Thanks for your thoughtful comments last week on whether we want to be defined by our political identity. Most, but by no means all, of you agreed with me that this would be a bad idea, that we have bigger fish to fry than our political allegiances--namely our experience of Jesus.
But some of your rightfully pushed back that, surely, being centered set couldn't mean we just disengaged from the political arena. And, strangely, I'm thinking one can be centered set and in the arena.
What we can't be, on this theory, is bounded-set about this. Bounded-set here means, to my thinking, that we strongly identify with a political ideology and we draw lines to separate the good people from the bad people. I think centered set here would mean that we fully understand that we're engaging politically as people trying to follow Jesus, that we could be wrong about whatever our political conviction is, and that we'll realign as needed as we go.
This would strike me as a radically different approach than the doctrinaire stances we experience today, doctrinaire stances that often require demonizing our opposition. 
If I can point fingers for a moment, the reports of racist and homophobic slurs characterizing the health care opposition rally in DC, along with stories of threats and intimidation towards congresspeople who voted in favor of it--I'm hopeful we can all agree that should be condemned. And that this is an extreme response to strong line-drawing.
We would-be stage 4 people are agreed, I'm thinking, that we want to shoot for "mysticism" rather than "line drawing." Surely this suggests something about ways that political engagement can be awesome and other ways that it can be destructive.
But walk me through this. How would you suggest distinguishing between stage 2 and stage 4 political involvement?
