{"id":222,"date":"2015-01-24T10:25:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T10:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2015\/01\/breathing-room-the-legacy-of-marcus-borg.html"},"modified":"2015-04-29T19:38:49","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T00:38:49","slug":"breathing-room-legacy-of-marcus-borg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2015\/01\/breathing-room-legacy-of-marcus-borg.html","title":{"rendered":"Breathing Room: the Legacy of Marcus Borg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Listen, I don\u2019t have a wildly inspiring story about the time I met Marcus Borg, or how one of his books saved me, precisely, from abandoning the church altogether. I did hear him speak once. From the FRONT ROW. And he was gracious, and engaging, and challenging, and yes, inspiring. But I never met him in person. The internet will be full of those stories today\u2014testimony from those who knew him well, or met him briefly at a critical time in their life of faith, and were transformed by both his work and his way of being. I won\u2019t try to tell that story.<\/span><\/p>\n

But here\u2019s what I can tell: Marcus Borg was the leading edge<\/a> of Progressive Christianity, before we ever even had words like Progressive Christianity. Today, at the sad news of his death, many of us are mindful that he gave us the lexicon for this journey.<\/p>\n

Some members of our fearless worship team spent some time last Sunday cleaning out that dreaded corner of the church known as \u201cThe Worship Closet.\u201d (shivers). If your church has such an area\u2014and I promise you, it does\u2014you know the horrors of going through years of stuff and junk and things. You are not just sifting through dust (and possible bat\/mouse leavings), you are literally moving through the church\u2019s history. Seasons of change; loss and heartbreak, hope and growth, all wrapped up with old paraments, drippy purple candles, maybe some unidentified scraps of fabric. They were certainly beautiful, once. Everything in that corner was certainly useful, meaningful, lifegiving. Once.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
What Marcus Borg did with his life was the systematic, sometimes tedious, but ultimately crucial work: of going through the Church\u2019s closet. But whereas my church has about 12 years\u2019 worth of stuff piled in that corner, he had to go through the detritus of a couple millennia. He shook the dust off of the Church\u2019s most deeply held beliefs, drug them out into the light of day, and was not afraid to say\u2026 Where did this come from? Who gave it to us? Is it true, and does it matter?<\/span><\/div>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen, I don\u2019t have a wildly inspiring story about the time I met Marcus Borg, or how one of his books saved me, precisely, from abandoning the church altogether. I did hear him speak once. From the FRONT ROW. And he was gracious, and engaging, and challenging, and yes, inspiring. But I never met him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBreathing Room: the Legacy of Marcus Borg<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Listen, I don\u2019t have a wildly inspiring story about the time I met Marcus Borg, or how one of his books saved me, precisely, from abandoning the church\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2015\/01\/breathing-room-legacy-of-marcus-borg.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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