Wednesday: Finally, Lauren Winner on how not to be a jerk

Notes from Lauren Winner's Sunday School talk at Ascension Episcopal Church, 2/19/06

"...em" (something LW says a lot)

(this is being transcribed from notes that are exactly one month old, so bear with me)

"I can share my story with my computer and then my publisher can figure out how to share it with everyone else" (How she sees writing her books as a sort of cop-out to evangelism)

"I have cool glasses. I went to Ivy League schools. I am a Democrat." (On why she is interviewed by reporters in the regular press more often than many noteable Christians.) (The reporters feel like she's one of them a little bit.) And then, they ask her, off the record, "Do you think I'm going to hell?" and her answer is fabulous!

"The question is so loaded that I can't answer it until I have spent a month with you (this is not a direct quote, but from memory), going to manicures, staying up late, going to the mall...It may not be time to answer that question."

She mentions a book, Miriam's Kitchen, a memoir of a woman who is recording what it is like to cook Kosher.

She talks about her friend Jonathan, who is an outright atheist and very Freudian. When she is going through her "spiral of craziness" she knows he will have something to say that will un-spiral her, something to the tune of "Doesn't your gospel have something to say about this?" Jonathan does not believe in Lauren's belief, but he knows it works for her, so encourages her to excercise it! She finds talking to Jon often more useful than talking to her Christian friends, who are often as helpful as Job's friends when he was going through his crap. She and Jon agree to disagree, which is often more healthy that when friends pretend to understand.

"Go into someone else's house and eat." She talks about when she kept Kosher, it was hard to visit other people--you had to invite them to your house, meet at a Kosher restaurant, or subsist on baggies of food you brought along. But Jesus didn't keep Kosher. He went to the houses of sinners, tax collectors, and this was SCANDALOUS.

"defensive and twitchy" A phrase I clearly liked enough to quote.

She recommended a book, Dare we hope "That all men be saved"? by Hans Urs Von Balthasar which has the basic premise that the Gospel allows us to hope that God may save everyone and that's all we can hope.

And my notes end there. **sigh**

Her point is be friends with people, and live your life. Wait for them to ask questions.

A way to deal with people who ask "are you one of those born again Christians?" from John Fischer.

Okay, this post should have been written a month ago. I'll try not to let it happen again.

Talk amongst yourselves...