@Plough @myleswerntz end/ Yet Christians can advance peace only so far, where "God's new voice in our midst" - meaning more fully conceived in integrative, planetary terms - carries the world beyond the "imaginative vice that keeps us from seeing any politic other than one undergirded by violence."
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Copy of tweet thread here: ‘Thus we Christians today are placed in the most difficult of all situations. We have to repudiate both the spirit of the age and the means that it employs. If we do not, if we yield even a fraction to those forces, we will betray Jesus Christ.’ —Jacques Ellul, What I Believe Our call, in practice, is to confront the simultaneity of the enormous force of the Zeitgeist and its primary, expressive medium. I wonder what Ellul, so presciently alert to the transcendent significance of wedded spiritual and media environments, would have made of the Web Era. 2/ As for Bulgakov’s “victory of good on the path of world-historical tragedy leading to the final separation of light and darkness"? It embraces a harvest of collective consciousness, disclosure and consequence in cyberspace as much as meatspace. We are a unicity, after all.
@brianmclaren 6/ We’ve been here ‘before’, of course. The first great efflorescence of spiritual breakthrough and insight that sprang up across the world in a remarkably compressed time period, and referred to as 'the first axial age', offers us a textbook example of conscious intervention.
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Beginning with:
It bears noting that all the great world traditions which emerged during the historical period which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers named the Axial Age, grew up in the context of endemic violence and warfare. And no matter the psychosis and brutality subsequently demonstrated by wayward ‘traditions of religiosity’ themselves, what the original Axial sages created was, the religious interpreter Karen Armstrong has observed, “a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to counter this aggression...The fact that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggest that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked.”
In this regard, the advanced insights of contemporary voices confirm the continuing relevance of spiritual genius to the realpolitik of our age.... [cont.]](/media/1783104447306166498-GL7cCmTbwAA_MEk.jpg)
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Two paragraph excerpt from: Beginning with: It bears noting that all the great world traditions which emerged during the historical period which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers named the Axial Age, grew up in the context of endemic violence and warfare. And no matter the psychosis and brutality subsequently demonstrated by wayward ‘traditions of religiosity’ themselves, what the original Axial sages created was, the religious interpreter Karen Armstrong has observed, “a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to counter this aggression...The fact that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggest that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked.” In this regard, the advanced insights of contemporary voices confirm the continuing relevance of spiritual genius to the realpolitik of our age.... [cont.]