You Say Tomato…

It’s beginning to dawn upon me what I’ve been trying to do for the last several years. To assimilate the sacred into the secular—and vice versa—requires a theology capable of integrating with the arts and sciences. Whether to refer to such as venture sacularism or secredism might pose the first of many challenges to its successful pursuit. However it is expressed, though, there seems to be an inherent trap in the attempt to make synonymous such terms as sacred and religion, or secular and science. It was not until I left the church I had grown up in that I realized how unique and rare Dad’s integration of theology and religion was. Once exposed to other congregations of United Methodists caused me to realize rather quickly that a lot of religion has little or nothing to do with theology unless by implicitness or inference. “I believe in God the father” can be professed without any theological undergirding, although without such a foundation the significance of such a statement is put into question. For me it is akin to stating “I believe that two plus two equals four” without having any understanding of the mathematics that make it true. Having immersed myself in the secular world for the last decade has helped me to realize that many who reject religion do so because they have had little or no exposure to theology. The converse is true to the degree that religious people reject other kinds of thinking because of contrived and artificial polarizations between the sacred and the secular. So, I’ve been hanging out in the real world after leaving the church and in the process am discovering that there is a pressing need for both worlds to discover their common ground.