Tonight’s Veritas Forum session was really exceptional for a variety of reasons. Each presenter had a different take on the issue of poverty and how Christians should address it, which allowed a bunch of pretty helpful viewpoints to emerge. Add to that a pretty skilled moderator and a series of insightful questions, and then re-connections with a couple of good friends that I’d lost touch with… It makes for a really good evening.

There’s not really a lot of point in rehashing what each speaker said… a fairly standard liberal/social justice point of view, and two evangelical/social justice points of view, though with different foci (focuses?). All good stuff, and nothing that I really disagreed with though some of the semantic points made for interesting conversation/thought. However, all three panelists certainly aren’t the sort of people who think interesting discussions are an end in and of themselves.

What’s helpful for me, though, is just a simple reconnection with some of the reasons that I moved to Fields Corner in the first place. I’m here ‘cause God loves this place, he loves the people here, and he wants to see a community transformed. But I think he also wants to see me transformed in the experience.

I’ve been holding back from my involvement in TXV and the community for a variety of reasons, but… It’s time. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but man… I feel poverty only on an intellectual level, and I think I need to get down into the trenches and start crying with people. Not that I think that in and of itself will be enough, but it’s a starting point. Ultimately, I do think my role is on the job creation/wealth generation side of things, but I want to do that with dirty hands and feet.

Yeah… Good stuff. One more panel discussion tomorrow night. Promises to be pretty interesting: a brilliant preacher and a secular humanist talking on how to actually reform/transform individuals and communities. Check it out, if you’ve got time: http://www.veritas.org/Harvard/schedule.htm