Saturday, March 25, 2006
the eBay Atheist visits Via Christus
We were fortunate to have been visited by a very special guest at our Via Christus Core Gathering tonight. Hemant Mehta, the eBay Atheist, came to observe Via Christus and blog about his honest impressions of us. As it turns out, Hemant is a very friendly and well spoken guy (not that that comes as any surprise), a student at DePaul University in Chicago studying to be a high school math or science teacher. He seemed to integrate himself into our group with no trouble and hopefully felt welcomed by us.



Hemant was gracious enough to stick around afterwards and chat with us about his experiences as well as ask plenty of questions of his own about what we believe and why. We were pleased to find that we had more in common than one might think, and shared a lot of the same questions and perceptions about Christianity as a religion. We all agreed that there ought to be more open dialogue between Christians and atheists, and between people of differing faiths in general. We all have a lot to learn from each other.

I don't know yet what he thought of our gathering itself, though I'm sure he'll be posting his review of us on the eBay Atheist blog within the next day or two.

Labels:

 
posted by Mike Clawson at 11:56 PM | Permalink |


2 Comments:


At 3/26/2006 10:05:00 PM, Blogger Brian

Very, Very Cool. How did you meet him?

 

At 3/27/2006 11:52:00 AM, Blogger Mike Clawson

I posted a comment to the blog at Off the Map suggesting several other Chicago area churches they could send Hemant to, and I included Via Christus as one possibility. Jim Henderson from OTM contacted me and asked if it'd be okay for Hemant to actually visit us, and also asked for any other church recommendations I had. I'll be interested to see if Hemant shows up at any of those places in upcoming weeks.