liturgy after charlotteville
The following are the brief remarks I made at Immanuel Church on the Sunday after the White Nationalist rally in Charlotteville, Virginia
I don’t have many words because, frankly, I’m embarrassed and broken hearted. For most of the weekend, as I saw report after report as to what had happened, my emotions went back and forth between sadness and infuriation. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because I have been predicting this stuff for a long time now, but I was still flabbergasted that what I was watching could be happening in my country in the year 2017.
A Liturgy of Peace
I wanted to put this out before it moved from the front of my thinking. A few of us have been very concerned about the increase in violent activity in our city (here is a different recent post about this). The question I have been grappling with is what is the church’s response to such issues. To be honest, the complexity of urban violence is beyond me. What can be done? What can I do? I am not sure.
Liv Larson AndrewsOne thing we (Eric Blauer and Liv Larson Andrews) arrived at was we did not want to become desensitized to how these brutal acts fractured shalom. I believe many Americans are becoming fatigued by the constant cascade
of news of this kind; that they are in a way de-selecting it for their possible choices of issues to be concerned about.