Relating Beyond Our Differences

In her 1984 work, Sister Outsider, author and poet Audre Lorde writes:

...we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.

How has the Church responded to human/cultural differences in these three ways (ignore, copy, destroy)? How might the Church develop new patterns by which relationships between different people groups can be fostered?

Meaning Beyond Nihilism

Race Matters was written one year after the Los Angeles riots of 1993. In his book Professor Cornel West addresses issues of race relations that still need treatment today. West gives sharp assessment of racial distictives in America as well as the systems, morality (or lack of), and history that have perpetuated a discord between different people groups.

While many factors pose a hindrance to race relations, West underscores the destructive nature of Nihilism to the person and to the larger community.

West writes: Nihilism is the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world...In fact, the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather nihilistic threat-that is, loss of hope an absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

What does it mean for someone to say that their life "has meaning"? How is "meaning" found? As people of hope, how do we live lives so that meaning is preserved of all people?

Addicted to the Market

In Cornel West's Race Matters. West makes a poignant commentary on the individualism we experience in excess as Westerners. West writes:

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such a sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience...The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and in mind.

What has the "market way of life" cost us as human beings? What has been lost by way of community (from promotion of "self" to a deep seated fear of those different than us)? How does living the Kingdom look different than living the market?