December (Web-only) 2004

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This is a week during which Christians all over the world will affirm their faith in the ultimate triumph of peace—celebrated in so many Christmas carols, imaged in the manger scene, present in blessed moments at least when we gather with our families. And yet how difficult it seems to be for us to live as if we really believed that promise! Even the words peace and peaceful are bones of bitter contention. Does our allegiance to the Prince of Peace commit us, for example, to pacifism (or the more popular variant, sort-of pacifism)? You say yes, I say no, and where do we go from there?

And what if we don't even share the same starting point? If our presuppositions are radically different? We need only look around—at the newspaper, the television, the blogosphere—for an answer. Where can we find good models for engagement, models that go beyond well-meaning bromides?

One place to begin is a project called Christians Engaging Culture, the brainchild of Harold Heie, senior fellow of the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, which sponsors the enterprise. Explicitly conceived to provide working models for public policy practitioners, politicians, and scholars—and, not least, for you and me—the project has generated three case studies, the first of which was presented at Gordon in November of this year by Susan Drake Emmerich.

Emmerich's story, which you may have encountered in the award-winning PBS documentary Between Heaven and Earth, centers on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where an embattled fishing community was locked in a long-running conflict with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), which was seeking to undo the consequences of profound environmental neglect. ...