NATO Summit 2008…

…might be a part of Romanian future history manuals.  What will my son learn about this summit? Will it be about the inherent minor incidents that happened during the 3 days? Or perhaps about the seagulls that impressed president Bush? Will he remember that he would have seen Air Force 1 flying over his head? I doubt any of this issues. I’d rather think that, following a well-known tradition in our country, historians will depict in the history manuals the impressive privilege NATO offered Romania to host such an event. Although many so-considered “important” events may well happen in the course of time by the time my boy reaches 10 (I think this would be the first acquaintence with romania’s history, as far as I can remember from my own experience). Only thinking of these makes me wonder how the world will look like ten years from now…

Understanding the times…

One of the main concerns of Jesus when he lived among us was doing the right thing at the right time. He had a unparalled sense of the right time so that he was several times surprised that the religious leaders didn’t understant the times they were living. As he himself predicted the religious leaders continued to lead the people astray. Not in the direction of worshipping the wrong Adonai, but worshipping Adonai in the wrong way. Whcich evantually had desastruos consequences upon the future of their nation (see AD 70 and AD 135-136).

It is a constant puzzling puzzle to me that the (more or less) sincere religious leaders of romanian evangelic christianity seem to misunderstand or underestimate the new epoch in which we’re living today, i.e. the postmodernity. It had to be a non-evangelical, Horia-Roman Patapievici, who had to deal with the ways postmodernity challanges us and what could be done to meet these challanges. And he did that in 500+ pages. Why didn’t that kind of approach appear in the evangelical environment?

 Because, although we pretend to clearly understand our time (see the message delivered by pastor Candrianu at National Baptist Conference, Resita, 2006), we cannot help to proudly assert that we’ll trample all the postmodern demons. Not knowing that keeping our head in the clouds, snakes can easily bit our legs.

The same old, unchanged in the essentials, discourse is taught and learned by the new spokesmen of the evangelical community, forgetting the bare fact that we’re living in another world.

 I do not assume that I have the smart answers for this situation. But I’m desperate to hear the more experienced voices (the patriarchs that Daniel Farcas once spoke) leading clearly the romanian believers in these troubled times.

Advantages of a lingua franca

If you can understand clearly this line you already enjoy the advantages of knowing the lingua franca of our times: not “americanish” but – forever – “english”.