Author's Preface
Fractured Dance
As the
acknowledgments below make clear, Fractured Dance
began as a dissertation completing the requirements for a
Ph.D. in rhetoric and communication from Temple
University, Philadelphia. Two factors in that statement
are worth highlighting. First, J. Denny Weaver and those
unknown (to me) consultants who reviewed the manuscript
on behalf of the C. Henry Smith Series deserve special
credit for helping this material move from a dissertation
to a publishable book.
Second, even as it has
hopefully moved a significant distance from its
dissertation origins, this book emerged from studies at
Temple University in Philadelphia. Significant here is
that after considerable exploration of educational
options, I deliberately opted to pursue doctoral studies
at a secular rather than religious or Christian school.
Up to that point all my post-high schooling had unfolded
in such Christian settings as Eastern Mennonite
University and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
These were wonderfully productive milieus in which to
study—yet they always placed me in the position of
being in the church looking out at the world. I chose
Temple to see what could be learned by aiming to sit in
the world looking back in at the church.
The tone of Fractured
Dance is very much connected to that out-looking-in
perspective. I aimed throughout my Temple years to remain
rooted in the church. During much of that period I was
always at least either a part-time pastor, part-time book
editor for Herald Press (Mennonite Church denominational
publisher), and sometimes both. And often I raised
Christian perspectives in Temple classroom settings.1
But I also always held myself accountable to learn how to
speak about the church within those academic languages
and concepts that tend to be the native
“dialect” of academia.
My assumption was not
that this language was better than church
language—sometimes it is not2—rather,
my conviction was that if I at least provisionally worked
at seeing the world through the spectacles provided by
this academic discourse, I would glean insights not
available if I insisted only on forever treating it as a
foreign dialect. Much of Fractured Dance is thus a
record of insights gained through the quest to take
seriously the learnings available at Temple University,
that alternate “temple” of secular worship
(rooted, ironically enough, in the Christian vision of
Temple founder Russell Conwell).
Among Temple-focused
learnings I aim to record are those gleaned from applying
the work of Hans-George Gadamer to a case study. In this
regard I hope the book proves of interest to scholars
regardless of how they may view its church-oriented
material. This points to the fact that the book tells two
intertwining stories. One is the story of what happens in
an attempt such as this one to apply Gadamer to an actual
set of conversations. Since this is a path not often
taken, the story of how Gadamer fares in that process
deserves attention in its own right, which is why it
threads its way throughout the book. Here the question is
what is learned about Gadamer.
The other story is the
church-related tale of what unfolds in a set of
denominational discussions. Here the question is what is
learned about the conversations themselves. I hope those
less fascinated with the nuances of the scholarship will
either bear with me or skip to this story even as they
grant me space to tell the story of Gadamer for those who
will find it of interest.
This church story is
also gaining fresh emphasis as the book is released
within a series of volumes that explore
Anabaptist-Mennonite concerns. With such publication, I
hope to continue to talk with the conversation partners
who were so important at Temple and are so often
addressed in these pages. At the same time, I hope those
who share my Christian passions will now also join the
conversation. They and I may then find yet another layer
of insights as together we stand in the church but gaze
through this book at the church as if from outside. I
hope that in some way this inside-outside juggling can be
helpful to us all, no matter how far in or out we are.
Having explained why
much of the book reads as if from a perspective of
standing outside the church looking in, let me add one
more explanation regarding the introduction and the
epilogue. There I have sought to bracket the book in
material that turns its perspective briefly the other
way: inside looking out. There I have aimed to show how
the rest of the book, though in some ways standing at
such great distance from the church, does finally
integrally connect with church agenda.
In the introduction I
write as clearly and simply as I know how why the topic
and approach of Fractured Dance matters to me,
above and beyond my concerns as a scholar. I hope this
will in at least a small way bridge any potential gap
between church and academia. I hope also that, given the
complexities of Gadamerian thought, this material will
offer enough of a “Cliff Notes” summary of the
book that anyone who gets lost in its mazes can always
turn back to it for an overview of where I meant to go,
even if I too sometimes risked getting lost in the
labyrinth. Then in the epilogue I mean simply to bridge
the church-academia gap one last time. My goal there is
to offer one modest example of how the principles
explored in Fractured Dance might actually be
applied to ongoing church discussions.
Let me add yet that
this is a living project, this quest for ways we become,
indeed, a “We” amid all that sometimes
appropriately and sometimes tragically divides us. I hope
my investment in the project is evident. I hope it shines
with some of the lifelong yet still growing passion I
have felt to seek better ways to live with each other
than the worship of one or another ideology, one or
another partial truth worshipped as the whole truth, we
humans so often fall into.
I hope evident at least
implicitly are the roots of that passion in my journey
through the tangled thicket of homosexuality and other
controversial issues. I well remember the early 1980s
days when I preached the sermons at Germantown that among
many other influences probably contributed to setting the
congregation on its fateful road toward head-on collision
with Franconia Conference, its parent denominational
body. I remember thinking I and we were so right and
others so wrong.
Then I remember as well
the gradual awakening to the realization that
self-righteusness was probably not more to be celebrated
when I was the one convinced I was right than when it
showed its ugly face in those with whom I disagreed. I
came increasingly to suspect that no way forward that
allowed one side the smug conviction that it had cornered
the truth was likely actually to be the whole truth. Year
by year grew my conviction that whenever we face the
thorny thickets of our most basic conflicts, there where
we feel that everything dearest to us is at stake, the
way forward is not likely to come by wielding the machete
of one-sided righteousness. Rather, each of us will have
to find our way through thorn by thorn, delicately
pushing aside for each other the brambles, pondering
carefully each step of the way where our truth is
contributing to a way through and where it actually is
one more branch obstructing our passage toward
redemption.
But if I risk (as I am
sometimes told I do) becoming one more dogmatist in my
passion for dialogue, then I hope also that not only that
passion but also my awareness of my own finitude (to
preview Gadamer) is evident. I too need to risk my
prejudice for dialogue and grow in response to the
criticisms this book will surely generate.
I think often of a good
friend of mine, who tells me mine is a romantic quest for
forms of community likely to be rare indeed in a world
where, he says, people actually do not want to trust and
seek to learn from each other so much as to “turn
each other into roadkill.” There is plenty of
evidence on his side, and I aim to address some of it in
later chapters. But I hope he will not mind if I add that
the evidence on my (and Gadamer’s) side may include
the mutual learning he and I find in the very act of
debating whether his view or mine is truer to the actual
condition of the world. The answer, I would guess, is
that both of us are right and both of us are wrong, and
that is why we have so much to offer each other on the
way.
—Michael A. King
Telford, Pennsylvania
Fractured Dance orders:
|
