After The Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism - Softcover

Ladd, Nancy McDonald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558968288 ISBN 13: 9781558968288

Publisher: Skinner House Books, 2019

Synopsis

With humor and humanity, Nancy McDonald Ladd calls religious progressives to greater authenticity and truth-telling in challenging times rather than mere optimism.

Progressive faith is at a crossroads. Liberal pulpits ring with grand sermons about the arc that bends toward justice, and about progress “onward and upward forever.” Meanwhile, the people in the pews struggle to attend to the suffering of their souls and the tragic aspects of life. In this engaging polemic, using stories and metaphor, Nancy McDonald Ladd issues a call for change. Speaking from a rising generation of clergy and lay leaders who formed their commitments to liberal religion at the end of the optimistic modernist age, she shows how the religious life is not characterized by endless human advancement, but by lurching movement, crisis-management, and pain.

In After the Good News, Ladd charts a course forward that includes reclaiming rituals of atonement and lament, and becoming more vulnerable and accountable in our relationships. She shows how, together, we might build a necessary and greater resilience among ourselves and for the generations to come.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy McDonald Ladd has served as Senior Minister at River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation since 2012. Passionate about preaching, liturgy, and social justice, her first commitment is the building of relationships that sustain and challenge us to grow braver in the face of brokenness and loss. Using her background in community organizing, pastoral ministry, and worship design, her goal is to equip colleagues and lay leaders to do the work that is uniquely theirs to do in the congregation and in the world. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the years leading up to 1914, and then again in the decades following the Second World War, the modernist progressive utopian dream taught that the ideals we hold dear can be achieved through the steady advance of moral cultivation, a dedication to learning, and church-based community action. Protestant progressives have been preaching this utopian vision for generations. That utopia, like so many others before it, is all but dead, and it is time that we admit it. It is also time for us to reconstruct something more honest, and arguably more powerful, from those ashes.

Today, the idea of idealism is not enough. Casual optimism rings hollow, and triumphal, self-assured liturgies leave our broken hearts still yearning for the chance to sing together in a minor key. The people we serve yearn for that too, for an honest word and an opportunity to hold our shared grief and deep personal brokenness together in community on a Sunday morning. We cannot offer the cheap grace of eventual societal perfection in times of systemic desolation, and we cannot sell one another on the idea that it’s all going to be just fine in the end.

The liberal church is being called to a new way of being, a less self-assured but equally faithful approach to living and serving in these times. Daniel Berrigan, one of the late great radicals of my liberal Catholic heritage, once said, “How [do we] build a life worthy of human beings in the darkness? We are called to grow new organs, by new conditions of life and death. New ways of perceiving, of living in the world, new ways of moving over, to give room for others to live at our side.”

This project arises from my own discomfort at the certitude of the good liberal people I have come to love, to lead, and to serve alongside. It is also inspired by the faithfulness and courage many in my own Unitarian Universalist tradition are currently bringing to the work of dismantling of white supremacy and decentering whiteness in our institutions.

This effort to build a new way of worshipping and proclaiming hope in the liberal church does not depend on triumphal self-assurance. It is fueled daily by the resilience, truth telling, and humble courage of the people who weep and laugh alongside me during daily parish life.

The people I serve tell the truth. There is a reason I can never seem to locate any tissue boxes in my office—those tissue boxes move all around the spaces we have made sacred, flowing as freely as the tears. As a minister, the invitation offered to me, day after day, week after week, is to somehow articulate the full truth of my people’s deep human experience and deeper human longing, all while pointing us forward with both hope and commitment.

My abiding love for the progressive church stands in creative tension against the fundamental critiques of this book—liberal optimism, attachment to respectability, the centering of whiteness, and a progressivist view of history. These critiques apply to the congregation and the denomination in which I serve as acutely as anywhere else in the world of progressive religion. And yet these critiques cannot arise from less generous a sentiment than love for the people I serve—a love that would be greatly diminished if I remained too cautious or too comfortable to offer honest critique of the broader liberal religious culture that holds us all.

After all, church is church is church is church. Much of what we struggle with in my own tradition, we struggle with together across the Protestant spectrum and beyond.

And though many of the resources in this text are drawn from my own Unitarian Universalist tradition, I hope these pages will illustrate that mine are not the only people in the liberal church who are a little too sure of themselves. We also aren’t the only people with a persistent tendency to skip right on to the triumph of Easter while barely nodding our heads at the horror of Good Friday, nor are we by any means the primary religious and institutional home for the performance of white-centered respectability.

Likewise, when it comes to excessive confidence in our own capacity, attachment to middle-class comfort, and faith in the upward trajectory of history, Unitarian Universalists do not have a corner on the market.

I also know that this discomfort with a fundamentally optimistic progressivism is not at all unique to me, nor even to my fellow cynical—yet soul-searching—denizens of Generation X. Generations before us have ached to tell the truth, while simultaneously proclaiming a propulsive and inspirational hope. Others before us, both within and outside of the liberal Protestant tradition, have pointed out the same flaws in our triumphal progressive imaginings.

This project is not unique, in either conception or design. It’s merely an effort to communicate a few things that so many of us on the left-leaning side of the religious spectrum have been thinking lately and weeping over from time to time. It’s born of a desire to remain faithful to the hope and power of the ones who went before us in liberal religion, while also not hiding behind their once-shiny ideas of progressive optimism—especially the idea that each congregation of worshippers within the Eurocentric liberal church could personally build a land where we bind up the broken and set free all the captives whose imprisonment we ourselves have profited from.

And so, as we move forward from this situation, we all must begin where we are. We can’t borrow anybody else’s story. We can’t wear another’s oppression or experience like a brand-new suit, tags still on, that we might just return later in the day. We can only tell our own stories with honesty while forthrightly putting ourselves in proximity to the stories, the tragedies, the triumphs, and the living and dying utopian dreams of those fellow travelers we hold dear.

To begin at the beginning, for me, is to go home again to the dead utopias of my personal history and communal heritage. The progressive utopian experiments that are part of my hometown history crumbled long before I lived. And the privileged Eurocentric ideals of my chosen religious tradition are crumbling all around us. Taken together, they pervade each corner of my life and ministry.

The story can’t be told without starting right there—at home. Back in the shadow of two dead utopias.

Edition details

• Publisher: Skinner House Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1558968288
• ISBN 13: 9781558968288
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184