What’s going on with me lately …
This interview at Patheos.com will catch you up …
http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Spiritual-Practices-in-an-Election-Year-A-QA-with-Brian-McLaren-Deborah-Arca-04-26-201
Here’s an excerpt:
There is a great interview with you and singer/songwriter David Wilcox at last summer’s Wild Goose Festival where he asked you if your books were really a journal of your growth as a human being and Christian. Where have you been growing with your latest book projects?
The short ebooks all relate to the theme of identity—political identity, religious identity, human identity. That’s really been a focus of my reflection for the last few years. A lot of us are suffering from what I call CRIS—Conflicted Religious Identity Syndrome.
My big project for this year—really, one of the biggest if not the biggest literary project so far in my life—is a book on Christian identity in a multi-faith world, which comes out September 11 of this year. It’s Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? I’m asking questions about why religious people often seem so hostile—so willing to turn the other into the enemy, so willing to use the language of warfare, as in culture wars or jihad or crusade—to frame what they’re about.
In the book I explore four challenges I think we Christians must engage—whether we’re Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Pentecostal, conservative, liberal, modern, postmodern, whatever. There’s the historical challenge—coming to terms with the dark sides of our Christian history, and especially the colonial and imperial tendencies in our history. Then there’s the doctrinal challenge—not just what we believe, by how we hold those beliefs and how we use them in relation to others. Then there’s the liturgical challenge—because liturgy, I’m convinced, is a major dimension of identity formation. And finally there’s the missional challenge—how we translate our faith into constructive, creative action in the world.