Sometimes the thing we desire most is the very thing that prevents us from obtaining it.
Category
Theology
Midrash: Not Allowing the Text to Turn into Stone
“The rabbis, when they read, walk into the text. They bring themselves to it and step across the edge of the scroll onto its body, bouncing a little, believing it will hold their weight. And then on hands and knees crawl through the furrows of words, examining, brushing away dirt, not unlike a botanist examining…
Tevyn East: Leaps and Bounds is Profound and Powerful!
On Friday night my community Valley Mosaic brought Tevyn East and her one woman show Leaps and Bounds to Williamsport. It was an unbelievably inspiring performance. Tevyn uses a blend of storytelling, song, poetry, prayer, movement, and music to tell the story of God’s creation and an economic system that threatens to destroy it. Tevyn’s…
The infinite is beyond all name and form, how can the poet describe that which is beyond words?
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…
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…
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…
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….