by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) 'Ambiguity Proposes, Preference Disposes': We Have to Choose by Fred Clark "But this quirk in translation is only possible because of the larger, pre-existing ambiguity between those exclusive and inclusive viewpoints. Ambiguity proposes, preference disposes. That ambiguity — that perennial argument — between exclusion and inclusion pervades the entirety of scripture. And preference predisposes which side of that argument we choose to endorse." 2) #HowOldWereYou: Origins of a Heartbreaking Hashtag by Karen Swallow Prior "Those days were different from today. Then, such people were referred to as 'dirty old men,' a phrase that bespoke their commonness but was unfortunately dismissive of the seriousness of their actions. I told my parents about my teacher. They told me if I needed their help in handling him to let them know. I didn’t. It ended. I don’t remember how. Fortunately, my parents had raised me to be strong and independent, and they succeeded. I see now that other girls—too many—were not so lucky." 3) Sacred Space and a Latte by Sarah Joslyn "I don’t usually offer to pray for strangers, but the words tumbled out before I knew what was happening. It sounded an awful lot like my voice as the words fell, “Maybe this is weird to you, but I’m going to be praying for you as you get ready to move.” And you know what happened next? Quiet Mama cried. She let quiet tears stream down her quiet face and she talked about loneliness and stress and a struggling ministry. She talked about surgery. And then she talked about cancer. I looked over at her Not-So-Quiet children and I hugged her. Her tiny daughter asked for a hug too. We hugged and we cried." 4) If You Feel Far Away From God, Guess Who Moved? by Addie Zierman "Maybe the silence of God is not a punishment, but an invitation to a new kind of trust. In a world that is so loud and constant, where we are talking on social media even when we’re not using our voices, always saying something, always conversing and communicating…we’ve forgotten about the layers of Silence. The richness of it. The power of it. We’ve forgotten that God has a habit of going quiet with his people." 5) Women, Infants, Children: WIC Vouchers, Whole Foods, and the Oppressed by D.L. Mayfield "Some of us have the luxury of not understanding the vulnerabilities inherent in gender and age in our world today. Some of us can choose to be unaware of government aid programs that catch the hungry children before they slip through our fingers. Some of us, myself included, can slide up and down the poverty scale as it warrants us, choosing to live simply without ever experiencing the true crush of hunger. Some of us, myself included, would rather pretend that the world is equal and just, and that right living and right thinking will lead to right outcomes." Honorable Mention The Lingering Light of Summer by Fiona Koefoed-Jespersen Holy Relics: A Box of Tissues by Martyn Wendell Jones Be Not Deceived: There's No Such Thing As A "Christian Banker" by Benjamin Corey Tweets of the Week "Don't worry Redskin fans, you can easily switch your tattoo to a George Washington head without diminishing your support for historical racism" - @sethpomeroy "Of course it's a dull match featuring teams that are strangely apathetic in spite of the high stakes. That's how an OPEC meeting works." - @tejucole (on Iran vs. Nigeria) "Ochoa is the roommate who always cleans the kitchen and buys toilet paper. The rest of the Mexican team is Derek. Fucking Derek." - @celebrityhottub Song of the Week "Hey Ya" by Obadiah Parker
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) Upward Mobility by D.L. Mayfield "When you want to tell the whole story of your life, you find few takers. We want either communists or patriots, sell-outs or self-righteous. We are seeking either blessing or lament, despair or hope, faith or faithlessness. But I have always had everything, everything in spades. Hope and doubt and fear and faith. I accept good gifts from God and I feel angry that others don’t get the same." 2) The Origins of "Privilege" by Joshua Rothman "But what I believe is that everybody has a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life. Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one’s place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents’ places of origin, or your parents’ relationship to education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background. We’re all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are, who we’re seeing, or what we’re required to do." 3) Don't Let Jesus Trump the Bible by Nate Pyle "Everyone picks and chooses which parts of the Bible they listen to and which parts they ignore. Everyone gives some attributes of God’s character more weight than other parts of his character. We naturally develop a Christianity that challenges us in the places we are comfortable being challenged in while dismissing, sometimes self-consciously, the words of God that challenge us in the areas we should be challenged in." 4) Finding God in Exodus International by Ben Moberg "In the aftermath of the Exodus shut down, I wrote: 'I am dragging my feet toward forgiveness,' and as time has gone on, I have covered so much ground. In the freedom of Christ, I have learned grace, I have learned that I am enough, and part of this walk means making peace with those who implied I never was. And in my process, I made a radical decision. I decided to open my eyes and look for grace. And to my surprise, in the darkness, I found the face of God. This is the truth I am unearthing about him: He is always on the job. Even in the darkness." 