend. Unlike Argentina, there are plenty of jobs available. Unlike France, the transportation industry is not on strike, just the people who write the trash they offer up on most television channels (perhaps itself a cause for giving thanks). Americans are a lot better off than they feel, but they are haunted by how is once was.

In the end the real reason for gratefulness is not about economics or politics, it is about a God who gave His life that we might have hope and His promise to remake the world in His image. "It's all about you, Jesus." The God who still loves us no matter how down it gets, no matter who much politicians lie to us and manipulate us, no matter how much gasoline costs, no matter how many employers cancel the health benefits they promised, no matter if we have a parent in the hospital dying of cancer or a son in Iraq laying his life on the line, no matter what, God is with us and will bring us through. That is the real reason to raise the Thanksgiving hymn and feast in the name of our God!

Sabbath & Jubilee Theme: New Books

There continues to be a surprising number of new books on the Sabbath from Christian writers. Four caught my eye recently:

Sabbath: The Gift of Rest by Lynne Baab is one of the LifeGuide small group Bible study guides from InterVarsity Press. Includes materials for eight sessions, focusing on the Genesis, Exodus and Isaiah 58 texts in the Old Testament and threads of gift, value of humanity, social justice and grace from the New Testament. Quotes virtually everyone who has written about the qualitative elements of the Sabbath, including Celeste Perrino Walker, Making Sabbath Special (Pacific Press).

Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline by Lauren Winner (Paraclete Press) is actually out this year in paperback. Somehow I missed the original hard cover edition in 2003. The author grew up Jewish and began a Christian as a young adult and the purpose of this book is to recover as much as possible of the Jewish roots of Christian faith into contemporary practice. It starts with Sabbath as the cornerstone and builds a whole life pattern. I highly recommend this project and the book!

Sabbath Presence by Kathleen Casey is from a Catholic publisher (Ave Maria Press) and the author begins with her Catholic faith, but focuses on how the Sabbath is a spiritual discipline that orders all of our days, our entire life, toward our relationship with God. The 13 chapters include scripture, meditative questions and activities that can be used in a group setting or individually.

Sabbath and Jubilee by Richard Lowery (Chalice Press) has been out since 2000, but I found it only recently. This is more theological and less focused on spirituality like the others. The author attempts to make a strong connection between the Sabbath, the "Jubilee system" also laid out in the Old Testament and 21st century social problems. Unfortunately, he allows modern, critical Bible scholarship to so dismantle the key texts that he actually weakens his case. (He cites Bacchiochi as one of the four most important scholarly books on the Sabbath.)

What is interesting to me is that all of these books entirely ignore the issue of which day of the week actually is the Sabbath. Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish theologian that they all quote, would, of course argue that a "pick any day that is convenient to you" approach undercuts the entire concept and makes the exercise meaningless; a "temple in time" is about time, not just practices. A number of Christian theologians would agree. But the publishers are to be commended for these excellent volumes despite the fact that they wish to avoid this fundamental controversy.

If you are interested, all of these can be found at www.powells.com as well as other online booksellers.