By David Gushee
In this Thanksgiving week, your curmudgeonly controversialist has chosen to give thanks rather than — this one time — make any more trouble. I am grateful to God for:
— Reaching out to me and saving me when I was a truly, deeply, desperately lost 16-year-old, an event for which I am so little responsible that it has left me with at least a mildly Reformed strand not so much of theology but of experience;
— Mercifully enabling me to retain my relationship with Christ over these 33 years, despite sometimes miserable moments in conflicted Christian institutions;
— My wife, Jeanie, whose steadfast love for me over nearly 30 years together continually amazes me;
— The anticipation of seeing everyone gathered around the Thanksgiving table on Thursday, including our children, normally dispersed in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia;
— The remarkably rich, interracial and intergenerational Christian community that is the McAfee School of Theology; now 250 strong, with many promising future leaders for the churches and almost no one fixated on the battles of the past;
— The courage of the leadership of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, for partnering with the Center for Theology and Public Life to host what will be a searching, honest and deeply Christian conversation on sexuality next spring — the speakers and schedule for the event will be released very shortly;
— First Baptist Church, Decatur, Ga., Pastor Julie Pennington-Russell, and a congregation that truly loves Jesus and hangs together amidst difficult challenges;
— Every individual and organization that shines a spotlight on what is wrong and helps all of us treat the least of us with dignity, including an aggressive free press and human rights advocates here and around the world — here I honor Doug Johnson, retiring head of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, whose organization has both served the tortured and advocated for an end to torture around the world;
— Those who follow where God, duty and conscience lead, even when it requires breaking with power brokers, friends and conventional wisdom — kudos here to Israeli and American Jewish advocates who call for the State of Israel to treat the Palestinian people with dignity and justice and negotiate a fair and enduring peace;
–Those office-seekers who manage to retain their dignity, integrity and civility amidst the temptations of the campaign trail — here’s a shout out especially to Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney among the Republican presidential candidates in this astonishing year;
–Every author, such as Ron Suskind (Confidence Men), who has waded into the Great Financial Crisis with intelligent and fearless reporting to help us understand how our entire economy became vulnerable to the sanctioned greed of the finance industry and its friends in Washington;
— The brave women and men of the Arab Spring, in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and elsewhere, who have risked everything and sometimes given their lives for basic human rights and participatory democracy;
— Those veterans of the U.S. military who call our country to a new (old) way of life in which we learn to get along without constantly trying to fix the world through military interventions — praise here for A.J. Bacevich especially.
— The millions of unemployed, foreclosed on and pension-deprived Americans who despite extraordinary losses over the last three years have not abandoned their spouses, children, hope or God. May their Thanksgiving tables resound with the happy sounds of family love.