HELLO!

Fred Evans turns 95 Friday. His daughter Jennifer shared it would over-whelming for him to be visited by his many Woodlawn church friends. She asks if you could email your greetings for Fred: Jevans101112@gmail.com I remember Fred from my first six months at Woodlawn, he sat in the front row, always in a suit, with Teri and Craig. I recall, at the end of the service, he went directly to Bethe for a hug. Happy Birthday Fred!

On Tuesday night February 3^rd at 7 pm in the Sams Room I begin my six-week winter faith study based on the book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others by Barbara Brown Taylor. Our conversations, on these six evenings, will be less about the specifics of the five great world religions she explored with her undergraduate students in 2019 and more about the reasons Christians like her want to know more about the faith of others. In short, what makes you want to know more about the faith of others, persons who belong to other religions? Why are you interested?

You don’t need to own or to have read this book to participate in our conversations. I offer a summary of the chapters at the outset, then invite questions and comments. I was struck by Brown Taylor’s approach to her course. She initially began, like many modern scholars, with an attempt to offer her students an “objective” set of facts, beliefs, analysis, of each religion. Soon this proved unsatisfying. Knowing facts is one thing, having an appreciation for why and how others find meaning is another. She shifted her focus, rented a van, and took her students to the places these Religions gather for their sacred rituals and celebrations. At each place, a leader of that faith community shared what they hold to be true. A time for questions and an engagement by the students came next.

Brown Taylor reveals that not all religions are the same. “Their understanding of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies…As the title of my book suggests, this is about how my envy of other traditions turned into holy envy, offering me the chance to be born again within my own tradition”. For the author, learning about other religions helped her to understand questions these faith-filled persons are asking, the remedies they find in their Religion and how her own faith might answer some of these important questions. Their faith moved her to deepen her own.

In these times it is no longer an option to ignore the faith of others; from how we offer health care, how we understand commerce, to what we eat, we must improve our religious literacy. Brown Taylor concludes, “Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia – not covered in dust but evolving all the way – so that each generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions about life”. Peace, Kevin