5) Before You Get Off This Bathroom Floor by Osheta Moore "Before you get off this bathroom floor, I want to send you out with one more piece of advice. You are braver than you know, yes. You are selflessly stunning, yes it’s true. You will get through this—of that I’m sure. But one more thing you need to know: even though you don’t have a husband and even though your parents may disown you, you are not alone. When you step out into the world with your round belly and ring-less left hand, remember this: there is a God who sees us and deeply, deeply loves us." Honorable Mention In Which I Am Learning to Obey the Sadness by Sarah Bessey It's Not About Conforming to the World by Rachel Held Evans Not All Pastor's Kids Are Christian. Sorry. by Jamie Wright
This Is the Sunday School Pagaent I'd Love to See: Psalm 82 by Fred Clark Tweets of the Week "And when you gaze long into a selfie the selfie also gazes into you." - @JohnLuce "I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Jackass *proceeds to live a sincere and selfless life*" - @mattytalks "I agree, it's hard to explain Michael Sam's situation to a child. The
nuances of ideal defensive roles and speed/size makeup are complex." - @harrypav On Pop Theology Week in Review Eight Shades of Crayola by Rebekah Mays "As a child, I used to spend hours coloring paper doilies. I’d click my Lion King cassette into the tape player and line my markers up, single-file." Tech Is Not Your Enemy by Christopher Hutton "My phone and I have a symbiotic relationship. It feeds me information, and in return, I keep its batteries charged." An Apology for the Post-Egyptian Ownership of Domesticated Felines by JaneAnn Kenney "The subject of domesticated felines (for the purposes of this essay, hereafter called 'cats' with wavering regularity) is suspiciously lacking in the Jewish and Christian canons." On TV Shows and Process by Ben Howard "I know I’ve been good at hiding it, but I must confess that I’ve been in mourning this week. I lost something that was very close to me, something that brought me joy and laughter, something that I regarded it as a friend for the last five years." On Abominations by Sebastian Faust "In my last podcast interview with Professor Baruch Levine on the text of Leviticus, I lamented that the prohibition on homosexuality is perhaps the text’s best-known passage within popular Christianity." Song of the Week "The Truth is a Cave" by The Oh Hello's
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) The Day I Knew I, Too, Could Murderby Bronwyn Lea "It was the day I knew I could murder. The day I knew I, even I, was capable of the most terrible depravity. After years of theological lip service to the fact, it was the day I knew I was a sinner. Horrified and humbled, I sat in a cold sweat on those sun-baked steps and wondered how it was that I could call myself a Christian while longing for the death of the three men who had snaked off into the night and left my most beloved in shreds." 2) The Charism of the Charismatics: Part 6, The Heart Has a Way of Knowing by Richard Beck "Emotions make our world. And if emotions make our world then attending to the emotions is a critical, perhaps even the central, task of Christian discipleship. Discipleship is more a matter of training our emotions than of changing our minds." 3) The Ministry of Watching Sparrows Fall to the Ground by D.L. Mayfield "Is this witnessing? Is this being a witness? I don’t get to use a whit of my degree in Theology. Instead, I am burrowing deeper and deeper into the forgotten parts of our world and I am trying to keep my spirit and my eyes open. Really, when it comes down to it, I am not the famous missionary or preacher or theologian I always yearned to be. Instead, my ministry is about watching the birds. His eye is on the sparrow. I know this because he has asked me to be the witness to it, to be his eyes and ears and hands on the earth. And I am here to tell you, they are falling to the ground in droves." 4) The Best Faith Film You'll See All Year by Rachel Held Evans "While the debates rage on about whether Noah is biblical enough, Heaven is For Real true enough, and God is Not Dead profitable enough, Philomena delivers a quiet, understated, and powerful portrayal of the actual human experience, where clear-cut lines between good and evil, heroes and villains, right and wrong might be good 'story-wise' but don’t reflect the reality most people of faith actually live in." 5) Why Sarah Palin is Right About Baptism by Waterboarding - #AmericanBaptism by David Henson "But, in truth, Palin is right. Waterboarding — along with other torture and human rights abuses like drone warfare and indefinite detention — was how the United States baptized the world into its new creation — the war on terror. It was simply an American baptism instead of a Christian one. We baptized 'combatants' with waterboarding. They became new creations that raised to life through outrage and injustice new enemies and violence." Honorable Mention Classical Music Makes Me Sick and Joyful by Mary DeMuth Crossed Paths by Jamie Wright If I've Survived to Achieve It All by Kenny Pierce Tweets of the Week "sorcerers are usually not named Dan" - @jon_bois "I have mixed feelings about the sun. I like that it makes my belly warm, but I do not like that it can make my belly too warm. I am a bear." - @A_single_bear "Son, we don't play Hungry Hungry Hippos for "fun." We play it to learn how friends turn on each other in moments of desperation and scarcity" - @longwall26 Song of the Week "Algiers" by The Afghan Wigs
