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Here are a couple of passages from Miroslav Volf’s Against the Tide, along with my comments:
1. Page 110: We need to resist the temptation to “package” religious wisdom in attractive and digestable “nuggets” that a person can take up and insert into some doomed project of striving to live a merely experientially satisfying life…From a Christian perspective, sharing religious wisdom makes sense only if that wisdom is allowed to counter the multiple manifestations of human self-absorption and to connect human beings with what ultimately matters—God, whom we should love with all our being, and neighbors, whom we should love as ourselves.
I don’t see what’s so wrong about packaging religious wisdom into digestable nuggets. That’s what I like about visiting Catholic churches: they’re not overly intense. I just hear a brief homily, which has stories and a lesson about trusting in God and being kind to people, and I go home. Although I don’t read Daily Bread, it has the same sort of format: daily nuggets of inspiration about trusting in God and being nice. I’m reading a book like that right now, a daily devotional through the Book of Proverbs. It has a Scripture, a story, a lesson about the story, and a prayer—all on one page. I especially think it’s beautiful when I hear people talk about how they read Daily Bread each morning with a friend, then briefly discuss what they read. Nothing intense or over-the-top. Just good ol’ nugget Christianity!
2. Page 127: We often engaged in interpretive endeavors as self-enclosed communities at odds with one another; we interpreted scripture not just to bolster our own identity in the face of the other but also to put down the other, even to harm the other. As a Christian, I have come to consider such interpretations of scripture sinful, even when they turn out to be factually correct?
What? There are more important things than being right?
