A Sound of Sheer Silence

1.  The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I spent a week in Tallahassee, Florida at an event called Boys' State.  It was put on by the American Legion (an association of foreign war veterans), and it was a government/civics-oriented thing.  The highlight, at least for me, was that you could get yourself "elected" to various positions in a faux state government, and then form up and go through the motions of being legislators and other politicians.  I got "elected" to the State Senate, and we deliberated in the actual Florida State Senate chambers, voted on proposed legislation, and all the rest.  I "served" the State Senate with my (still to this day) close friend Justin (now Father Justin, the Russian Orthodox priest), and we had a grand old time. In addition to the legislative stuff, there was a great deal of, well, political content, for lack of a better term.  The biggest part of this was that we all had to prepare "Am...

A quick sort-of digression, and then to my main point.  I am part of the formation of a new religious community within the Episcopal Church, known as the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (CMMR).  It will be officially founded in September, and I will be saying much more about it in these electronic pages in the coming months.  There are numerous reasons why I am excited about this project, but one of them is how clear the theological vision behind the community is.  If you could summarize the charism for this community down to one sentence, it would be that "a fundamental component of the Christian message is opposition to Empire in all of its forms, and our mission is to equip and form disciples in resistance to Empire." Which of course raises the question--"what do you mean by 'Empire'?"  At the risk of defining something in relation to some other complex concept, I would say that "Empire" is a synonym for Rene Girard's concept of ...