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) "God Is Done With You": Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence by Samantha Field "That is what these extremely strict morality codes do at these colleges. They actively prevent the administration from seeing a victim’s situation clearly. Because the administration is more committed to enforcing the honor code than they are to helping victims, they are incapable of giving a victim the protection he or she needs to come forward about their assault." 2) Footsteps in the Student Center by Katherine Willis Pershey "What I did do was this: I sat in a room with a pastor of deep integrity who took the scriptures seriously enough not to take them literally. I admitted to being full of doubt and distrust without the person to whom I was speaking turning into the Salvation Police. I realized that Christianity didn’t have to be about accepting a bunch of propositions about God, but that it could be a journey." 3) The Solution to American Poverty by Shannan Martin "If our hope dangles on a spindly thread of political best practices, it's time to shear it off. If we find ourselves caught up in the puppet-string politics where society's easiest targets dance on demand, a jazzy chorus line to our real concerns, let's remember God's kingdom is theirs and the responsibility to right their wrongs was handed straight to us." 4) The Fuller Integration Lectures: Part 4, Kenosis as Pouring Out and Vomiting by Richard Beck "Specifically, what is being emptied is the hero system--the ways we have internalized social and cultural standards of significance versus insignificance, success versus failure, worthiness versus unworthiness, light versus darkness, pure versus defiled, whole versus damaged. The "emptying" of kenosis is becoming indifferent to, dying to, this hero system." 5) Jonesing by D.L. Mayfield "This was my drug of choice for many years, my heroin, my whiskey. Saving the world, helping all the people, spreading the gospel both in word and deed. The picture on my shelf is a reminder of the dangers of my drug, of how self-serving and isolating it is, how it causes beautiful young refugees to become props in the story of me, how it becomes the only identifier of any value. Like the addict misses their fix, I look longingly at the picture. When I am jonesing hard to take up my old savior complexes and crosses, I look and remember that the world was never mine to save anyways. It was too big of a burden, and I was nearly crushed in the process." Honorable Mention
Understanding My "Call" by Benjamin Moberg Triumph of What? by Maria Gwyn McDowell Brief Moments When I Did Not Hate The Bible by Heather Caliri Tweets of the Week "I've never been dumped but I have poured my cereal & later realized there was no milk so I pretty much know what you're going through." - @jbyas "You're never really taking a selfie when you walk with Christ :)" - @ashfein "I do not understand the concept of robots. I am a bear." - @a_single_bear On Pop Theology Week in Review OPT Podcast: Episode 52 - The Swan Children w/ Hannah Ettinger and Connor Park "This week on the show Ben talks to Hannah Ettinger and Connor Park about the new magazine and online art gallery The Swan Children." I Need You To Kill Me by Justin McRoberts "Nothing curbs the appetite of my fierce personal preferences or consumerist instincts like falling in love with someone else." Which Christian Celebrity Are You? by Rebekah Mays "Lately, Buzzfeed has been taking up way too much of our time with all those darned quizzes, when we should be meditating on more lasting things during this period of Lent." If God Had a Name by Sebastian Faust "In the land where I am from we worshipped the nameless God." The Eternal Darkness of Parks and Recreation by Charity Erickson "My last On Pop Theology piece explored the newest addition to the McConaissance oeuvre, the seriously serious HBO show True Detective, and its struggle to say anything really meaningful about…anything." Song of the Week "Girls Chase Boys" by Ingrid Michaelson
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) Ash Wednesday Sermon on Truth, Dust, Babies, and Funerals by Nadia Bolz-Weber "And this God of which I speak is nothing if not a God of hope and promise. Here’s the image I have of Ash Wednesday: If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and us not knowing what the distance is between the two, well then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and then held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet." 2) Remember You Are Dust by Richard Beck "We just finished the Ash Wednesday service for our majors here at ACU. And I tell you what, it's a profound and moving experience to have your students--all these bright, talented young people--come up to you, one by one, so that you can impose the ashes." 