I was sitting in my Speech Communication class a few weeks back and was struck by something my professor said. We were reading poetry and he was critiquing someone’s reading when he said, “You must have the ability to ‘other yourself’ into the life of who you are portraying.” A few weeks later, I began reading David Tracy’s little collection of essays in “Naming the Present” – and began to read about the “other” and about the polycentrism in our world today. Something made me think that maybe it was time to muse about the Other.
Tracy writes:
“…there is emerging a new polycentric world and a world church where the most concrete others – the poor and oppressed – speak and act. For the Western center…cannot and should not hold as the center…A fact seldom admitted by the moderns…even with all the talk of otherness and difference – is that there is no longer a center with margins. There are many centers…[T]he others are not marginal to our centers but centers of their own.”
It is simply a fact that we live in a pluralist society, it’s not something that is open to debate. There is – and should be – no center. It’s not the USA, it’s not the Conservative Evangelical agenda, it’s not the Western world, it’s not the educated, suburban, upper-middle-class. There should be no center; rather, our world is a polycentric world, a world where we need to learn to encounter the Other, and encounter them as they are their own centers.
What does this mean for us today? Especially for those of us who are white, upper-middle-class, American Christians? What would it look like for our faith, for our churches today to try and ‘other ourselves?‘ What would it mean for our churches to place ourselves fully into the lives of many Others…with the Others who we disagree with? To the Others we’re prejudiced against…to the Others we don’t think we can live with, or be in community with? I don’t know all the implications of ‘othering ourselves’ – but I know that more and more, I’m realizing that this is one of our calls as members of humanity and especially as followers of Christ…
Another quote from Tracy: “They mean that the central theological question today is not the question of the nonbeliever but the question of the nonperson – those forgotten ones, living and dead, whose struggle and memory are our history.” So, what are the implications for discovering the Other…?
Continue reading “Discovering the Other: A Theological Menage a Trois”