Values That Promote Reconciliation: Prayer for South Sudan, Day 4

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and Reconciliation, Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul, Faith J. H. McDonnell, forgiveness, inclusivity, Independence Day, National Day of Prayer for Healing, peacebuilding, pluralism, reconciliation, Social Justice, South Sudan, South Sudan Independence

Working for peace, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation in South Sudan (Photo credit: Catholic Relief Services)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

It is the morning of July 4 in Virginia as I write, America’s Independence Day. But in South Sudan the fourth day of the National Prayer for Reconciliation is coming to a close. South Sudan will celebrate its own independence on Tuesday, July 9. The National Prayer for Reconciliation is an effort to ensure that the baby nation grows well and strong and prosperous.

In the working paper of the Committee for National Healing, Peace, and Reconciliation, the Most Rev. Daniel Deng Bul, the Archbishop of Sudan and South Sudan (Episcopal Church of Sudan) outlines the values that will guide the way to reconciliation of the various people groups in South Sudan. The core values that foster healing, peace, and reconciliation are pluralism, inclusivity, peacemaking, social justice, forgiveness, healing, atonement, and sovereignty. Here is a closer look at the first four, and during Day 5 the last four will be explored:

• Pluralism – the working paper explains that “pluralism means that we seek unity in the midst of diversity.” South Sudan has learned the value of pluralism the hard way, by being under the oppression of the Islamist regime in Sudan which respects neither religious, ethnic, nor racial diversity. “Ethnic and cultural diversity should be seen as a gift from God: to be a blessing, to be part of the richness of human experience, and to be celebrated,” explains the working paper. It warns, however, that “we must be honest in saying that diversity has its limits, which must be defined by every society in terms of the range of tolerable deviation from the norm.”
• Inclusivity – with wisdom derived from a Biblical understanding of justice and compassion, the Archbishop’s working paper explains, “Compassionate inclusion means that we seek to overcome hostility by the practice of  unconditional love toward others, including one’s enemies.” It adds that “compassionate inclusion requires a willingness on our part to confront our own hostility toward “the other.””
• Peacemaking – The paper says that “communities and nations are made-up of weak, fallible, broken human beings, who have an inherent tendency toward conflict.” This is part of our human nature and therefore it is assumed that conflict is “an ever-present reality.” Rather than ask how to avoid conflict, we should ask how to resolve conflict without violence.
• Social Justice – The working paper defines faith-based social justice as seeking “the common good through transformation of the soul of a community.” It continues to explain that social justice is inherently tied to issues of privilege, land, and economics. “Faith-based social justice means that there is a moral grain to the universe established by God which governs human relationships and structures,” the paper says.

Please pray that as the many people groups of South Sudan wrestle with this critical issue of nation-wide healing and reconciliation that they will embrace these values and make South Sudan a shining example of reconciliation to the whole world.

Trinitarian Pluralism versus Postmodern Dissonance

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Catholic, George Weigel, pluralism

By Mark Tooley (follow on twitter @markdtooley)

IRD emeritus board member George Weigel in a recent commencement address has an excellent insight about true pluralism in God’s order of creation versus the incoherent, post-modern, discordant pluralism that plagues secular society and much of the liberal church.

Truth is symphonic. Fragmentation and disintegration are among the chief characteristics of our intellectual life today: Everything is in bits and pieces; nothing fits together; there is no “frame” in which the parts can be composed into a whole. Little wonder that cynicism, skepticism, and irony are prominent features in our 21st-century Western culture. In the face of all that, the Catholic intellectual tradition insists that, amidst real plurality, there is also pluralism: a symphony of truth in which the various instruments by which we apprehend what is true and good and beautiful play together melodiously, not in a cacophony of dissonance. And that which forms plurality into pluralism, individuals into community, fragments of intellectual stone into a cosmatesque mosaic of symphonic truth, is love: the love which is the basis of the unity of the Church; the ecclesial love, itself an expression of Trinitarian love, in which the world may glimpse the unity for which it yearns, but which it never finds on its own.

In contrast to this harmonious symphony of truth that Weigel identifies, the liberal church often celebrates a “cacophony of dissonance,” in which each individual or interest group demands affirmation of his/its own self understanding, politically, theologically, sexually, socially, etc. The only instrument banned from the discordant symphony of liberal post modernism is the one that heralds a universal truth that unifies the whole. That truth, from the church’s orthodox, apostolic perspective, also redeems the whole, and is modeled, as Weigel notes, by the symphonic pluralism of The Trinity, whose Three Persons are distinct, separate and vocationally unique, yet in complete accord within the Godhead.

Maybe it’s no accident that the liberal church often defaults toward an unconscious Unitarianism. Liberal church pluralists too frequently cannot conceive of a divine harmony embodied in the authentic pluralism of The Trinity. Maybe orthodox believers need to cite Weigel’s description of this Trinitarian vision and expression of love. And maybe we should even exploit his wonderful citation of a “cosmatesque mosaic of symphonic truth.”