The Official Sport of the Slow Church Movement

May 17, 2012 By John Pattison 1 Comment

I think baseball should be the official sport of the Slow Church movement.

I love baseball. When I can, I listen to or watch games at home. I read books about baseball. (I’m currently reading Bruce Weber’s magnificent As They See ‘Em: Travels in the Land of Umpires.) I play catch or wiffle ball at home with my daughter. And I like to take in games at the high school, the local short-season single-A team, and even the very occasional big league game. The two things I have most on mind these days are Slow Church and baseball. Here is my first, albeit ham-fisted (and self-indulgent!), attempt to connect the two. [Read more...]

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There Are No Unsacred Places

May 6, 2012 By John Pattison 2 Comments

My pastor, Bob Henry, read this wonderful blog post this morning at Silverton Friends Church. The post is called “The Hill” and it was written by Mike Huber, pastor of West Hills Friends, a Quaker meeting in Portland. The blog post reminds me of something Wendell Berry wrote in a poem called “How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)”:

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

The apostle Paul says followers of Jesus are ambassadors of reconciliation. That reconciliation work extends to – and is perhaps even rooted in – our particular places. Thus, part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to re-sacralize the desecrated places, as well as to resist the spread of “non-places” (to borrow a term from the Slow City movement) that are the byproducts of fast life. [Read more...]

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The Taste of the Place

April 29, 2012 By John Pattison 1 Comment

One of the keys to understanding Slow Church is captured in the seventeenth-century French phrase le goût de terroir, which can be translated “the taste of the place.”

Carlo Petrini, co-founder of the Slow Food movement, writes often about terroir as “the combination of natural factors (soil, water, slope, height above sea level, vegetation, microclimate) and human ones (tradition and practice and cultivation) that gives a unique character to each small agricultural locality and the food grown, raised, made, and cooked there.” Thus, a Pinot noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley takes on the taste and texture of the grape, the soil, the barrel, and the late frost. Milk, it turns out, is also highly sensitive to terroir, according to a fascinating and slightly terrifying article on raw milk in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

In the same way that food and wine take on the taste of the place, Slow Church is rooted in the natural, human, and spiritual cultures of particular places. Slow Church is a distinctively local expression of the global body of Christ. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). [Read more...]

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The Moral Importance of the iPhone

April 28, 2012 By John Pattison 3 Comments

In a 2007 interview with Arthur Boers, the philosopher Albert Borgmann makes the case that television is of moral importance. Borgmann says: “When I teach my ethics course I tell these relatively young people that the most important decision that they’ll make about their household is first whether they’re going to get a television and then second where they’re going to put it.”

I think for my generation and for the generation coming after mine, the questions could probably be amended to (a) “Are you going to get a smartphone?” and (b) “If so, what limits are you going to place on its use?”

These are questions I’m asking myself right now too. I have an iPhone. Am I going to keep it? If so, how should I limit its use? To use a science fiction metaphor, the iPhone is a kind of portal, one that can cause me to be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually distant, even when I’m physically present. How often do I want to have that portal open?

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