Jordan Cooper had put this link on his site, and being the unoriginal guy that I am, I decided to follow suit. I have not read Collapse yet, but I did recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and think that Jared Diamond is one of the most important writers today, both for his amazing research, creativity, and the way that his books are being embraced by the mass public.
My question, which I purposely choose to propose as a question rather than a rant, is as follows; how do we get church-folk to engage in the kind of conversations that are brought up in Diamond's books? For instance, I read Guns, Germs and Steel at the same time that I read The Poisonwood Bible, and noticed an immediate correlation between the two. Too often the western church has a simplistic view of the rest of the world, especially as we send our missionaries to other countries to "fix" different societies. Our simplistic models need to get blown out of the water, and right now I'm definitely struggling to make this a reality for myself, as well as for those I minister to and with.
Peace,
Matt
Currently Reading: The Godbearing Life, by Kenda Creasy Dean. I really appreciate what she is trying to do with youth ministry, though her books sometimes seem to all say the same thing over and over...at least it's a good thing, I guess.
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I was intrigued by your reference to The Poisonwood Bible, which made a huge impact on me because I started it while preparing for a trip to East Africa and finished it on the plane. It was instructive (and a little depressing, frankly) to play Nathan Price's 'only one way' view of Africa against the realities the folks we met were dealing with. This novel is a great argument for the kind of contextualization that we need to work on today.
I see your connection, and it challenges me to think about how we inject the realities of the globe into the process of figuring out the how's and why's of people's worlds. This is probably too simplistic, but I think we have to be bold enough to start these conversations. In my tradition they're easy to have in the abstract, on the denominational level, and much harder when you engage people in how much they consume and what they should have. The trick is to get beyond the familiar and too-easy "left" and "right" positions and have nuanced conversations that allow people to reflect and digest the implications of how we live.
You're not alone in that struggle.
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