3) Wrong Side of the Story: How "Captain Phillips" Affected a Somali Community by D.L. Mayfield "The closer we get to stories like these–not just the Captain, but of the young men forced into lives of hopelessness and violence–the more shock we will experience ourselves. We will start to see students, instead of headcoverings. We will start to see people made in the image of God, instead of simple stereotypes. We will see talented actors like Barkhad using his language and his culture to tell beautiful, redemptive tales many times over. And the closer we get to these other worlds, the more we will long for the day when the appetites for singular stories change." 4) She Is Not Her Circumstances by Erika Morrison "This is not a mystery to me anymore, nobody is the sum of their circumstances and on the other side of Jesus, everybody is my family – it’s just going to take an eternity to get to know all the people I’m related to." 5)What Really Changed After The Resurrection? (A Challenge for Lent) by Zack Hunt "In other words, if the kingdom of God is really at hand, the only way people are going to notice is if we become the physical embodiment of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. Only if we take seriously our call to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world, doing justly and loving mercy, will anyone ever be convinced that the resurrection really did happen and something really did change and really is changing as the result." Honorable Mention Ageism in an Age of Hipster Christianity by Mary DeMuth To Be Seen by Fiona Koefoed-Jespersen My Cause For Hope (The Next Generation) by Benjamin Moberg Tweets of the Week "One of my favorite things about Lent is that I get to give up all the people who fast from social media..." - @JesusNeedsNewPR "Happy Fat Tuesday! Remember to sin continuously from sunup to sundown or it doesn't count." - @LissGrunert "Things one can deduce from '80s music: cocaine makes saxophones sound AMAZING" - @pauljaycomic Song of the Week "Corallina" by Lulu Mae
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by Ben Howard Reads of the Week 1) Telling Tulsa's Story by Jennifer Luitweiler "A young African American man stepped onto an elevator on May 31, 1921. Dick Rowland, likely on a break from his shoe shine job, had planned to use the restroom on the fourth floor of the Drexel Building. He and his colleagues had restricted access to public facilities; this was the one they were permitted to use . He probably took that trip twice a day every day, but on this Monday, what happened next lit the city of Tulsa on fire." 2)Jennifer Knapp and the Long Road Back by Addie Zierman "But that night at the concert, Jennifer Knapp gave me something else: a soundtrack to my heart’s greatest questions and hopes. She was singing about struggle. About failure. About grace, mysterious and beautiful." 3)When Every Knee Bowed by Natalie Trust "The priest paces the aisle during his homily and engages the crowd in ways that are much different from my priest, but he says the familiar words and I settle into the celebration. He tells us we are gifts, we are the reason for the season of Christmas, and my breath snags on my heart because I’ve never heard words said quite like this before." 4) The Year of the Minivan by D.L. Mayfield "nothing can ever be easy, is what i say in my bitter hours, as i fight my way through another day of chaos, as i long for routines and results, never fully expecting either. my next baby will not be grown in my belly, my next baby will be baptized into sorrows that took me decades to find. the next bend, the next year, will only further explore the broken aspects of my neighborhood, my city, my government." 5)When Church Is Like a Party by Ed Cyzewski "Balloons aren’t the most sophisticated element for a party, but they act as a signal: we’re celebrating, this is a PARTY. Every kid in our church associates balloons with a party. They danced and sang and threw balloons around. It was just as wild as any party with over 50 young kids turned loose with a pile of balloons." Honorable Mention Losing Mandela by Kelley Nikondeha Architecture of Thought by Carol Howard Merritt I Chose the Tears by Richard Beck Tweets of the Week "I don't eat junk food because I'm sad or I crave comfort. I eat it because it tastes so good & I'm weak." - @MrJakeJohnson "I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I’ll let you know." - @JimGrayOnline
"If you don't apathetically say 'go sports' to friends who like football, how will they know you went to a liberal arts college?" - @DaveHorwitz On Pop Theology Week in Review The Things That Keep Us Apart: A Review of Disunity in Christ by Charity Erickson "Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart is a lovely piece of writing. It’s humorous—always a welcome surprise in Christian literature!—and very smart." Bonfire of the Vagueries by Ben Howard "My grandpa and I had a deal when I was in college. He would give me books to read and have me write a book report. In return, he would give me $100. Needless to say, this was a pretty sweet deal, not to mention an innovative way for a grandparent to help out financially during what can otherwise be some lean years. But there was a slight catch: All of the books were by motivational speakers." Song of the Week "Red Clay Roots" by Laura Stevenson & The Cans
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