Hopewit

  How Do I Think I Think? Practical Reconciliation, Part 4 To review : Binary thinking is 2-positions thinking: “It’s either this or that.” You’re either born again or you’re not born again, in America you’re white or not-white, “you’re either for me or against me.” I’m basing spectrum thinking on the notion that there’s generally vast territory between the poles of a binary view. In other words, one can be on the way toward or away from what Jesus meant by rebirth, people can have a mixed heritage that can’t be described by any of white, black, or coloured, and it’s possible to partially favour a leader on some issues and not on others, so that “for or against” becomes binary nonsense. The question of bias is well demonstrated by, for instance, statistics about the preponderance of police stops of black drivers over white drivers in the USA and Canada. Bias is a leaning toward or away from and it needn’t be deliberate; bias can motivate actions out of our unconscious, cause

  Practical Reconciliation, Part 3 This is a third in a series called “Practical Reconciliation,” and follows last week’s urging to honour  as Kingdom work  the talents, jobs, careers, avocations and vocations we find ourselves in. Today, I want to pass on some of the wisdom of others touching on conversation, particularly the talking/listening, writing/reading aspects. i Technology is rapidly changing the style and format of conversation, but we will always have occasion to sit in a circle with others—or just across from one other—and exchange ideas, impressions, news, etc., and sometimes to disagree, even quarrel over any number of things. The conversation surrounding the current pandemic is an interesting study of the nature of conversation made more complex by the internet and illustrated by the fact that a student in China and a retired bus driver in Saskatchewan can converse on whatever topics interest both of them . . . with a real-time visual connection. What this change mea

Last week, I posted some thoughts on the basics of a spectrum worldview, including getting away from seeing ourselves on the world’s (and hard-core Fundamentalism’s?) binary approach to almost everything. You can refresh your memory by scrolling back in the blog.   Our topic today is part 3 in a series and deals, as promised, with more of “Practical Reconciliation.”   Ω    Secondly (the first was “Reconciling to yourself”), I want to suggest that we work at discarding the binary way of thinking on all kinds of things. In the church, binary thinking can narrow everything down to a point where people begin to assume that if they can’t preach, teach and proselytize, they’re letting the Kingdom down. If the gospels and epistles were making the point that a “born again” ceremony was preparation for a life after death and all that mattered, then binary thinking would be satisfied if we did nothing but cajole people heavenward.  But taken as a whole, the Bible presents a spectrum of messages