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by Rev. Dr. Robert R. LaRochelle

Now that a few weeks have passed since the whirlwind visit of Pope Francis to the United States, I think it would be worthwhile to pause and explore some of its significance. However, I have to begin with a disclaimer. For the first forty five years of my life, I was a Roman Catholic. I was active in the Catholic Church and spent nine years as an ordained clergyman within it. The heart of the struggles that led me to leave Catholicism had to do with the issue of authority in the church. When you talk authority in the Catholic Church, the Pope is a pretty significant figure. If you want to look at this struggle in more detail and examine some of these ‘authority’ matters in more depth, you may want to check out my book entitled Crossing the Street (Energion, 2012). In this book, I look at the issue of authority in the church by including my own personal journey as a way of explaining it.
So, the bottom line regarding the Papal visit for me is that it was most certainly of high interest! It seems to me that this interest was shared by many in this country for a variety of reasons. I am optimistic enough to believe that deep within the human person there lies a longing for that which we would call spiritual, and Francis, because of the way he comports himself, strikes people as one who has some depth and whose priorities are in the right place. I am not the first to say that the timing of his visit in the heart of a nasty political campaign was quite the stark contrast. I want to believe that most Americans know that there is a qualitative problem with our political discourse and that Francis was here to talk about those things in life that REALLY matter.
Upon further reflection, I also considered a few things I think important enough to share with you:

1. The Pope is uniquely positioned to make an impact as a well known religious leader. No other religious group has a leader who commands the attention the Pope receives. I say this objectively. I am not contending this is good or bad theology. It simply IS a fact!
2. With the long standing dissent and the real pain that has been experienced within the Catholic community, how this particular Pope presents himself represents a certain degree of hopefulness within the Catholic Church, something that has been missing for a while. Even if church doctrines are not going to change, there is a different tone ( dubbed the ‘ Francis effect’) which has already made a difference in local Catholic churches.

The great political leader, former House Speaker Tip O’ Neill, said something once that has become rather famous. O’Neill noted about politics that ‘all politics is local.’ I would contend that, in a very real sense, such is the case with the church: Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox alike. The local parish or congregation is the body which most people associate as ‘church’. A highly charismatic Pope may increase peoples’ interest in things spiritual, but, ultimately, it is in smaller groups, i.e. local churches, where people have concrete opportunities to learn, worship and serve. Sadly, it is the church on the local level, and the leaders of the church, who have let too many people down, people searching for meaning and depth from their religious faith.
No large scale visit will render the necessary effects unless that visit has somehow inspired people to build communities of faith that are inspirational to others. These are communities where worship really strikes an internal chord, where preaching speaks to both our minds and hearts, and where people are clearly DOING FOR OTHERS!
Thus, for me, the bottom line is this: It was a great visit. It really was. Now where does the Christian church, and I don’t just mean Roman Catholic, go from here?
I would invite your comments…

by Bruce Epperly

When you mention process theology, often peoples’ eyes glaze over. As one person noted in a Facebook comment, “I’ve read a little Whitehead, and couldn’t really grasp the language.” A pastor I know preaches a yearly process theology sermon. The congregants comment to the pastor as they shake hands at the end of the service, “That was really a heavy sermon, pastor. You really gave us something to think about.” But, out in the parking lot, I’ve been told, they shake their heads and note, “I really didn’t understand a word he said….What was his point?”
The language of process theology and philosophy is unique and often difficult, and off-putting to the layperson and educated pastor. That’s one of the reasons I took up the challenge of writing a 40 page introduction, Process Theology: Embracing Adventure with God, as part of Energion’s “Topical Line Drives” Series. I had written a longer introduction, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed, but I wanted something that a layperson could pick up, read for a couple hours, and get the heart of process theology.
I believe that process theology is too important to be left to the academics. I believe that progressive and mainstream Christians need accessible theologies that illuminate what it means to be a Christian in today’s pluralistic, postmodern, and rapidly change time. We need theologies that can inspire world loyalty, care for the earth, hospitality, and congregational vitality.
I have been living and breathing process theology for over forty years, first as an undergraduate and graduate student, and then as a professor and working pastor and university chaplain. I believe that process thought can be translated in ways that inspire personal and congregational transformation and address the questions of those for whom paternalistic, rule-oriented, and hell-fire and brimstone images of God no longer work. Process theology can speak to church people, providing new horizons for understanding God, and also to the growing “spiritual but not religious” community.
Progressive in spirit, process theology can be described by a number of life-changing affirmations:

• The world is a dynamic, forward moving process.
• Reality is relational. All things are interdependent.
• Experience is universal, though variable, and extends beyond humankind.
• The universality of experience leads to the recognition that every creature is inherently valuable and deserves moral consideration.
• Freedom and creativity are essential to reality.
• God is the primary example of the dynamic, process-relational nature of reality.  
• The future is open-ended and we have a role in shaping the future, for good or ill. God is not aloof from history, but is acting within history, shaping and being shaped by history.

