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Find other resources for advocates at the Presbyterian Washington Office Web site.
Connect
Connect with other faith-based advocates at these upcoming events and happenings.
Save the date
April 13–15, 2008
Women’s Empowerment
The Women’s World Summit will take place April 13–15, 2008, in Washington, D.C., at the Washington National Cathedral and other venues. The Women’s World Summit will formally launch the Women’s Faith and Development Alliance (WFDA), a multi-year advocacy and communications campaign aimed at making investment in women and girls a key priority for government and donor spending. |
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Learn
 The Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns invites you to, “… add to your faith, goodness; and to goodness, knowledge” ( 2 Peter 1:5). Effective advocacy requires an accurate awareness of the facts involved and a firm grasp of the complex dynamics of an issue. ACWC encourages us all to increase our understanding of women’s concerns and then work to have our faithful voices heard. You can begin with reading a book. Here's what we're reading now.
Saving paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this world for crucifixion and empire
by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
By the same authors as a book reviewed earlier, Proverbs of Ashes, this book was four years in the writing. It was well worth the wait. It is a big book, 552 pages but 127 pages are footnotes. It is well researched and I judge it to be one of the most important books I have read. It is clear, concise and easy reading, unlike some of Brock’s earliest books.
What Brock and Parker discovered was that for the first thousand years the Christian church did not display Jesus hanging on the cross in its artwork, in its sanctuaries, or in its common life. Jesus was always depicted as alive, in the midst of the church’s common life: standing in front of the cross alive was the closest he came to being on it.
We are reminded that the purpose of crucifixion was to shame, instill fear, fragment human community and wipe out the connection to the cause of justice. The passion narratives in the gospels defy the power of crucifixion to silence Jesus’ movement. The Resurrection was the gift of persistent love, stronger than death: “life in his name”. (John 20:31) The followers of Christ claimed their place with the risen Christ in paradise, the space of resistance to the death-dealing powers of Rome. “When Christians gathered to share of the bread of heaven, partaking in the Eucharist feast, they entered the most concentrated form of paradise on earth, where living and dead communed with the risen Christ, and the banquet of abundance was spread for all.” This book traces how the idea of theosis as a community effort to do the work of God, with Christ resurrected in our midst was transformed to otherworldly, future-oriented salvation that emphasized the death of Christ more than his resurrected presence. The Atonement became the primary emphasis of the church, and along with it the prohibition of taking human life was replaced with the idea of holy war in the time of the crusades where people could assure their salvation by participating in the crusades.
This book follows the idea of Paradise through the Puritans settling in America and follows it to our present day. “Today you will be with me in paradise,” Jesus said. But when Western Christianity removed paradise from today, placing salvation beyond, behind, or ahead of us — but not here and now — it disconnected life from full engagement in the present. How might we come to terms with this loss? Read this book. It will be well worth your time. I didn’t want to put it down.
Good Reading — Terry Alexander
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