Advent Series: Embodying Faith, Week 1
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Advent Series: Embodying Faith, Week 1
November 29, 2023, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Led by Kristen Leigh Mitchell, M.Div.
We live in a cultural context where mind & body, sacred & secular, and heaven & earth are perceived as being separate from one another. Old cultural messages we inherited from Western Europe – particularly during the Enlightenment – continue to confuse our ability to experience the inherent connection between our spiritual and our material lives. Advent is a season that invites us to make room for the incarnate Christ, who entered through birth into the messy, complicated world of human life and death, and preached the good news that the Kingdom of God was already in our midst. In this class, we will explore some of the most common inward and outward barriers to experiencing and embracing the fully embodied faith of Jesus within our current cultural context.
Week 1: Christianity & the Marketplace
In this season of “hustle and bustle,” our tradition calls us into a time of quiet reflection and contemplation. How are we supposed to embody our Christian faith in the midst of so many contradictory expectations and demands on our time and energy? This week we’ll look at the origins of some of our most beloved Christmas traditions, as a lens through which to begin to think about the relationship between our Christian religion and the holiday rituals of a supposedly “secular” capitalist culture.
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Kristen Leigh Mitchell earned her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in NYC, where she spent four years researching the relationship between religion, spirituality, psychology, theology, and the arts. Her master’s thesis offered a cultural and historical analysis of how Western churches came to define the relationship between the “sacred” and the “secular.” She has published articles on early Christian music, liturgy, medieval church history, theology and film, artistic vocation, and Biblical interpretation. Kristen spent several years working as resident librarian and later Assistant Director for The Servant Leadership School, a spiritual formation program based in NC that teaches embodied faith through contemplative spiritual practices in the context of ecumenical Christian community. She also just so happens to be Joe’s wife!
You can learn more about Kristen’s writing and other work by visiting her website: www.kristenleighmitchell.com
