Dori Baker
Scholar-in-Residence
Recent entries:
December 13, 2011
This Christmas season I received a gift I love so much I can’t help
but give it away. I took my 13-year-old daughter, donned the dorky 3-D
glasses, and dove into 127 minutes of delight: Martin Scorcese’s new
film "Hugo."
I rarely see first-run films. At $13.50, it seems absurd not to wait a
few weeks until it comes to the dollar theatre. But I raced out to see
Hugo after an email from a friend who said the movie reminded him of our
work at FTE. Indeed, he was right: the movie hit me where I live,
reminding me why I do what I do, love what I love, and care about what I
care about. Hugo creates a space to celebrate all the things we embrace
in the work of VocationCARE: holy listening, story-telling, community
as source of healing -- and perhaps best of all -- unlikely friendships
across generations, mysteriously in service to finding (or re-finding)
one’s place in the world.
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March 22, 2011
A University of Massachusetts Medical School study recently found
that storytelling may have positive effects on patients with high blood
pressure. For at least one group of low-income African Americans
followed in the study, listening to personal narratives helped maintain
lower blood pressure as effectively as more medication. The study found
that participants who watched videos of stories drawn from their own
community and told in patients' natural voices fared better than those
who watched generic, how-to videos about stress reduction.
Does that surprise us? All the world's religious traditions hold...
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October 16, 2009
Call asks that we set out from a place that is familiar and relatively secure for a destination that can be only dimly perceived, and that we cannot be at all certain of reaching, so many are the obstacles that will loom along the way.
—Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope
“When you walked into our church, you saw a lot of gray staring back at you,” says Chris Enstad former associate pastor at Normandale ELCA, a 2,700-member church in the southwest suburbs of Minneapolis. Fresh out of seminary at age 27, Enstad was to pastor youth and young adults in a church that had few visible members between the ages of 13 and 30.
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October 01, 2009
Every single one of us has a good work to do in life.
This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world,
but completes something in us.
When it is finished a new work emerges that will help us make green a desert place …
—Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope
Make green a desert place. Take something barren, lifeless even, and slowly tend it with the right amounts of water, sunlight, and nutrients. Watch life return. In time, green shoots emerge.
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July 18, 2009
“Every single one of us has a “good work” to do in life. This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world, but completes something in us. When it is finished a new work emerges that will help us make green a desert place ….” Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope
Make green a desert place. Take something barren, lifeless even, and slowly tend it with the right amounts of water, sunlight, and nutrients. Watch life return. Slowly green shoots emerge.
We’ve been looking for green shoots lately. We’ve been scanning for congregations where youth and young adults want to be, where young people are heard to say “If this is church, bring it on!”
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July 11, 2007
In a collection called The Book of Questions, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda asks "Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world?" I encountered this line in 1993 while I was a youth pastor preparing to take a group of North American teens to the Atacama Desert in Chile for their first international mission trip. Emily, then 16, grasped this line and refused to let it go. It became the group's oft-whispered mantra.
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April 11, 2007
Recently, a friend shared this story with me. It is the Sunday morning before high school graduation. Eight robed seniors stand in front of the congregation. The pastor introduces the students, giving each one a moment to shine. Before one student, the pastor pauses to tell thecongregation that they should feel particularly proud of Mark as he will graduate fourth in his class."What are you going to do next?" the pastor asks. Mark answers that he's going to attend the nearby state university to major in physicaltherapy.
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