President's Column 2019

William McDonald
NAAE President, 2017-19

It goes without saying that we live in polarized times. From Brexit to border wall, political divergence comes immediately to mind as a sign of the times, as do an ugly resurgence of white supremacy, growing income inequality, and the questioning of accepted norms in scientific method.  The world comes flying apart!Who better knows about the business of division than ecumenists? It’s our stock in trade. We look to history—theological and institutional—to diagnose how unity was quickly lost in Christ’s ecclesial body. And, as Robert Wilken shows us in The Myth of Christian Beginnings, the church never had a golden age of unity from which we fell. No sooner had believers joined hands at the foot of the cross, or rejoiced together in the “one place” of Pentecost before they were asking (again) who among them was the greatest, or who had a lock on the truth. Despite claiming the cross as compass and the Spirit as guide, there has been endless fissiparousness, sometimes thinly veiled under a cloak of nominal unity. Ecumenists know disunity, and not only can we tell you how it happened, we are keenly aware that we live in it daily.In hoping for unity, Wilken suggests we look not to the past, but to the future. Ecumenists are called to sow seeds of unity through dialog and praxis, and so participate in the many harbingers of a unity to which the whole church is being drawn by the Spirit’s tethers. Such unity comes through listening to one another in love, sharing one another’s gifts, and finding ways to live the unity we discover by working together in the Lord’s vineyard. And so, what came flying apart slowly begins to come back together in new and exciting ways.NAAE has a long history of carefully discussing all facets of Christian ecumenism. That’s our mission.  Ecumenical dialog, though, takes place in a circle still wider, encompassing the human family’s many communities of faith beyond Christianity. There, too, things have come flying apart, the collateral damage produced by centuries of war, colonialism, and cultural polarizations of all sorts. Interfaith dialog seeks to build bridges of trust and understanding among the world’s religions. The intra-Christian conversations of ecumenists and the inter-religious dialog of representatives of the world’s faiths are instructive for one another methodologically, topically, and in terms of their outcomes. Some ecumenists have participated on both ecumenical and interfaith conversations, building bridges across both ecclesial and religious borders. What can we learn from dialogs with those beyond the Christian world? Do interfaith dialogs suggest new approaches for ecumenists in their work? What do ecumenists and interfaith dialog participants have to learn from one another? In what ways does this historical moment make interreligious dialog particularly urgent? Can the two forms of dialog be mutually beneficial? What yields or examples from both might be lifted up and critically examined?With these questions in mind, we will meet in Montreal for the 2019 NAAE annual conference, where our theme will be: “Towards a new Détente: Ecumenical Outreach and Interfaith Dialogue in an Age of Uncertainty.” We will gather Friday, September 27 through Sunday the 29th at The Sign of the Theotokos Orthodox Church, 750 St Joseph Blvd E., in Montreal’s Plateau Mont Royale neighborhood. Conference registration will open on this website in late spring. Accommodations at a conference rate will be available at Hotel Auberge de la Fontaine, 1301 rue Rachel Est. Check back here for further information about the Auberge and other hotels in the area reserving rooms for the conference. Meanwhile, NAAE membership renewal rates (separate from conference registration) are posted here on the website. Fr. Joseph Arsenault, our treasurer, will also be sending out notices concerning membership renewal so that everyone stays informed, given adjustments in dues schedules agreed upon at last September’s meeting.I hope the quest for a new détente brings you to Montreal in September!

Best, William McDonald
NAAE President, 2017-19