What's the deal with thorubos?

The possibility of a wider audience than I had been imagining (thanks mostly to the friendly attention of Mr Strauss) and a conversation with James in the car yesterday about hospitality in a public forum have inspired me to do a post to explain thorubos, which many of us have alluded to, and might also in the future. Indeed, thorubos members have their own designation in my sidebar.

Once upon a time, it was interim at Calvin. I was taking one class that was very little outside work, and the same was true, to a greater degree, for my friend Kent. We share an office with 8 other worship apprentices, and found ourselves for those three weeks hanging out quite a bit in the afternoons, just talking about stuff like theology and philosophy and emergent church and reading blogs and posting in our own. Our friend Matt was taking no classes, and came by our office a fair amount as well. Some of the other Worship Apprentices were there for some of this stuff, as were our mentors, Paul and Cindy. Anyway, one day Kent observed that we tend to read the same books at different times. We should just read the same book at the same time as each other and then we could all talk about it at once. I thought that seemed like an exciting idea, and ideas began to form as we talked about who might be interested in such a venture with us. Emails flew. We wound up with a group mostly of current and former WAs and a few others interested in this idea. We decided to be both pretentious and silly and call the group Thorubos, the greek word for uproar (this was Kent and Sarah's idea).

So, the basic idea is that we get together once a month or so, having done our best to read a book, and talk about it. And it's been wonderful to spend some intentional time with some people I really like and respect who are smarter than I am and talking about difficult issues. Last night Dean graciously hosted us in Zeeland and we talked about The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder. I'm surely not done thinking about it. Kent has posted something, as has James, about last night's conversation. I might come up with more idea-specific thoughts later.