Dear visionaries,
John’s post (with regard to the substance of it) was right on the money. As we are fond of saying in our circles, theology comes out your fingertips — and whatever comes out your fingertips is your theology. Please remember that the issue that prompted all this debate was the fact that our school district came within a whisker of having to close one of the government schools (that’s what they are, so why not say so?). If present trends continue, and it looks as though they might, this will remain a highly significant community issue. Why is all this happening? There is no way to answer the question accurately without addressing the theological underpinnings in the minds of many that have caused the exodus from the government schools (“Why do you keep calling them that? Pravda was actually a public newspaper!”)
The one place where I think John missed the point was in his suggestion that we wanted to shuffle this debate off into a tiny corner, as though the centrality of these issues were not self-evident. Actually, we think the debate needs to happen, and happen publicly. But we also know that the ethos of university-town-liberalism tends to be highly provincial and insular, and people frequently do not take well to genuine diversity in public discourse. We simply do not want to offend anyone unnecessarily. But when it comes to our reasons for not allowing our children to be indoctrinated in the tenets of a religion alien to ours, giving offense has become unfortunately unavoidable.
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.