Belonging is that complex, entangling, and freeing experience of simultaneous choosing and being chosen that lovers, committed members of marginalized groups, members of religious communities, and others know. Belonging is the way human beings find a home for themselves in a universe not centered in or on them…. [B]elonging brings with it not greater privilege, but wider and deeper joy, obligations to others, and suffering…. the acknowledgement that one is a participant rather than a ruler.
Finally, the teaching of election reconstructed as belonging could help to counter the tendency toward spiritualism (the devaluing of the embodied life); for each of us belongs only in and through the stubbornly concrete and particular experience that is ours.
“Election” by Mary Potter Engel in The New Handbook of Christian Theology.
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