A Dwelling Place for Social Justice
“Old scholars don’t die, they just get re-shelved.” This parody of General MacArthur’s quote regarding old soldiers came to me as I was literally moving the 10,000 volumes of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice (CLBSJ), to make room for the latest addition of 1000 volumes from half a dozen donors, each volume with its proper place according to the Library of Congress cataloguing system.
“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!” Psa. 84:1 The notion of sacred places generally makes for good religion but poor theology. Great stories such as the one of the burning bush, Peniel, and the Mount of Olives, offer wonderful and metaphors, but what do they draw us toward? What makes a conference center hosted library for example, or a sanctuary, a dwelling place, sacred spaces?
There needs to be a table, a book, a bed; someone to share the meal with, to discuss the book with, and to inspire a night’s reflection full of sustenance and good questions. Then the experience must send you back into the world better prepared to make a difference through word, action, servant leadership, and by example.
The Center and Library, in its fifth year, is an asset of the Stony Point Conference Center (SPC) in Stony Point, New York, and a resource for its Community of Living Traditions (CLT), as well as Stony Point’s thousands of guests each year. A growing number of those guests arrive precisely to use the library as a repository of accumulated wisdom, or to write sermons, prepare papers, or research monographs. This is why it is here and it’s so very satisfying.
The Conference Center grounds offer an interesting mix of uses from cradle to grave, including a day care center that operates independently of SPC year round to a stand of bamboo that marks a memorial garden where ashes are interred from time to time. However, the bulk of its use is dedicated to spiritual growth and development ranging from scholastic to the mystical. And its particular, perhaps unique, character is the multi-faith nature of its resident staff and guests.
The resident staff is an intentional community of two dozen Christians, Jews, and Muslims who chose to live together, delivering radical hospitality as the serving staff of the conference site as they explore the nature of their traditions and its commitment to principles and practices of nonviolence. At the same time, they examine their inner lives and the outer world through these lenses and decide collectively where and how to intervene in social justice work. As walkers on the same path, they mix freely with guests and sojourners serving as both a sounding board to bounce ideas off of and as a living concordance for testing interpretations of scripture.
Like any conference center, there are managers, marketers, housekeepers, groundskeepers, cooks, dishwashers, electricians, plumbers, people who set up program spaces, and people who drive vehicles. However, uniquely so, at SPC Center and Library there is also a farmer whose workers use an acre of its grounds, which were once a working rural farm, to grow enough food to support the vegetarian part of the dining hall menu throughout the year. The farm is a reminder to all that food production and distribution is the stomach of social justice throughout the world.
The Center and Library staff is not only multi-faith, but are also multi-cultural, both ethnically and gender-wise. They are multi-talented and multi-curious as well using arts, writing, speaking, music and organizational skills to deepen sensibilities about the roots of injustice and reveal paths toward reconciliation and restoration, which gives testament to the scope of the holdings in the library and its purpose in being located at SPC. The library is located in what was once the “Readers’ Service” of the United Presbyterian Church USA. Now the building houses CLBSJ, a separate collection of 1000 texts of the Muslim Peace Fellowship led by campus Chaplin, Rabia Terri Harris, and a media studio dedicated to creating content built on the Community of Living Traditions’ activities.
The Library and Center are the inspired creation of three retired scholars, Herman Waetjen, John H. Elliott, and former New York Theological Seminary Professor Norman Gottwald. As young scholars during the Vietnam War and in the emergent years of Latin American liberation theology, they were activists in the streets of Oakland San Francisco and on their own campuses. As their uses of their own libraries narrowed to a few lifelong passions, the larger collections became available for a new home. When combined with the core volumes from the Readers’ Service, a library of CLT co-founder Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, and the transfer of current executive director Mark Johnson (former director of The Fellowship of Reconciliation USA), the library quickly grew from 2000 to 4000 to 6000 volumes.
When Walter Wink died in 2012 his partner June Keener Wink gave his 1250 volume library to CLBSJ. Another 40 donors have brought the current collection to nearly 11,000 volumes searchable on line: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/clbsj. As a research facility, the books are available for use on site, a great excuse for an extended stay as a sojourner at the Center: http://stonypointcenter.org/book-a-room/personal-retreats.
The Center and Library would not have found a home at SPC without the equally inspired, if fortuitous, friendship between Ched Myers of the Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries and Rick Ufford-Chase, co-director of SPC with Kitty Ufford-Chase. Rick recognized the character of the space and campus as perfect for CLBSJ, and Ched coined the board’s mission- defining motto, “Making biblical studies and social analysis accessible to the seminary, the sanctuary, and the streets.” The deepening interest and capacity of an emerging generation of seminary students, faculty, those in the pulpit, and those in the streets to explore the intersection of scholarship and activism, informs a growing range of programs housed in the Center including a conference scheduled for October: www.clbsj.org.
In the 21st Century, the work of activists in the field of social justice has become increasingly intersectional. The environmental work of creation care, for example, has become more attentive to and involved with the issues of race and economic justice, rooted in the wisdom of indigenous communities and engaging a rising generation of justice seekers. The work has also become decidedly multi-faith in character and focus.
Biblical scholarship has become increasingly well grounded in the physical and social sciences, a benchmark of the work of founders of the CLBSJ. Solidarity in the search for social justice has brought seminary students and faculty back into the streets and activists have sought to deepen their understanding of the relationship between faith and justice by entering seminaries and graduate programs or writing for broad public consumption.
On occasion, religious leaders lift up calls for peace and justice. Here and there the steps of legislatures and courts are also platforms for witnessing and resistance from civil society and communities of faith on various issues. Yet there are few opportunities for a purposeful gathering of scholars and activists to discuss their shared commitments and understanding. Not all who stand in solidarity with calls for social justice consider themselves to be “activists.” Not all who seek a deeper grounding of their understanding of peace and social justice in scripture and research consider themselves scholars. The academy can appear as an ivory tower full of empty talk and the streets can seem full of noise and desperation with little evidence of progress. The occasions for multi-faith exploration are still extremely rare.
The board members of The Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice represent a cross-section of these worlds. Their interests and networks span the entire spectrum of work for social justice from scholarship and education to preaching and marching in the streets. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of CLBSJ they are convening an international conference, October 20th – 22nd 2016 at SPC on the topic, “The Word is Action: Engaging the Bible and Social Justice in memory of Walter Wink.” The goal is to further shape solidarity in the search for social justice.
The Stony Point Center is a lovely dwelling place. The library there is full of wisdom and discernment. The sparrow and the swallow build their nests there. Preachers compose their sermons and scholars write books there. Those who live there are happy and those who visit leave refreshed, inspired, and challenged. The highways of Zion pass through their hearts. A day (or two or three) spent here can be better than one thousand elsewhere.
