Rev. Galen Guengerich Senior Minister, All Souls Unitarian Church New York City

Transcription

1 Rev. Galen Guengerich Senior Minister, All Souls Unitarian Church New York City THEOLOGY OG FOR A SECULAR AGE

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3 Your Aspirations What will make Theology for a Secular Age a meaningful investment of your time and energy? What do you hope will happen here? Take a few minutes to write your answer.

4 At the Smithville Methodist Church, by Stephen Dunn

5 Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, by Richard Hooker Theologie, what is it, but the Science of things Divine?

6 Eli and Amelia Swartzentruber The Courting Buggy, 1916

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8 1985, Directed by Peter Weir

9 For Discussion What experience in your life most decisively shapes the perspective from which h you look at these issues? What experience in your life decisively shapes your perspective on theology and religion?

10 A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor

11 Course Goal The goal of this course is to suggest how we might begin to think about faith and religion, as well as religious community and ethical conduct, in a different way.

12 The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, And the Future of Reason

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14 A Third Way The seven questions we ll address: 1. How do we know what we most truly know? 2. What is the nature of existence and how do we fit into the picture? 3. What in the world is divine if anything? 4. What is the uniquely human challenge? 5. What is the purpose of faith and the role of religion? 6. What does it mean to be a religious i community? 7. How shall we live in order to transform ourselves and our world?

15 1. HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE MOST TRULY KNOW?

16 What source of knowledge gives you the most confidence?

17 A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

18 A Common Faith,by John Dewey

19 IDA 47 million year-old primate

20 It all seems to us to hinge on one overriding question. Do we really believe the Bible to be God's inerrant Word or not? If the Bible is really the Word of our Creator God, then by definition it must be inerrant and authoritative on every subject with which it deals. This assumption leads clearly to the conviction that the creation took place in six literal days several thousand years ago. We believe this simply because God said so and said it quite plainly! - from the Institute for Creation Research

21 The Gospel According to St. Matthew

22 The Printing Press, 1440 Johannes Gottfried von Gutenberg

23 The Fall of Constantinople, 1453

24 The 95 Theses,1517 Martin Luther nails a list of complaints against the Roman Catholic Church on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany

25 The Rise of Modern Science

26 The Banyan Tree Exercise Please stand, as you are able. Reach your arms straight overhead. Feel the wind.

27 The Ten Commandments

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29 2.WHAT IS THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE AND HOW DO WE FIT INTO THE PICTURE?

30 What There Is, by W.V.Quine 20 th Century American analytic philosopher

31 Stephen Hawking s Universe

32 Ancient and Modern View Aristotle Daniel Dennett

33 Ask Yourself How do I know who I am? How do I describe who I am? What is most essential about me?

34 Alfred North Whitehead

35 The Oracle of Delphi

36 This Land is Your Land 1. This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me 2. As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway I saw below me a golden valley This land was made for you and me 3. This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me 4. I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond d deserts And all around me a voice was sounding This land was made for you and me Words and music by Woody Guthrie

37 Song of Myself, Walt Whitman I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

38 Relationships These experiences, and countless others besides, make me who I am not in the way a potter applies steady pressure to shape a bowl, but in the way flour, butter, sugar and other ingredients go together to make a cake. If you take away the relational ingredients that make up my life, what remains has little value certainly not as Galen Guengerich.

39 Bf Before we continue, take a few minutes to make a list of the main experiences relationships in action that make you who you are.

40 The Elegant Universe: Brian Greene on String Theory

41 There is only us, heirs of a past we cannot change, creators of a future we cannot delay.

42 3. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS DIVINE IF ANYTHING?

43 The Theological Periodic Table The periodic table of theological elements is laid out in terms of meaning, purpose, and value.

44 Arm Chair Philosophers If a tree fll falls in the woods, This apparently and no one is there to hear, did it make a trivial question raises a deeply religious issue. sound?

45 What happens to experiences no one knows about or remembers? 1. Who hears the lonely l cry of an anguished ihd soul in the night s darkest hour? 2. Who suffers with a young boy who is abused by his father? 3. Who bears witness to the travesty of an infant girl abandoned on a hillside by her parents to die? 4. What if no one knows? What if no one cares?

46 4. WHAT IS THE UNIQUELY HUMAN CHALLENGE?

47 Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones

48 The Nature of Lucifer s Game? 1. Is human history a These questions are contest between known as the purview of a God and Satan? discipline known as 2. Do we as humans THEOLOGICAL need saving in the ANTHROPOLOGY. first place? It asks, What is the 3. If so, from what? ht? human condition 4. If not, why not? such that we need to be saved?

