Adventist Forum : mackenzian

September 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

What atonement means

I presented my paper on the lived experience of atonement theologies this morning.

First, I took the audience through some of the violent and Othering imagery and metaphors at the end of the Christian bible and explained, based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s research, that metaphors open up patterns of thought and interpretation as well as restrict them. Then I shared historical and contemporary examples of Adventists and Christians failing to acknowledge or intervene in the suffering of Others. (During a panel later in the day, I also offered some counter-examples: we have options!)

My host, the Association of Adventist Forums, plans to publish this morning’s talk. It was also audio recorded, and I’ll be able to share it when it’s available.

I love reading, studying, writing, and sharing my work. I also put a lot of time and effort into developing this talk and a related response to the keynote speaker.

It was hard. It was also worth it. I got to ship my work and connect with people who resonated with the material, said they felt moved by my examples, or gained a new way to think about the consequences of our beliefs and sacred texts for how we treat one another in community.

Sometimes things that are really hard to do are also really fun to do.

Thanks to the AF board and conference team for inviting me.

September 12, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Interview: Insights from an Adventist communicator

Shot from NASA's EPIC telescope: Earth hangs in space, a blue bauble on a black field. — From NASA’s EPIC Earth photo series.

Alita Byrd interviewed me on the Adventist Forum/Spectrum Magazine blog about my upcoming presentation at the 2016 Spectrum conference.

We covered quite a bit of ground: the work I do with churches, my thoughts on the denomination’s near future, as well as the recurring question about North American Adventism’s racially separated conferences.

‘For God so loved the world’ is one of the hub verses of the Christian gospels, and I wonder whether we’ve paid enough attention to ‘the world’ in that phrase. The conventional Adventist understanding of ‘atonement’ can be both ethnocentric and egocentric: focusing on the denomination’s role in this phase in human history or on me and my personal salvation. What could The World Restored teach us about the way we get to live together on this planet today? What could it teach us about our ecological responsibilities? How might it challenge our addictions to domination, bigotry, and waste?” —Keisha McKenzie

Check out the interview.

July 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Read with Spectrum: Volf’s Flourishing

Adventist Forum’s Spectrum Magazine is hosting a summer reading group again this year. Last year, we read Richard Beck’s reflections on morality, purity, and disgust in the book Unclean.

Read my article on the body and the private sphere.

This year, we turn to Miroslav Volf’s latest work, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world.

The book is Volf’s ambitious attempt to integrate reflections on the relationships between globalization and religion and ways world religions can undermine or support human development. Based on his classes at Yale Divinity School, including a course he co-taught with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Flourishing also depends on several international and multi-faith review groups that Volf invited to assess the manuscript. He gives extensive credit to his research assistants and graduate students, a move that I appreciated.

At least in the preface and introduction, whereas Volf defines and delimits religion, he does not define globalization. When he writes “globalization,” does he mean something more substantial than “international and trans-national trade”? I assume so, but in the absence of definition, the term is a cipher that readers can fill more or less as they please, whether with Blair’s modern Western liberalism, with the UN’s sustainable development tenets, or with other signifiers like “freedom, democracy, human rights, market economics, and prosperity” (p. 5). In notes, Volf does mention Joerg Rieger, who wrote the brief Globalization and Theology.

Volf tells us his colleague Linn Tonstad encouraged him to make his positioning explicit:

I could have tried to shed the particularities of my own faith and culture and to survey the landscapes of multiple religions and globalization processes impartially, as if I were a mechanical drone with no biases or interests of my own. But the ‘view from nowhere’ is impossible; drones always fly at somebody’s behest and for somebody’s interest.” —Miroslav Volf, Flourishing, p. 18

I’ll learn more as I read. I already wonder whether Volf takes too much about globalization for granted. And I don’t think he could possibly be right to exclude indigenous and non-conquering religions from his grand synthesis of the future of religions or flourishing humans: we already have enough practical theory based on the praise songs of war winners.

But we’ll see.

Update: My commentary came out the first week of August. Read with us.