The concept of God is the most challenging of process theology’s contributions to Christian theology. Here again, let me share some affirmations about God’s relationship with the world:

• God’s power is relational, not domineering or unilateral. God works within the world, shaping the world, and God acts in relationship to the freedom of God’s creatures.
• God aims at a world with maximal freedom and creativity, congruent with the well-being of both individuals and communities.
• God is truly changed by what happens in the world. While God influences us, we also influence God. God truly hears our prayers and responds to them with possibilities and energies.
• God is adventurous, constantly doing new things, and urging us to be creative. Following God means honoring innovation as much as tradition. God is still speaking and God’s inspiration is at work in ethical advances involving persons of color, gay and lesbian persons, economic justice, and the care for the earth.
• God’s inspiration and love embraces all creation. Revelation is found in scripture and also in the world’s many faith traditions. Faithfulness to God involves embracing God’s wisdom and healing wherever it is found.

Process theology gives us the vision of a faithful, intimate, lively, adventurous, and loving God, for whom this world truly matters. It pushes us beyond old orthodoxies and unbending rules to live adventurously, exploring new ways of life, and prizing relationship over rule.

By Dr. Dolly Berthelot

 America has become a volatile place to have meaningful conversation. Perhaps the whole world has. Is it possible to address controversial issues together without rancor? We lose that ability at our peril.
Whether online or in person, across the dinner table or the board table or the oceans, among individuals or religions or organizations or politicians or nations, poor potential outcomes of escalating conflict include chaos, hostility, enmity—at worst, even violence. Any of these can mean waste, loss, calamity or catastrophe for those involved as well as for those who try to avoid the controversy. At the very least, when discussion disintegrates into disrespect and then disgust, nobody wins. Nobody grows. Nobody learns anything. Nobody moves forward.
So what can you and I and every single person of good will do about this?
First, we must understand that nothing gets accomplished by two people or two groups without the INTENTION of accomplishing something together. Even if that goal is simply mutual understanding. Simply? Ha! That’s often a challenge for all of us.
Whatever the collective goal, it must be accomplished in cooperation with one another, not in competition with one another, particularly not in hostile competition, which is the most destructive.
One of my favorite traditional proverbs is the Chinese saying, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”
And we see every topic from where we “come from.” That may include our age, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, heritage, geography, political party, faith, philosophy, education, profession or work, friends and family, income, natural proclivities, etc. All these and more shape the perspective we bring to any discussion. Sometimes they can blind us to objective reality.
Our perspective affects our perceptions. Think of two people in a room, X standing on the northwest corner, Y sitting in the southeast corner. Things happen in various parts of that room. X and Y will naturally see (or not see) whatever happens in that same room quite differently. They will literally see (and miss) different things. They will certainly interpret what they see (and miss) quite differently. Even if both have their eyes wide open and neither are blind.
By sharing their varying perspectives, BOTH persons in that room can enhance visibility and thus foster mutual understanding. But each must carefully attend to how the other person sees things. If each calmly explains what he or she witnesses or experiences, rather than screams that that view is the ONLY logical or rational or good or worthwhile view, or calls the opposite perspective foolish or stupid or evil, and if each person listens carefully and open-mindedly to the other, everyone will benefit. Everyone stands to gain a more 360° perspective. Certainly the often complex and confusing reality will become clearer.
So, to achieve more productive dialogue, consider the following brief guidelines:

DO

1. Intend to accomplish genuine dialogue, mutual understanding.
2. Respect those with whom you disagree. Respect is not agreement.
3. Assume they may see, know, experience something you haven’t.
4. Share your perspective and your perception calmly and kindly.
5. Listen to opposing perspectives expectantly and open-mindedly.
6. Appreciate the opportunity to share, listen, learn, grow.
7. Reward the sharing of others by your behaviors and your gratitude.

DO NOT

1. Presume the worst about those with whom you differ.
2. Ridicule or insult—overtly or in your mind.
3. Overgeneralize. Acknowledge but control your biases.
4. Let your prejudices and preferences rule your better judgment.
5. Fear that truly hearing another person is harmful to you.
   

