Sandbox Cooperative Podcast

When tragedies hit or hot-button issues come front and center, we seem to have the same “conversations” over and over again with the same rehearsed talking points – rehearsed, because we’ve done this before… Sometimes it feels like the divide is just a little too wide to know how to work through things together. We’re stuck culturally and as a society. How do we get unstuck? Can we get past ideologies that fit on a bumper sticker or internet meme and understand each other? Despite our differences, and the real problems that sit at the center, are there some real things that we can learn from each other?

Where Do We Go From Here? – Martin Luther King Jr
We also referenced Paul Schroeder’s book, Practice Makes Purpose. Check it out at SixPractices.com

In this episode, we talk with Paul Schroeder, author of Practice Makes Purpose: Six Spiritual Practices that Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Community. Paul is a social entrepreneur, author, and spiritual teacher who has spent over 20 years working at the intersection of spirituality and social change. He served for more than a decade as a Greek Orthodox priest. After a divorce and a period of personal and spiritual crisis, Paul left the priesthood and founded New City Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to helping people who experience poverty and homelessness achieve their full human potential.

Learn more about the book at SixPractices.com

Just a couple of weeks ago, not far from us here in Rochester, there was a bombing at a mosque in Bloomington, MN. And less than a week ago, white supremacists and Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, VA held a violent demonstration. In the last couple of days a death threat was posted on the video of our Sandbox live event featuring our friend Regina Mustafa.

Where do we go from here? How do we deal with our perception that this is bigger than we can fix? And how might conversation be a launching point for real solutions?

In today’s episode, we talk about language. In its simplest form, language is made up of words that we use to express something. But from cultural context, personal experience, external pressures, the message is rarely if ever cleanly sent and perfectly understood. Sometimes we think we are communicating in prose, but more often than not, it’s poetry filled with metaphor, innuendo, and inflection. It’s a wonder we can say anything at all.

Lyle Beckman is a night minister with the San Francisco Night Ministry, a ministry that provides care, counseling, referrals, and crisis intervention to anyone in any kind of distress, every night of the year between 10pm and 4 am. Every night for 52 years, a night minister has been out there, walking the streets with the job of caring for the people who are out when most people have gone in. Lyle has served as a night minister since 2004.

While we were in San Fransisco last summer, we had the opportunity to talk with Chuck Lewis and Joanne Chadwick. Chuck is a retired pastor and night minister. Jo is also retired after a career working in the church, at the YWCA and in suicide prevention. They’ve both worked in support of peace and justice for many years to make their communities and our world a better place to live. Now, both in their 80’s, they reflect a bit on where they’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed.

Roger Wolsey is the director of the Wesley Foundation United Methodist Campus Ministry at University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s also a writer, and the author of Kissing Fish, an introduction to progressive Christianity. We talked with Roger a bit about his book and other ways of interpreting the Christian tradition.

If you’d like to learn more about Kissing Fish, visit ProgressiveChristianityBook.com or find it on Facebook.

On May 7, 2017 Sandbox Cooperative welcomed Drew G. I. Hart to the Sandbox stage. This podcast contains the Q&A portion of the evening event.

Drew is a professor at Messiah College with ten years of pastoral experience. He studied Biblical Studies at Messiah College, he attained his MDiv with an urban concentration from Biblical Seminary, and he recently received his PhD in theology and ethics from Lutheran Theological Seminary-Philadelphia. His work has included pastoring in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, working for an inner-city afterschool program, leading anti-racism workshops, adjunct teaching, and doing public theology. His dissertation explored the overlaps of white supremacy and Western Christendom and how Black theology and Anabaptism aid us in untangling our lives from these realities.

His book, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism, utilizes everyday stories, Jesus-shaped theological ethics, and anti-racism frameworks to transform the church’s understanding and witness. Hart’s blog is hosted at The Christian Century and he speaks regularly across the country. Drew and his family recently moved from Philly to Harrisburg, PA.

More about Drew at DrewGIHart.com, @DruHart, Drew Hart on Facebook

On May 7, 2017 Sandbox Cooperative welcomed Drew G. I. Hart to the Sandbox stage.

Drew is a professor at Messiah College with ten years of pastoral experience. He studied Biblical Studies at Messiah College, he attained his MDiv with an urban concentration from Biblical Seminary, and he recently received his PhD in theology and ethics from Lutheran Theological Seminary-Philadelphia. His work has included pastoring in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, working for an inner-city afterschool program, leading anti-racism workshops, adjunct teaching, and doing public theology. His dissertation explored the overlaps of white supremacy and Western Christendom and how Black theology and Anabaptism aid us in untangling our lives from these realities.

His book, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism, utilizes everyday stories, Jesus-shaped theological ethics, and anti-racism frameworks to transform the church’s understanding and witness. Hart’s blog is hosted at The Christian Century and he speaks regularly across the country. Drew and his family recently moved from Philly to Harrisburg, PA.

More about Drew at DrewGIHart.com, @DruHart, Drew Hart on Facebook

All of this week we’re sharing responses to the question we asked each of our guests on our road trip: “If you could tell everyone in the world one thing (not that they would necessarily agree, but they would listen), what would it be?”

In the last part of this mini-series, we talk with Samir Selmanovic. Samir is an executive life coach in New York City who helps others master the alchemy of creativity, compassion, and courage in the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds, adding meaning to their success. Samir is also the co-leader of a Christian community called CityLights, and serves on the interfaith relations commission for the United States National Council of Churches.