Monday Meditation: Ronald Osborn on Exile and Community

For the liturgical service at the La Sierra University Church on October 8, Ronald Osborn gave the homily, speaking to how we can respond to a world that seems beset by calamity. He used William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming” as a framework, which begins:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Osborn continued to recount the story of exile from the book of Jeremiah and how that story connects to the present. “We also find ourselves in exile today, whether we are consciously aware of it or not,” he said. But even so, “it is in the welfare of the larger world that we will find our own welfare in the time of exile.”

Ronald Osborn is an associate professor of ethics and philosophy at La Sierra University and executive director of The John Henry Weidner Foundation for Altruism. His academic work focuses on questions of violence, moral theory, human rights, and religious studies.

You can watch the homily below, which begins just after the 23-minute mark.

Alex Aamodt is managing digital editor of Spectrum

Title image credit: screenshot from Loma Linda University Church on YouTube 

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