Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I don't want to make that clear. But I don't think Jesus needs Christianity to lift his teachings up and lift who he was.
Yeah, there's plenty. There's a number of people, a faction maybe, or maybe even more than that, in the prayer group a presidential prayer group that is distributed all across the Western world now and beyond. Oh, vastly beyond. Yeah, that also seems to be, what would you say, staking itself on that particular movement.
That there's something about the figure of Christ that's unifying outside, well, you said outside the religious. You also contrasted the religious, I thought, very interestingly with the concept of ministry. Which is a very different idea because ministry is, what is that, active love? Something like that. So let's go back to the Aramaic cloud of words around love and proceed from there.
So there are, in Corinthians, seven elements, attributes to embrace and seven to avoid. And we have turned it into what we may be presumptuously call an algorithm. And we is who? Well, those of us that have traveled making peace. There's numbers of Senate and House members, religious people, both Christian, Muslim, and other. We've traveled to 147 countries.
and worked on six conflicts and releasing 52. I'm not saying this has nothing to do with a brag or presumption, but the work, this way of creating common ground, released 52 hostages and believers in prisons all over the world consistently. And you said ameliorated six conflicts. Yes, including a genocide.
Over what span of time has this occurred? 30 years. Right. Okay. So we definitely want to delve into that. But it's based on love. Right. And now you're defining that. You said there were six? Seven attributes to embrace. Right. And seven to avoid. Okay. Okay.
For example, you are emitting love. to me now, by creating a safe environment by which we can communicate together.
Okay, and that's definitional. That's behavioral. Yeah, got it. Well, that's what you do if you have any sense as a psychotherapist, and that is a logos process. Well, Carl Rogers was one of the people who formulated that most clearly, the idea that if you Freud was doing this, although he didn't say as much exactly.
Freud believed that if you listen to people and let them speak without, like spontaneously and without expectation, that their minds would automatically devolve towards the problems that confronted them and start to spin up something approximating a solution.
And Rogers, who was a Christian seminarian before he became a psychotherapist, he became an atheist, at least that's what he said, but his doctrine was still intensely Christian. He believed that if you could set up the preconditions for positive transformation by setting up a dialogue, dialogical space, a lot of Rogers' work has been used by peacemakers
like consciously by peacemakers trying to mediate between groups with opposing views. One of the Rogerian presuppositions, for example, it's a very useful one, is that you listen carefully to what someone says, And then you repeat back to them what you think they said until they agree with your summary to ensure that genuine comprehension has been established.
And it's a Rogerian presumption that when that happens, there's transformation on the part of both participating parties. But to me, that's a reflection of something Rogers knew as a Protestant seminarian that, you know, where there are two or more gathered in Christ's name, so to speak, then the spirit is there.
And I think that's actually technically true from a psychological perspective, because when people can communicate freely, a transformative process that aims at something like peace and cooperation does make itself manifest. And I think you can tell when that's happening because the conversation is meaningful and engaging. That shows you how deeply it
That process is in accordance even with the instincts that mediate attention.
And you're very good at that. Repeating back, you've been doing that now, you repeat back. And we try to do that when we're talking to leaders, when they're saying, well, the United States has done this and they don't understand our position. And we patiently listen.
Yeah.
So creating a comfortable space, a safe space, listening and not pushing or promoting an agenda in terms of international peacemaking. For example, we went to see Omar al-Bashir of the Sudan in the mid-2000s. When I say we, I mean there are sitting members, former members. The delegations changed, and we brought an American Sudanese Muslim
who assured the president that we weren't there to convert him. Right, right, right. Because this is one of the problems, you start talking about Jesus with anyone, ah, you're trying to convert me.
Yeah, yeah, well, we skirted that problem when I talked to Mohammad Hijab, because one of the things that happened in the mosque was that we had a conversation about Christ, which went quite well, I thought, remarkably well, given the circumstances. But again, there was no...
on my part, or Jonathan Paggio, a friend of mine was with me, there was no attempt to convert, like to count saved souls, let's say. It was merely a dialogue, right? And an exploration. And so that lack of agenda, that's got to be something like humility in search of peace, right?
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