I was just in a mini-stream on Twitter with @james_ka_smith , where I tried to re-open the topic re: the church and the Occupy movement. I had tweeted a while back to JKA on this, but it didn’t seem to spark much interest on his part. He and I had done a bit of back and forth back in 2005-06 Continue Reading
I asked Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners about her thoughts on the Occupy Movement, and she said something we don’t hear much amidst all the uproar about the “middle class” being under assault. While the economic figures about the shrinkage and stagnation of wages in the middle class make for a wider audience from which to garner movement support, what Continue Reading
This kind of blows their image as having Catholics on their side as well. The nuns represent the “live it out” segments of the church. Republicans, especially the right-wing chairman of the House Budget Committee who inspired the tour in the first place, are generally dismissive of their pleas http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/07/12614620-this-week-in-god This is what the GOP has been doing for 30+ years. Continue Reading
In my previous post, I started speaking of “relational”; I saw this as a related piece of the “catholic” emphasis; as a piece of the emotional/liturgical/ as in: This [Protestant/Enlightenment/rational] shift manifests itself in the life of the church with the Reformation, which displaced the centrality of the Eucharist (a very tactile, affective, sensual mode of worship) and put the Continue Reading
I have found it hard, for some odd reason, to get into reading of theological things over the past several weeks. The last thing I read at much length was Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution. I have a slight suspicion that maybe that has sparked in me a deep cynicism about the usefulness or relevance of reading without much serious attempt Continue Reading
On the inward/outward blog , a post of mine has been posted and generated several comments today. My post Going With the Flow, elicited an email from Kayla at COS, asking if she could use this post on inward outward, and I was happy to see my post strike a chord with Kayla, and with some commenters. I had, in Continue Reading
From Dan, once again (really a great series on Christianity and Capitalism) Christians, following the “preferential option” exercised by God, and the life-trajectory established by Jesus, must learn to share life together with the poor. In order to grasp just how much this differs from the charity that is affirmed by capitalism, we must come to recognize the ways in Continue Reading
The last 3 days of posts at Inward Outward have nuggets from Elizabeth O’Connor, Jean Vanier, and John Perkins. All of them certainly worth a look When [the church] starts to be the church, it will constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices Continue Reading
More outstanding, downright confrontive (at least this is as it should be) stuff, from Dan in his ongoing series of posts on christians and capitalism: Bonhoeffer reminds us that we must be practical when it comes to community, lest we cling too much to our “visions” of community and are thus overcome by the disillusionment that occurs when the reality Continue Reading
I’ve been listening to the unabridged audiobook of Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution, and it is causing all sorts of resistance in me. It’s great, but it’s also troubling, because I feel totally aware of how my theology is SO NOT my life. And it isn’t Shane that communicates this. Shane is about as un-judgmental as it gets. It helps Continue Reading
My previous post about Moyers and Stewart brought to mind how much I long for readily available conversation in our churches, and media for our churches that go WAY WAY beyond and OTHER than the “Christian radio” and “Christian TV”. Where we can explore some faithful attempts to be a people of God, and talk about world and national events Continue Reading
Dan , in his “blog stream” of posts on Christianity and Capitalism, posted this early this morning, and I was particularly drawn to this observation : What really got me thinking about all this in more detail was something a friend of mine wrote recently. He and his wife are rooted in an innercity neighborhood and trying to find ways Continue Reading
Actually, it is but a “renewed” old idea; old reality; original reality; an “Ancient Future” kind of reality. When I heard a while back a pastor of a large successful church refer to The Church of the Saviour as atypical in the sense that it “really isn’t so much a church as a monastic community”, I thought, yeah, and how Continue Reading
It is there that the required formation and life instills into us what peace really is. it is an absence (or a struggle against) the forces that act against a peaceful people as God has called us to gather to be (notice I don’t say “here”, but “there”*). The peaceable kingdom is the story to which we are called, and to Continue Reading
This by Dave Winer has me thinking back in similar fashion: After posting about the future of UserLand, a lot of comments, all constructive. What a change. It used to be that when we opened this kind of discussion, the users were crowded out by flamers. It feels in a way like we’ve popped the stack back to 1995 or Continue Reading