In love, nothing exists between heart and heart. Speech is born out of longing, True description from the real taste. The one who tastes, knows; the one who explains, lies. How can you describe the true form of Something In whose presence you are blotted out? And in whose being you still exist? And who…
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Art
Why I am voting (and why I almost didn’t).
But there is still the delicate point of participation in elections. Should anarchists vote? If so, should they form a party? For my part, like many anarchists, I think not. To vote is to take part in the organization of the false democracy that has been set up forcefully by the middle class. No matter…
Stanley Hauerwas and War Hyms
I never sing the National Anthem. I will stand at baseball games when it’s played or sung, because I don’t want to dishonor the people who are allegedly are being honored by the singing of it. But look, it’s a war hym, and Mennonites cannot innocently play it or sing it. It underwrites a nationalism…
It’s like making use of slaves
Very often our cheap goods are produced because of low wages. It’s like making use of slaves— slave labor may be cheaper and thus slave-produced goods would be cheap, but this is unjust. The purpose of an economy is to allow everyone, producer and consumer (and most of us are both), to live in a…
Shane Hipps on Voyeurism, Exhibitionism & Facebook
I’ll admit I found some appeal. There is a certain thrill in looking at pictures of high school friends from long ago without them knowing. It’s like being a fly on the wall at your high school reunion. I was instantly connected to long-lost friends. People I would never go searching for, but would love…
Eating with Whores
[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…
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….