Eric has a well articulated, and as I read it, passionate plea for Christians to stop placing so much trust and awe in what our liberal democracy has been presenting to us as “the public square”.   I left a comment. 

One of the highlights that Eric raises,  is summed up nicely in a quote from William Cavanaugh (I assume this is embedded in the essay you identified,  The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,  which I suppose I will have to read after,  or maybe during my read of Graham Ward’s Cities of God  (which was scary in the beginning,  in the introduction,  because I found myself totally lost,  thinking “Oh my gosh,  is this going to be how densely he writes?”, but the chapters starting with 1 have been much more intellectually palatable,  and refreshingly sociological as well as theological).  ….

anyway,  back to my point about Eric’s points,  the Cavanaugh line:

So, as Cavanaugh puts it, instead of being a Church-facing people, we Christians have instead become a stateward-facing people.

Source: Eric’s Tasty Morsels of Thought

Amen to that.  Eric’s post effectively elaborates on that.  I mentioned to Eric in my comments on his post that this was an encouraging thing to read on yet another Sunday morning when I am “churchless” and at home,  looking at and responding to blogs.  Sounds strangely ironic that I am encouraged by talk and calls to be “church-facing” while NOT going,  but I find in times like these, that short of going out “church shopping” again (Which I haven’t given up on , by the way),  that diving into conversations around such things gives me renewed hope that there are such people emitting such conversation and such a desire to see embodied such a people and be formed by such a message.  I was just reading a comment Eric made on his pastor’s blog back in September of 2005:

sometimes these virtual spaces do good to remind me of the church catholic in ways I wouldn’t ordinarily receive.

Yes.   This is the main good I derive from blogs,  particularly when I ‘m not finding face to face conversations like this (except in rare occasions like a trip to Kansas City).  Such a church beckons,  and I also get it in “putting out there” my reflections on such things as “Becoming the Authentic Church” which I have transferred into an independent set of pages here (under “Church of the Saviour” in the tabs in the header of this blog, below a quote from that booklet written by Gordon Cosby and Kayla McClurg of the Church of the Saviour churches. 

But I know that I have a journey ahead that requires an embodied, corporate support (remember,  like I said yesterday,  this “corporate support” is the body called to be God’s people,  into which we are called to be “incorporated”;  joined;  formed.