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Dancing in Brazil<\/p>\n
The year was 1989 and I was in a small church in rural Brazil \u2013 and was having the time of my life!\u00a0 <\/span>I had been brought up strict Southern Baptist, which meant I had never – not even once \u2013 danced.\u00a0 <\/span>But here in this rural area, the children, youth and adults were all engaged in something similar to a square dance.\u00a0 <\/span>I joined in!\u00a0 <\/span>It was so much fun, inhibited, exuberant and innocent. This was our \u201csocial imaginary\u201d – the set of values, traditions, rules, and symbols common to a particular society or in this case, church group \u2013 the integration of theory and practice as the means of initiating and sustaining social change.<\/p>\n Later I found this to be the tradition after Sunday night services in many of the rural churches \u2013 until, a pastor from a large city in south Brazil, educated in a seminary run by Southern Baptist missionaries, arrived to pastor one of our large churches.\u00a0 <\/span>The integration of theory and practice as the means of initiating and sustaining social change had begun.<\/p>\n With his wisdom and learning, he also brought legalistic baggage imported from Baptist traditions in America, i.e., it\u2019s a sin to dance.\u00a0 <\/span>Initially no one gave much credence to his tirades and messages.\u00a0 <\/span>But slowly, a form of what Charles Taylor in Modern Social Imaginaries<\/em> describes as the \u201cpublic sphere,\u201d began encroaching on the simple beliefs of those small rural churches.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n (In Taylor\u2019s book, he argues about an elusive set of criteria in which actually influences our behaviors because of common expectations within western modernity, rather than a \u201cmoral order\u201d decreed to us from others, helping us to arrange our social orientation.\u00a0 <\/span>But in this case the \u201cmoral order,\u201d influenced by the \u201cpublic sphere,\u201d began to exert its strength.)<\/p>\n Dancing, the common matter of interest began to be discussed face-to-face.\u00a0 <\/span>Then it was an article in a newsletter and others began using other media forms to place the debate within common spaces, or, the public sphere.\u00a0 <\/span>As Taylor says, after an idea is utilized within the public sphere, a common mind emerges.\u00a0 <\/span>In our scenario, it was the general assembly held each year in which the pastors of the state gathered together.\u00a0 <\/span>Enough doubt had been cast on the activity that it became taboo.\u00a0 <\/span>For me it was sad to see how a specific idea, thrust onto people, could result in a change from an innocent activity to an evil form of sin.<\/p>\n In this case, order, or as Taylor says \u201cour pursuits of our life plans must harmonize\u201d didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 <\/span>True harmony he writes can only come when \u201cmy love of myself coincides with my desire to fulfill the legitimate goals of my co-agents\u201d or others on this road of faith.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel that my friend from the urban south failed to understand this concept.<\/p>\n The moral order of mutual benefit, once seen as \u201cGod-created\u201d had vanished in arrogant legalism. \u00a0<\/span>How many times does religion seem to use the public-sphere for selfish advantage and forget the inference of its moral mutual benefit for harmony?\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE \/* Style Definitions *\/ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Dancing in Brazil The year was 1989 and I was in a small church in rural Brazil \u2013 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[356,322,2,186],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brazil","tag-dancing","tag-dminlgp","tag-taylor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}