The World Is About to Turn (Rick Rouse & Paul Ingram) -- A Review
THE WORLD IS ABOUT TO TURN: Mending a Nation’s Broken Faith. By Rick Rouse and Paul O. Ingram. Foreword by Peter Marty. Saint
Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2020. Xx + 153 pages.
The
United States remains a religious nation, at least in comparison with Europe
and Canada. Nevertheless, the times are a-changing. Especially among younger
cohorts, institutional religion has lost its savor. At the same time, America's
religious expressions are becoming more and more diverse. I happen to live in a
large metropolitan area that is expressive of that diversity. I am greatly
enriched by my friendships with folks who express that diversity. That is not
to say everyone is happy with this diversity, but I find it enriching.
The World Is About to Turn is an effort by Rick Rouse and Paul Ingram to
address the challenges present in our current situation, and offer some
possible ways of embracing the changes that are afoot. Both authors are
Lutherans who have written an enlightening book that speaks both to the
brokenness of our religious life, which unfortunately has found expression in
acts of violence against faith communities and the possibilities of moving into
a new reality.
They
begin the book with a chapter laying out the challenges of our religious life,
starting from our earliest days as a nation. They move from there to a chapter
on justice and inviting us to find the moral courage to do the right thing.
Here is where the hope begins to emerge—that faith communities will commit
themselves to pursue justice and resisting oppression. The pursuit of justice
is coupled with compassion and kindness. Thus, they invite us to love the
stranger and practice hospitality. If you're getting the sense that the authors
have been reading Micah 6:8, you would be correct. That's because chapter 4
invites us to walk humbly with God. In that chapter, they speak of the
importance of repentance and reconciliation as a path to a more civil society.
Having
laid out several principles that can guide our conversation, principles rooted
in Scripture, they invite us to consider more fully our engagement in
interfaith/interreligious relationships. They begin in chapter 5 with an
invitation to discover common values shared by different faith traditions. As one
might expect, they begin with the various ways in which the golden rule is
expressed by different communities. In this chapter, they briefly describe how
Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Chinese communities express
their core values. Although they lift up most of the major faith communities,
they do leave out Native American traditions, the Sikhs, and the Baha’is. They
conclude, helpfully by noting that the examples they lift up "give
evidence to a common spiritual thread woven throughout humanity, calling forth
the best angels in all of us" (p. 68).
They
follow up this discussion with a broader conversation about religious
pluralism. They suggest that our options are exodus or exile. By exodus, they
mean not clinging to the past. It means rejecting racism and misogyny, among
others. To choose exile is to cling to the past way of living. The choice is
ours. Whether one agrees with the definitions of pluralism at every point, this
is a helpful introduction to religious pluralism. They rightfully, in my mind,
affirm the possibility of engaging in authentic dialogue while holding to the
truth of our own beliefs, even as we show respect for our neighbor's faith
practices. They write that "what is important is that we recognize that we
have much to learn from each other. We can be open to inviting God's Spirit to
intercede and bless us with compassion and understanding for each other"
(p. 83).
After a brief epilogue that takes note of the Covid pandemic that was underway when
they completed the book, taking note of the realities that are unknown to us at
this point, they provide four appendices. The first is a "Litany of
Confession for the Day of Mourning," which is a resource from the Uniting
Church in Australia created at the request of the Uniting Aboriginal and
Islander Christian Congress. They offer this as a resource for remembering the
history of First Peoples here in North America. The second appendix provides
"A Liturgy of Repentance and Reconciliation," which was created by
the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada in collaboration with the Indigenous
People of Canada. Like the Australian resource, it speaks to the history of
colonialism and its impact on indigenous peoples in North America. In addition
to these two liturgical resources, they include an ELCA declaration addressing
persons of African descent, issued in 2019 that offers a word of repentance and
apology for complicity in slavery and oppression of persons of African descent
in the US. Finally, the provide us in Appendix 4, the ELCA's policy statement
on Interreligious commitment. All four of these documents serve as expressions
of the message they offer in the prior chapters.
I
believe that Rouse and Ingram's The World Is About to Turn will be helpful to all Christians seeking to navigate in
this new world of ours and do so with an eye to the invocation of Micah to
pursue justice, love/compassion, and humility before God. I do have to note,
however, that the book is marred at points by grammatical and typographical
errors that take away from the impact of the book. The content is important and
worth taking to heart, but the errors are unfortunate.
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