49 Original Sin

50 The Scream, by Edvard Munch

51 We are dependent on the universe for every detail of our experience. Alfred North Whitehead This principle applies to everything whatsoever. Nothing not people, p not rocks, not galaxies is what it is strictly within itself. The first principle of the universe is not independence, but its opposite: utter dependence. Everything that exists is made up of constituent parts that are borrowed from, shared with, and related to others outside it. In every respect, we are utterly dependent.

52 Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality From Emerson to Oprah

53 A Nation of Seekers

54 The Transcendentalists Rlh Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman

55 Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Green Day

56 5. WHAT ARE THE PURPOSE OF FAITH AND THE ROLE OF RELIGION?

57 I Still Haven t Found What I m Looking For, by U2

58 The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

59 The Pragmatists Lt Late 19 th Century philosophers h who became known as the pragmatists include: Oliver Wendell Holmes John Dewey William James

60 Colin McGinn: Faith is Contrary to Reason

61 Enlightened Faith In the modern world, people of enlightened faith live on the boundary between things we know for certain and things we can never fully comprehend.

62 Faith Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Rembrandt van Rijn The Apostle Paul, c. 1657

63 Religion is the support that sustains and renews our faith It is the collection of external forms we use songs, symbols, stories, rituals, obligations, sacred spaces to carry our faith along from day to day and generation to generation. The meaning of the word religion is usually traced to the Latin verb meaning to bind. Early monastic Christians were called religious because they had taken sacred vows and were bound by solemn orders. This early form of the word religion suggests that religion is a way of life. Faith is a commitment from within that is sustained and renewed by the way of living we call religion. That s why we call it the practice of religion. Galen Guengerich

64 The Mindful Brain, by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

65 What causes our brains to thrive? It turns out that change and challenge are the main catalysts tl t for neurological l development. Ironically, our brains cannot be changed merely by adding new information or knowledge. What is required is new behavior: a different way of living.

66 In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Eamon Duffy, a professor of Church History at Cambridge University, points out that early Christianity was more than a new religion. DiVinci s Codex Leicester comprises 18 sheets of paper, each folded in half and written on both sides, forming the complete 72-page document.

67 Our modern book known as a codex evolved from the ancient equivalent of a stenographer s pad. Codex Argenteus, the "Silver Bible, written in 520 CE comprised 336 leaves.

68 A Faith of Enlightenment As Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard, put it we are the church of the new millennium. Ours is a unique faith, embracing as it does both the certainty of science and the mystery of the spirit. In other words, ours is a faith for children of the Enlightenment.

69 Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. -Karl Marx

70 Three Key Points on Religion 1. Some religions are better than others. 2. Religion is something particular. 3. Religion is a way of life that occurs within a community of faith.

71 Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

72 6. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE PART OF A RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY?

73 Worship In worship, we open ourselves to a truth that cannot be demanded. Worship is religious practice. It s where we learn how to wait and listen, how to be truthful and faithful. It s where we learn to be fully present to ourselves and to each other.

74 The Christian Faith, by Friedrich Schleiermacher

75 Gratitude The appropriate religious i response to our experience of utter dependence, in my view, is gratitude. My conviction is that gratitude should be the defining element of our faith. In the same way as Judaism is defined by obedience, Christianity by love, and Islam by submission, I believe that Unitarian Universalism should be defined d by gratitude.

76 Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, by Wayne Muller

77 Ordo Virtuntum, by Hildegard von Bingen

78 7. HOW SHALL WE LIVE IN ORDER TO TRANSFORM OURSELVES AND OUR WORLD?

79 Ethics and Morality Ethics and morality are both concerned with proper conduct, but in somewhat ht different ways. Ethics comes from a Greek word meaning character, and morality comes from a Latin word meaning custom or habit. Morality usually refers to the values we hold and the moral rules we follow.

80 Simon Blackburn

81 Immanuel Kant

82 Ethical Standard We need an ethical standard d that t resonates with all of our being, as well as with the world we live in.

83 Opinion, by Baron Wormser

84 Elaine Scarry, Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard

85 The Essence of Beauty Think for a moment about several recent experiences of beauty in your own life. What do those experiences have in common not in terms of your emotional reaction, but in terms of whatever it was out there that caused you to respond in that way? In other words, what is the essence of beauty itself?

86 Beauty Transfixes & Transforms

87 The Social Contract, by Jean Jacques Rousseau

88 Ethics and Women Luce Irigary Riane Eisler

89 Malcolm Potts & Thomas Hayden

90 Ethics and Food

91 Ethics and the Planet

92 From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun

93 The Constant Gardener

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