John F. Baggett
Rev. Dr. John F. Baggett is a graduate of Kentucky Wesleyan College and Vanderbilt Divinity School. He holds a Masters in the Anthropology of Religion and a Ph.D. in Psychiatric Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served United Methodist pastorates in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Chicago. and has been a frequent lecturer in Theology, Biblical Studies, and Anthropology. In mid-life he was called to a new ministry on behalf of mentally ill persons and their families. Dr. Baggett has served as the Executive Director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of North Carolina and as the Director of The North Carolina Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services. He retired in 2003 to devote himself to research and writing. In addition to numerous mental health and religious articles, Dr. Baggett is the author of Times of Tragedy and Moments of Grace, published in 2009 by Outskirts Press, and Seeing Through the Eyes of Jesus: His Revolutionary View of Reality and His Transcendent Significance for Faith, published in 2008 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing.
From johnfbagget.com
http://johnfbaggett.com/6622.html
“To take seriously the universality of the Word is to grasp that one encounters that Word in one's own human existence every day. To have life and to live in the world is to know, at some level of awareness, the reality of that mysterious power that has made life the way it is and has made each of us the way we are, and the truth that we are bound inescapably to live in relationship to that same mysterious power and to one another. To have human consciousness is to experience the universe as a sacred place and to understand that if we fail to appreciate and respect it, we do so at our own peril. To show up in life as a human being is to know in one's heart the sacred worth of every creature and therefore to know the obligation to treat every other human being with dignity and honor. And to be a human being is also to experience, whether ever acknowledged, moments of grace in which the goodness of creation and the blessedness of one's own particular life have become transparent.”