Sunday, January 6, 2008

"Sundays" are for Volf - Interlude

My "younger" (older) sister drew my attention to this example of Volf putting the theory he develops in Exclusion and Embrace into practice. Volf is listed as one of the authors of, "Loving God and Neighbor Together," a Christian response to the Muslim open letter, "A Common Word Between Us and You." But since Volf heads up the Yale Center for Faith and Culture that published the response, I suspect he is its primary author.

At any rate, Volf's involvement in the response takes on added significance when you remember that he is a Croatian, and that Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in which Muslims played a role. (I could make this point a lot stronger if I could equate Muslim Serbs with the cetnik fighters Volf describes as his enemies in the preface to Exclusion and Embrace, but I confess that I remain baffled by the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.)

This post is an interlude, since I haven't read the chapter in Volf's Exclusion and Embrace for this week. There are three more chapters to go, and they all look good: "Oppression and Justice," "Deception and Truth," and "Violence and Peace." We'll see what happens next week. I fear that between being a dad and preparing for classes, I will have time for little else.

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