Worth Reading

Jonathan Merrit, of RNS, the Religious News Service, recently interviewed Lillian Daniel.
Lilian Daniel is a UCC minister and a frequent author of the Daily Devotional. She is also the author of
When "Spiritual but Not Religious" Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church. The Seekers read and discussed this book earlier this summer.

You can read the interview here. It's worth reading. Rev. Daniels can be thought provoking but abrasive. In the interview she says


"Any idiot can find God alone in the sunset. It takes a certain maturity to find God in the person sitting next to you who not only voted for the wrong political party but has a baby who is crying while you’re trying to listen to the sermon. Community is where the religious rubber meets the road. People challenge us, ask hard questions, disagree, need things from us, require our forgiveness. It’s where we get to practice all the things we preach."


- See more at: http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/08/13/answering-the-spiritual-but-religious-an-interview-with-lillian-daniel/?ref=leaderboard#sthash.ExsToKaV.dpuf


After you read the interview, you might want to read the discussion in the comments. There is even a response by David Hayward on the NakedPastor blog.  He says

"The SBNR [Spiritual But Not Religious] people I know are not a homogeneous whole but a diverse diaspora. For the most part, the ones I know are humble but confident. They are unusually deep and find ingenious ways of dealing with difficult situations. They are spiritually complex and fascinating. They hunger for a community they’ve concluded the church cannot seem to provide. They are fiercely and even defiantly independent. And they quit the church because they felt restricted, controlled or even harmed by the system, its ideology and the people who govern and administer them."

Read the blog posts. See what you think. And comment here or on one of those blogs.

--Julia