Lillian Daniel Part 2

For the past decade Lillian Daniel has been the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Glen Elyn, Illinois. In 2013, she caused a stir with the bold title of her book, When "Spiritual but Not Religious" is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church. In this episode, we talk more about the ideas behind that title, as well as the influence the church had on early American democracy.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews The Still Point of the Turning World, by Emily Rapp

In October 2013, Wheaton College and the American Bible Society co-hosted a two-day conference on The Bible and Democracy in America.  The staff of Things Not Seen was invited to participate by conducting in-depth interviews with many of the conference speakers. In these two episodes, we feature our conversation with the Reverend Lillian F. Daniel. You can listen to Part 1 of our interview here.

Her book, When "Spiritual But Not Religious" Is Not Enough: Seeing God In Surprising Places, Even the Church is a provocative case for why religious community matters.

Reverend Daniel is an editor at large for the Christian Century Magazine, and a contributing editor at Leadership Journal, her work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, Christianity Today, Relevant Magazine, Books and Culture, The Journal for Preachers.

For several seasons Lillian Daniel was also a regular host on 30 Good Minutes, a weekly television program produced by the Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

Also on the Show

Katy Scrogin reviews The Still Point of the Turning World, by Emily Rapp

Here's a blurb from Publisher's Weekly:

"Rapp's next work after her memoir about her childhood disability and foot amputation (Poster Child) delineates a bracing, heartbreaking countdown in the life of her terminally ill son. At age nine months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a rare, degenerative disease, involving the lack of an enzyme, that is always fatal, striking the parents as a complete surprise, despite the author's having been tested during standard prenatal screening. An affliction most prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews, Tay-Sachs actually has more than a hundred mutations. Ronan's 'death sentence' was for Rapp and her husband, Rick, living in Santa Fe, a time of grief, reckoning, and learning how to live, and her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son's condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could 'walk through this fire without being consumed by it.' Unflinching and unsentimental, Rapp's work lends a useful, compassionate, healing message for suffering parents and caregivers."