We are all confronted with limits to our tolerance every day.
A multi-denominational conference based on the discipleship of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in November, challenges our responses. *
The conference will be held at St Joseph's Spirituality & Education Centre, Kincumber, NSW, Thursday, and Friday 19-20 November.
Conference organiser, Fr Stephen Moore, said Bonhoeffer's 'ethics of responsible action' shaped his response to Nazi oppression and the extermination of the Jew, which began 76 years ago.
"This principle of responsible action was written at a time when the German state initiated a program of euthanasia aimed at 'removing the burden' of those with mental illness or disability from the German people.
"For Bonhoeffer, the moral crises so appallingly active in Nazi Germany were an outcrop of a more disturbing crisis in human ethics," he said.
A responsible ethical life is neither one slavishly bound up in divine law or command, nor to ecclesiastical authority, nor to the verbally inspired text of the Bible. Neither is a responsible ethical life one in which choices are unlimited, nor the moral life unbounded or untrammelled - 'free' in the senses that it has not duties or obligations. True responsibility means freedom, and true freedom means responsibility, he argued.
Essentially, to Bonhoeffer this means that though God is responsible for the world - and takes responsibility visibly in the cross - Christians take a penultimate responsibility for who they are and what they do. Conference speakers are asked to interpret their topic from a Bonhoefferian perspective: the topics are contemporary and intentionally realistic but the interpretation of their response is through the lens of Bonhoeffer's core expectation of all believers of ethical responsibility.
Conference speakers include the Rev'd Dr Noel Preston, adjunct professor, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, and Mehmet Ozalp, executive director, Affinity Intercultural Foundation. A Muslim, he has spoken widely on interfaith issues. Also, Fr Peter Kennedy, former administrator, St Mary's, South Brisbane, whose congregation has been involved in a long-running disagreement with the Archbishop of Brisbane over liturgical and pastoral interpretations and which culminated in Fr Peter's removal by the Archbishop and the exile of the congregation. At the heart of the dispute is the matter of church authority. A former RAN chaplain, he has also served as priest to Boggo Road Jail, Brisbane.
On the Web: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/faculty/education-arts/events.html