It took me several months to read Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (1996) both because I was in the midst of school and other obligations as well as the fact that it is a work best read slowly. Here is my review and reflection on the work. The short version is that this dense and complex book is perhaps the most challenging and necessary work I’ve read in years. Volf tackles the topic of violence that occurs along race and ethnic lines that is often legitimized through divine invocations. What are its sources? Why does it happen? And what is the Christian response? The issue is particualrly relevant to Volf whose native Croatia was coming out of a long ethnic conflict with Serbia as he wrote the book. Volf opens the book recounting that after he presented a lecture on his theology of embrace, his friend and mentor Jürgen Moltmann asked him if he could embrace a četnik.

It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called “četnik” had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a četnik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. “No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.” (9)

It is in this setting that Volf begins his deeply personal, heavily philosophical, and powerfuly theological exploration. The hope for Volf is in the gospel of God’s history of salvation, but pat answers will not do. As I read this book, it gave me new lenses to see the world. Films I watched, books I read, and news reports I heard were filtered through and placed in the conversation Volf begins in Exclusion and Embrace. The book never flinches from diving into the hard questions and often comes up with harder answers. It is a book I wish everyone would read, but I know that it is too challenging and complex for a general audience—I often had to read paragraphs several times to understand the intricacies of Volf’s arguments. Perhaps we can hope that he will at least come out with a more popular version of this work that is frighteningly relevant in our world that is bursting at the seams with ethnic, religious, and idelogical conflict.

For the longer review, click below.

According to an MSNBC story:

Challenging some of their peers, dozens of evangelical Christian leaders on Wednesday issued a “call to action” on global warming — urging governments, companies and individuals to reduce fossil fuel emissions that many scientists tie to warmer temperatures.

“Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors,” the group said in its statement.

You can find out more about the group, read the statement, and view the signatories here. Some of the leaders include Rick Warren, Ron Sider, David Gushee, Andy Crouch, Jack Hayford, Richard Stearns, and Brian McLaren. I find this exciting. Sadly, however, many other influential evangelical leaders refuse to take a similar stand.

The move came after nearly two dozen evangelical leaders urged the National Association of Evangelicals to avoid taking a similar stand.

In a recent letter to the association, those leaders opposed any official position because, they said, evangelicals “disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.”

Those signers included: James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family; Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University; Donald Wildmon, head the American Family Association; and the Rev. Louis Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Carey and I drove to Phoenix on Monday and back last night so she could take another look at a hospital she’s considering for residency and so I could acquaint myself with the city. All this travelling has been exhausting, but I have had a chance to do a bunch of reading. I finally finished Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. I also read George Barna’s short work Revolution. (Reviews for both books coming soon.) For pleasure, I read Jeffrey Eugenedes’ The Virgin Suicides—a well-written, strange, and haunting novel. One of my favorite lines: “She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”