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Chaplains' Office Stories

Posts from January, 2014

Spiritual Journeys: The Complexity of “Living Communities”

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This is the day for spiritual journeys in the Chaplain’s Office. Spiritual Journeys is a blockly event held in Sacred Grounds that invites people to gather together and listen to a member of the CC community talk about their personal journey and how their life and work have affected where they are today. On this grand day we listened to Devaka Premawardhana, the new professor of Global Christianities in the CC Department of Religion. He wove an eloquent and beautiful story of how his academia has intertwined with his understanding of his personal journey. It raised a number of exciting questions in the room, such as how does surrender of self work in an academic sense? How does one reconcile the sometimes paradoxical relationship between living, active religious communities and the written theses and doctrine that scholars often use as categorical markers of their faith? What is the witness to these stories that a scholar means to undertake?

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation was about the nature of living communities. How are our assumptions, presuppositions, and categorization of different communities challenged when we actually enter those communities? Even within our smaller Colorado College community, what complications will be stirred up when we stop observing categorically from afar and actually break into the nuanced, complex, living world of people? I’m not sure, but I know it’s exciting. Stay alive and complicated everyone.

Cheers.

Ben Grund, Chaplain’s Intern.

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