[T]able fellowship [is] a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation…What [Jesus] advocates, therefore, is an open commensality, an eating together without using table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations…Since Jesus lived out his own parable, the most predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus…
Diary
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own…
New Poem: Watching Your Finger Nails Grow
Watching Your Finger Nails Grow The place makes me groan, Like the bones of those aggrieved saints of old This harsh light sucks the life clean from my face The person that was here is no longer here, And the person that remains is but a ghost The agony of “life and death’s dparting” Are…
Jesus: A Sociopath? A Prophet? Or a bit of both?
I suspect there is a very fine line between growing up to be a sociopath and growing up to be a prophet. I know of a story from about fifty years ago. There’s this little first grader, let’s call him Teddy. His teacher thinks he has done something severely wrong and confronts him. He denies…
Changing Educational (and Theological) Paradigms
HT to Kester Brewin for turning me on to this little beauty from the RSA. It’s a talk from Sir Ken Robinson on changing educational paradigms but as Kester says “the applications to changing theological ones are there for the taking.” I especially love the part when he talks about divergent thinking vs. convergent thinking….
the spirit comes without instructions for assembly
what is the gift of gospel-funk? did the twelve hear horns in the ear like a 120 instrument chorus did you think this was an orchestra? is the ghost-groan a gift of incorporation fixing rices on the scheme of sanctification like salvation in a k-mart package? the spirit comes without instructions for assembly this is…
Movie Night Logo
Death as A Mode Of Living
…just like Alcoholics Anonymous is the place where you go when you’ve got dependence on alcohol, the community of believers should be the place you go because you’ve got a dependency on religion. …and this for me is the good news of Christianity. It’s not that we repress our anxieties and we “believe” in God…
Bearing False Witness
The first elementary thing about being Christian is of course to refuse to bear false witness. And for me that means recognizing that I am accountable for what I do not know, and that I put myself in a morally perilous position when I do not know about the core convictions of my neighbors. The…
When you have more than you need, and others have none.
There are no peace churches in the United States. Because when you have got more than you need, and other people do not have enough to live on, you only keep the excess by violence. You do not keep it by appeals to faith or to love or to reason. And the churches are up…