Marilynne Robinson on Community and Imagination: Applications for Contemporary Catholicism

In her new book When I Was a Child I Read Books (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  Marilynne Robinson sees the basis of community as "imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly." And so she thinks that when the definition of community hardens, contracts, and becomes violently exclusive and defensive, tragedy results both for those against whom the edge of such definitions are turned, and for those developing such exclusive and weaponlike definitions of community.

As Institutional Church Cracks Open and Tumbles Down, New Life Rises in the Cracks

And as formal structures of church life appear to be dying in many places around the world, while spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst remain keen among those for whom churches no longer seem capable of feeding that hunger and slaking that thirst, Diana Butler Bass points to tender blades of new life springing up in the cracks of tottering and collapsing church institutions:

Easter Greetings: Hope, Resurrection, and Kindness

And so this, quite simply, was Steve's and my Holy Saturday celebration: before starting on our trip back home after our Good Friday meeting with my publisher and visit to the Crystal Bridges art museum, we go to Einstein Bros. Bagels for coffee and bagels.  My cousin Bill, who is collaborating with me on the book, comes along with us, as does his mother, a remarkable, spry, full-of-vim senior lady approaching 90.

Good Friday Message of USCCB: Attacking Gays More Important Than Helping Poor Immigrants

And on that tragic erosion of the significance of core Christian affirmations by a parochial, defensive, tribalistic Catholicism that is losing sight of what is key and central in the Christian message (I just wrote about this a moment ago): what to do with this hot mess, on the Easter weekend?: 

Reflections During the Sacred Triduum: Marilynne Robinson and the Central Narrative of Scripture as Wondrous Love

I'm also reading Marilynne Robinson's new book When I Was a Child I Read Books (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) these days, and am struck by a number of things that, to my way of thinking, have important significance for anyone trying to retrieve and celebrate the essential meaning of core Christian symbols at this point in American history.  First, Robinson is clear-eyed about the extreme damage many groups of Christians in the U.S. are now doing to the core symbols of Christian faith.  She minces no words about how the distortion of key affirmations of traditional Christian faith by ill-educated zealots who have little connection to what's central in Christian history and belief is tragically betraying the meaning of Christianity for large numbers of Americans today.  

Good Friday Reflections: A Visit to an Art Museum

I've been a bit distracted the past several days, since I had a lecture to give Thursday, and a meeting with the publisher of my forthcoming book yesterday.  The meeting went very well (the lecture seemed to do so, too), and it's definitely a relief to know that the publisher likes the work I've done, since I was anxious that he'd be horrified by a manuscript that I feared might appear blowzy and diffuse, after I printed the whole galumphing thing out.

More Adrienne Rich: We All Lose When We Force Others into Boxes

And there's this: here's an excerpt discussing Adrienne Rich's work from a posting of mine on 9 December 2009: