Well, day two has come and gone.  I'm enjoying this conversation very much.  Caputo and Kearney are two extraordinarily accessible people and their interactions are a joy to witness.

During the morning session in day 2 I finally found out how to make room for the Incarnation in Caputo's philosophy of religion.  In true PoMo form Caputo opens up this path by relying on someone else to open up that possibility (namely, Kearney).  Caputo begins from the stance of the "impossible," and Kearney begins from the "possible" - when they meet in the middle the avenue of "the possibility of the impossible" opens up.

The Incarnation (yes, Caputo would shudder at my use of caps - but I'm part of the Christian faith community and the Incarnation is the event of our faith) is certainly the impossible becoming possible - God in the flesh is an insanity that  Christians have wrestled with for centuries.  As such, I do appreciate how Caputo eventually put this in the morning session.  Of course, he immediately deconstructed it by pointing out that the messianic hope is something which is always in the future.  I should have known it wouldn't have been that neat!

I hung out in John Franke's afternoon session, which was interesting.  Two Southern Baptist gentlemen brought up that they wished we were talking more about sin, which lead to an interesting discussion.  Both gentlemen were gracious, though the older of the two did seem to be ready to explode at one point when he raised his Bible, shook it, and said, "We cannot abandon our foundation, the Bible!"  I was rather glad no one (including me) attempted to redirect his statment there.  The foundation of the Christian faith, after all, isn't the Bible - it's the living Lord Jesus Christ (whose apostolic witness is found in the New Testament and is prefigured in the Tanakh, but that's different than callin it our foundation).  If people had gone down that particular rabbit trail, I don't think we would've had a very productive time.

The discussion on the way we speak about sin, on the other hand, was wonderful.  A number of people in the room were deliberately dealing with people at their core realities of depravity, and a number of others spoke about how even with "normal" sins (my word there) they learned that our language of sin needs to be tied to the practice of grace (again, my interpretation of the discussion).  Our language of sin, however, was deconstructed.  Others pointed out that sin doesn't have the emotional impact that many in Christian circles think it possesses, and I pointed out that the word sin has been comicially deconstructed to the point of being used to sell cinnamon buns at the mall ("Cinfully Delicious").  The best example, however, of why the "traditional" use of sin language is in need of destruction came from a friend of mine from the Philly cohort, "Jesus didn't walk up to this disciples and say, 'You suck, and you need to follow me so that you can suck less!'"  That line is so brilliantly etched in my brain now that I've walked up to some of my friends and said, "You know, you suck, and you need to follow Jesus so you can suck less!"  (Don't worry, they were in the session with me).

Anyway, day 2 was a lot of fun.  I need to get the link, but I met a first year art student who's got a novel just about ready for publication (and he let me read some of it, good stuff), my friend Kevin gave me a 2nd Edition of Cell Phone Spirituality (thanks Kevin), and I pitched my book idea on the theology of CrossPoint-style worship to the Baker Books guy and he didn't tell me to give it up and quit bothering him.  Good times.  Good times.

 I'll get some images up and insert links later, right now the Internet connection seems to have slowed down to a crawl and it's getting annoying...