Feminist cleric plans 3 days of events

As a feminist theologian and Christian writer, the Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock is committed to certain ideals, including respect for all people regardless of gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation or education.
Brock plans to share her ideas on how to create more just communities and a more peaceful world in a series of talks at St. Mark's Presbyterian Church beginning Friday.
Brock, 58, is the founding director of Faith Voices for the Common Good and is a visiting scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. She was a professor of religion and women's studies for 20 years at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn.
She has lectured worldwide and is a member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, a global organization of liberation theologians. Brock's latest book is titled "Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire."
Here are excerpts from a recent interview with Brock:
Tell us a few things about yourself. Did you grow up in a religious home? Are your beliefs a reflection of what your family taught you?
I was raised in a Jodo Shinshyu Buddhist family in Fukuoka, Japan, until I was 6. My mother, Ayako, was trained as a nurse by the (American) Red Cross after World War II and met my Puerto Rican father, Clemente Morales, who was a U.S. soldier. He was sent to Korea when I was 6 months old, so I did not know he existed until I was 33. My mother married another soldier, Roy Brock, when I was 3. He brought us to the U.S. when I was 6, where I learned English and dropped my mother tongue.
My mother was baptized a Christian when I was in college. Roy was from rural Mississippi and raised Southern Baptist, though he rebelled and became more generally mainline Protestant because of the military chaplains we knew. I was baptized when I was 16 by a conservative Baptist minister, though I never accepted his fundamentalist kind of Christianity — I liked and believed in evolution. I also refused to think my Japanese family was "lost."
While English is now the one language I speak fluently, my thinking brain was shaped by the structures and worldview of Japanese, a language I have studied and forgotten twice. I think it, and my immersion in a Buddhist family, have shaped the way I orient to reality and think.
What inspired you to become a Christian scholar? An author?
In college at Chapman University, I was an anti-racism activist. The student leaders I most admired all told me to take a class called Literature of the Old Testament. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be the best class I had in college. It gave me an intellectual, inquiring — and deeply inspiring — alternative to the fundamentalism I rejected in high school.
Throughout my education and my career as a professor, I maintained my activist interests in justice and peace work, since they had inspired my study of religion. When I became a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine and immersed myself in feminist ideas, the patriarchy of virtually all religions became a major focus of my work. I originally thought I would do a feminist study of Buddhist-Christian dialogue but decided, because I am a Christian, my greatest contribution would be working deeply in my own tradition to transform its patriarchy.
Please tell us a bit about your latest book, "Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire."
It shows how, for four millennia, the idea of paradise, as the best human life on Earth can be, has inspired counterimperial strategies that resist injustice, war and destruction of life-sustaining powers. My co-author, Rebecca Parker, and I focus especially on the visual images and the biblical, theological and liturgical traditions of the first millennium of Christianity, which believed salvation was baptism into paradise in this life, most fully realized in the church. We demonstrate that the idea that Jesus' crucifixion saved the world is a second millennium idea of European Christianity. It emerged to support imperial conquest and became war propaganda.
Our intent in writing the book was to show that Christianity was once a life-affirming, this-worldly tradition. We can reclaim this truth for a time that needs a new value system that affirms love of beauty and the Earth, a commitment to the common good, and joy in the simple pleasures of a sustainable, decent life for all.
What are the greatest challenges people face today in terms of spirituality?
I think the two greatest challenges are the use of religion to justify violence and war, and the false notion that individual salvation — or personal spirituality without a community — is possible. We are all in this together.
How do you define Jesus? Do you see Jesus as a revolutionary figure?
I believe Jesus was the incarnation of the spirit of God in human flesh in this way: Jesus, a Jew, followed the paradise-based justice-and-mercy traditions of the prophets, who condemned imperial oppressions and wars. In being faithful to God as the core goodness of his tradition and his life, Jesus revealed to others the spiritual power in him that no human political system could destroy. Using that power, he organized a non-violent movement of resistance to imperial oppression, which is why the Romans crucified him.
His movement followed a value system whose God cared for the poor and condemned unjust rulers. Jesus revealed how communities united together in love incarnate God in human flesh. Communities gathered to remember him draw courage from the same spiritual power that was in him to resist systems of injustice and violence, and continue his work of justice, healing and mercy.
from:http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/280512