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by Elgin Hushbeck

I am skeptical of the theory that human activity is causing the earth to warm at a rate that is threatening. I freely admit that I am not now, nor have I ever been a climatologist, and for some this means I am not allowed to have an opinion or reach a conclusion in the matter. I am just supposed to sit down and blindly accept whatever the high priests of science pronounce. But I don’t.
I ask questions. I look at the arguments made on both sides, and have reached a conclusion that is in opposition to the consensus view. Frankly, I find that historically I am in pretty good company. At one point it ran against the scientific consensus to believe that rocks fell from the sky; only the unenlightened believe such things. Now we know that meteorites do exist.
When the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, it ran against the settled consensus view in geology, and opposition was expressed as, “If we are to believe this hypothesis, we must forget everything we learned in the last seventy years and start all over again.” (Hushbeck, 2007)   Because of this its proponent, Alfred Wegener, was rejected and denounced and had to leave his country to find a teaching position, and then in another field.   Then there was the scientific consensus that was Eugenics.   So I do not rate consensus that highly and instead look at the evidence.
When it comes to the evidence, I have been blessed, or cursed, depending on your point of view, to have been following this debate for 40 years. And for 40 years the alarmists have been consistently wrong. They have gone from predicting a new Ice Age to Global Warming and now, since we have not been warming since the mid-90s, they cover their bases with the generic term Climate Change.  In recent months, I have seen some reports about how the data has been “reevaluated” during this pause, so as to find some warming, but I remain skeptical. On several occasions in the past they have been caught, at the least, distorting the data.
More importantly for me, the alarmists have attacked anyone who disagrees with them as being somehow biased, selling their soul to big business, or just being evil. This is the irrational fallacy of ad hominem attack, and fallacies hardly make for sound arguments. In addition they actively try to suppress differing points of view. (The latter being a small part of a much larger problem of enforced conformity by the left.)
For me the four key questions are:
Are we warming? In the long run probably, as we are coming out of a Mini Ice Age and are still below the average temperature for the last 10,000 years, which itself is below the long running average. After all Greenland got is name when people lived there in settlements that are now frozen.
Are we the primary cause? Probably not, as there have been many more significant periods of warming and cooling in the past long before we could have had any impact. Given that the current claims are based on computer models that have consistently been wrong, I see no reason to hold otherwise.
Is there anything we can do about it? Even if the first two answers are yes, the plans put forth would have little if any actual effect on the climate. Any effect they had would be greatly outweighed by their negative impact on people, particularly people in the third world who would benefit the most from economic development and growth. As a Christian I do value the planet, but I value people more.
Is warming a bad thing? Probably not. It would certainly cause disruption, but considering that far more people die each year from cold related causes than from heat related causes, and much of the land mass is currently in colder regions, warming would probably be a net positive.
One other factor.  As an engineer, I do know a little about control systems.   The earth’s climate has numerous such systems, and if climatology is like any other science, I suspect these are far more numerous and far more complex than we now know or understand. I suspect that our lack of understanding of these systems is a primary factor in the models being so consistently wrong.
For the planet to have survived as it has this long, these systems must be robust and strong. For example, in very simple terms, increasing temperatures causes more evaporation, leading to more clouds, which reflect more sunlight out into space, cooling the planet – note until recently the climate models have not factored in cloud cover. Increased CO² means more food for plants, and this means more plants, which then consume more CO². If the climate was as fragile as climate alarmist claim, we would not be here in the first place as the climate would have spun out of control long ago.
So I remain skeptical. Maybe if the models had a track record of 40 years of accurate prediction, I would think otherwise, but they don’t.  And until the alarmist give up their irrational arguments to support their claims, I am likely to remain skeptical.

by Elgin Hushbeck

One of the issues that divides Christians on the right and left, and the right and left in general, is their view of government and the market place. This, in and of itself, raises some interesting questions concerning how and why we develop the values and positions we hold. How much do our political opinions influence our religious views, and how much do our religious views influence our politics? In this post, however, I will look at the left’s preference for government over the market place, and whether or not their underlying assumptions are correct.
For many Christians on the left, looking to government to address social ills and problems is an easy choice, at least when the government is in some fashion a democratic form of government. This is because they see government as an institution led by people they elected who operate as an expression of the people’s will. They regard it as an institution that is guided by values such as equality and a concern for the poor that they share.
The market place on the other hand is governed by large corporations, led by people they do not know, people they have no say over, and motivated by less desirable values such as greed. In fact, as my co-host Chris Eyre, on Global Christian Perspectives, labeled it, “satanic.” Thus when the question is, where should we look to address a social problem such as dealing with the poor, or health care, it is an easy choice.
As someone on the right, it is probably not that surprising that I would disagree with many of these characterizations. For example, I make a distinction between big business and the market place. In fact I would probably agree with much of the left’s critique of big business. The really big difference is that I see government as even worse.
While the left’s description of democracy is good in theory, it hardly lines up with reality.   Its most basic flaw is that it assumes that those elected to government will act in the interest of others over themselves.
The problem with such a view was elegantly summed up in Federalist 51 (by either, Hamilton or Madison) in the famous statement on the reasons for divided powers and limited government:

