Rainy Sept.11 in Chicago

Greetings friends,

It is a rainy Monday in Chicago, which I started early listening to the September 11 memorial coverage on NPR. They have done well today speaking about both grief and loss as well as possibilities beyond revenge; and the additional tragedies of having gone so quickly into a war that after several years has no good end in sight.


It is a day where I look forward to starting my class tonight on ministering to the survivors of human rights abuses, taught at Catholic Theological Union a few blocks away. It's a very popular course, taught by a former missionary in South Africa. However, the reading will be very emotionally exhausting, I've already seen. My other courses are at CTS, in pastoral care, psychopathology in theological perspective, and public theology (or, how to write about religion for the public media).


Most of my ponderings the last several days as I crack the books open again, are thinking about ethics in religious leadership and why we don't make it a point of studying the whole person. What I mean by this is, we study the personal lives of some theologians and leaders but not others. Anton Boisen, for example, is the person who decided seminary students needed to have practical experience ministering to the sick, in hospital wards, and especially in mental health centers. He himself was a seminary professor and writer, who expereienced several bouts of schizophrenia during his lifetime. So, one doesn't really study Boisen without also talking about how his illness and experience of being a mental patient and also being feared/stereotyped affected his work. Meanwhile, we are studying Paul Tillich, who was a prominent theologian in the past century but also had a reputation for sleeping with his students and getting himself into similar forms of trouble personally. However, you don't study that or how it affected his writing (which as I read it seems to me it did) when you study Tillich. So, one professor will simply say he hates Tillich and another will worship the man, and neither will really go in-depth to discuss this with students for any helpful formational end. One professor I raised this question with said he thought such questions were ad hominem attacks and shouldn't be used to dismiss his contributions to society.


I gently disagreed. I think it's instead a lot like studying your own family tree: when you learn the stories and the patterns for what they really were (good and bad), you can start making better decisions about the future, knowing where your potential downfalls lie. And when we look respectfully and honestly at leaders, we learn from them rather than turning them into idols for our mindless consumption. It seems important for ethical leadership at all levels of the church, I think. So, that is my two cents for the day.