A Matter of Scripture and Faith

This weekend was the inagural Piedmont College Conference on Religion and the Liberal Arts held at our Athens campus. As part of the planning group, I can safely say that the response to this was overwhelming. Originally, we thought it would be great if 75-80 folks were in attendance. I think there were more than 150 people in attendance.

Barbara Brown Taylor was the keynote speaker - with presentations on Friday night and Saturday morning - and preacher at the worship service on Saturday afternoon. Barbara selected the theme for the conference and used the Flannery O'Connor description of the South as "Christ-haunted."

My workshop, added within the last very few weeks due to the escalating registration, centered on the human qualities found within the sacred texts of other religious traditions. I think it went well. There were 29 in the morning session and 25 in the afternoon. I had a couple of participants who wanted me to deal with questions of salvation, which I avoided because that was not the subject of the workshop.

One of the participants defined truth in very Christological terms. Essentially, this person said that "truth" was a person, Jesus the Christ; therefore, this person does not think about the truth content in other religious traditions. That viewpoint raises many questions for me. Like, what does that say about the doctrinal and teaching content of religious traditions, including Christianity? And, how does one with this view have any productive and respectful interaction with an adherent of another faith? And, how does this deal with the same spiritual principles expressed in other religions before they were articulated in Christianity?

Ah well, as I expressed in the workshop, these are all questions that will take much honest dialogue to begin to resolve.