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This is particularly problematic as government becomes more distant from the people. One could argue that this is just democracy in action, yet numerous real world factors such as gerrymandering of districts, advantage of incumbency, campaign finance laws tha,t in reality, only make it harder to unseat incumbents, influence of special interest groups and lobbyist, to mention a few, insulate those in office from the people.   Such factors are not an aberration, but are rather now the norm as government becomes more centralized and powerful. (For a more complete discussion of some of these factors see my book: Preserving Democracy.)
In a consumer based market place, however, one has some economic say by choosing where to spend one’s money. This requires that the consumers have real choices and businesses must compete for their business. In such a marketplace, to succeed, a business must be concerned with their customers’ wants, wishes and ability to pay.
Not only can such a system work in theory, it can and has worked, and has resulted in the greatest increase in the standard of living for more people than any other economic system. As Arthur C. Brooks has pointed out, because of such policies, “The number of people in the world living on a dollar a day—a traditional poverty measure— has fallen by 80 percent since 1970, from 11.2 percent of the world’s population to 2.3 percent” (Brooks, A. C. (2012). The Road To Freedom, New York: Basic Books., p. 72).
Granted no system is perfect, and problems remain, but as we move closer to a true consumer based marketplace, things get correspondingly better. On the other hand, as government is asked to do more, it grows larger and the problems are exacerbated. Rather than being a defender of the public against big business, only the large and well connected can have influence.
Thus for me the choice is clear.  Government cannot live up to the ideas of the left, and in fact the larger it grows, the more likely it is to be a defender of big business. Not only can a consumer based capitalism make people’s lives better, but it also allows more freedom as well.

In today’s American culture, there is one virtue that seems to be held above all others as the one to be achieved at all costs. That is individual perseverance. And what is wrong with that, actually? After all, isn’t perseverance one of the things we are told we will learn as we go through trials? So, we welcome trials because we know we will get perseverance and, once we get that, we’ll stick to everything and we’ll get everything done possible. And, again, aren’t we told we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us?
But what if you can’t do everything? I mentioned that in yesterday’s post. There are times when you just can’t do everything and you need someone to come along and show you mercy. And, in my first article, I mentioned about how my family gathered around each other and supported each other in our grief and trials. But that goes counter to everything our society teaches us.
“Buck up!” “Stiff upper lip!” “You can do it!” “You don’t need anyone!” “Stand on your own two feet!” “Pick yourself up!” Subtly, constantly, our society teaches us that this is normal, this is virtuous. To ask for help, to even need help means that there is something wrong with you. This is part of the reason why caregivers, I believe, get the short end of the stick at times. Everything is focused on the person going through the struggles. They are the heroes. They are the ones that need the encouragement to get through, to pick up, to move on, to conquer. The power of one! Stick to it! You can do it!
But the caregiver, sitting in the background, has to keep the strength going and keep the power going. They are the ones that make it all possible, really. My wife has told me time and again that if it wasn’t for me, she would have despaired in her own cancer treatments. My wife wasn’t able to make it through alone. Did she fail? Of course not! She is still here. She and her doctors beat the cancer and now she’s back to her recovery. And I was the caregiver that also helped her through.
But when is a caregiver not a caregiver? The answer: when the caregiver needs care themselves. There were so many times when I was helping my wife through her treatments that I felt so utterly drained, so alone, so tired, that I felt I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was filled with intense grief, suffering, and pain of the heart. Yet, I had to keep on going. “Stiff upper lip!” and everything. But I couldn’t do it on my own.
You see, caregivers are people experiencing suffering and pain as well as the ones cared for. It isn’t the same, of course, as the people going through the illness. But they are certainly hurting. They need as much comfort, encouragement, and strength as the people fighting off the illness, because caregivers are fighting off the darkness of despair; they just cannot bear to watch their loved one in pain any more.
This is, really, why I wrote The Caregiver Beatitudes. I realized that I needed something other than myself to get through it. There was so much I was being asked to do, but I needed to know how to get through it. And I realized, as I was writing, that it was not something I could do on my own. I needed God to get through. And, as I found out, I needed a whole family and network of others as well. A caregiver needs their own caregivers. This is how we get through. And this is how, ultimately, we win the fight.