Season: A Season of Resurrection - Life in Our Cells
Speaker: Joel Smith
Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Our friend Joel used wordsmiths—Walker Percy, Philip Roth, and Wallace Stevens—to illustrate the problem of language. Words don’t mean one thing. On Father’s Day the word “Father” is in full effect. God as “father” is complicated by our own experience. We may check out of the whole thing because the problems with the word are too much to figure out. Joel suggested getting out of your head and into your relationships as an antidote. It’s inevitable that we’re going to get it wrong, so we might as well stop trying to be right all the time. Loving God is not about being precise, it’s about being connected. Joel suggested using our choice to choose questions over declarations, stories over definitions, self-description over other-descriptions.