by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) The Cost of Repentance by Zack Hunt "Our actions have consequences. And while we may no longer face eternal consequences for our sin because of Jesus, the earthly consequences are very real and aren’t going anywhere. Which is why forgiveness divorced from accountability is so dangerous." 2) Cripple by Shannan Martin "We worry sometimes that we'll seem too churchy, too weird, and all Jesus ever did was be weird and ridiculous and shocking and bold. We tell ourselves the world wants us to be more like them, and caught in the exact-right light, it's true. But the harder truth is, the world wants us to love them with the heart-ruined love of the only thing that ever made us alive." 3)Letting Go of God by Heath Bradley "Throughout the Christian tradition there has always been a constructive tension between saying things about God, and at the same time acknowledging that all our words fall short of the divine reality. It is to our detriment when this paradoxical polarity gets out of balance." 4)Farewell, StrongBlackWoman by Christena Cleveland "Meanwhile, the StrongBlackWoman identity, which at first glance seems like a positive identity, has wreaked havoc on black women’s emotional, physical, spiritual and relational health. In an attempt to escape one set of racist/sexist stereotypes, black women have run smack dab into another stereotype, one that is also maintained by societal racism and sexism." 5)Sermon on Lembas Bread, the Feeding of the 5,000 and Why I Hated Pastoral Care Classes by Nadia Bolz-Weber "Perhaps Jesus’ injunction against sending the crowd away wasn’t because he was about to magically multiply a couple loaves into thousands, (although, again, that is a totally valid reading of the text). Maybe he didn’t want the disciples to send the people away because Jesus knew that those people had what the disciples lacked." Honorable Mention Search Term Friday: Judas Suicide by Richard Beck Holy Relics: A Focus on the Family Movie Review by Martyn Wendell Jones The Book That Changed Amy's Life by Amy Peterson
"Good thing most planes have TVs. Nothings worse than having to look out the window at Earths sacred majesty from the point of view of angels" - @pharmasean
"I raised my kid as a philistine. "How about less Schopenhauer & more QVC Shopping Hour?" I'd scold—but German idealism already corrupted him" - @BigRedDreck On Pop Theology Week in Review Harry, Severus, & David: The Danger of a Single Narrative by Laura Brekke "Recently, I had an epic weekend of re-watching all the Harry Potter films (okay, it was more than a weekend, because: sleep)." Song of the Week "Let Your Heart Hold Fast" by Fort Atlantic
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by Ben Howard Reads of the Week 1) Dirt is Resurrection and God is a Bad Farmer (Homily for the Parable of the Sower) by David R. Henson "That’s the scandal of this parable. God is throwing seeds around like an intoxicated fool at the bar buying another round of drinks that she can’t afford. There’s no limit to the extravagance, to the generosity and love. What kind of farmer sows seeds on the hard path? What kind of farmer plants in the thorn bushes? What kind of farmer tosses seeds among the rocks? What kind of farmer wastes so much? The kind of farmer who doesn’t believe in hopeless causes." 2)Homeless Jesusby Juan Lopez "It’s so easy to have a personal relationship with a Christ you never see. I worship this God as I sit in traffic, I’ve spent hundreds of dollars buying the right music. I’ve bought all the best inspirational books. I’ve attended many enlightening conferences. I pay my tithes faithfully and I’ve seen him bless me abundantly. At least that how I justify the extra pounds I’ve gained since I got married. Meanwhile the debt piles on and I keep pretending I’m walking with Christ." 3)The American Dream: Hobby Lobby, Pro-Life Ethics, and Me by Hannah Ettinger "But what’s more, it’s the result of a complex network of decisions and chess moves by the conservative Christian right set in play for more than 20 years. And I haven’t thoroughly read all the details in the ruling and the dissent by Ginsburg (bless her), but this is personal and I know enough to get myself into a little trouble talking about it, and I need to talk about it." 4)The Most American Way to Watch Soccer by Valerie Dunham "Only in the United States is soccer obscure. Only in the United States are we generally indifferent. And only in the United States could a group of fans turn one of the world’s most accessible games into a carefully guarded gated community. If anyone in that bar was watching the game against Germany like an American, it was the small group of people watching in the corner who thought they were unique for doing it." 5)The Treasonous Love of Jesus (A 4th of July Reflection) by Zack Hunt "But even in the real world, where we are fortunate enough to not live under a foreign conqueror, our faith has become so infused with patriotism that the notion that a person can’t serve two masters – both God and Uncle Sam – is treated like heresy. And we have become so wedded to our politics that we’re blind the countless ways our love for America comes into direct conflict with our love for Jesus." Honorable Mention For the Love of Liturgy by Bronwyn Lea The Graffiti That Made Germany Better by Andreas Kluth
"I can turn beer and wings into obesity. Your move Jesus." - @AngelaEhh "4-year-old: What’s a cubicle?
Me: It’s a place liberal arts majors go to be sad." - @XplodingUnicorn "If the bald eagle sees his shadow on the 4th of July, there's six more weeks of America." - @michaeljhudson Song of the Week "I Wanna Get Better" by Bleachers
Peace, Ben You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to help us pay the bills, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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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 and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) The Theology of Johnny Cash: Part 8, A Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree by Richard Beck "The biblical imagination, like the God it is trying to describe, is like that whirlwind in a thorn tree. The biblical imagination cannot be codified or systematized. The biblical imagination is going to be wild and untamed." 2) Walking the Second Mile: Jesus, Discrimination, and 'Religious Freedom' by Rachel Held Evans "And yet despite enjoying majority status, significant privilege, and unchallenged religious freedom in this country, we evangelical Christians have become known as a group of people who cry 'persecution!' upon being wished 'Happy Holidays' by a store clerk." 3) When Life Gets Quiet and I Can't Deal by Shannan Martin "Getting here was the easy part. Letting roots fall down into the earth is a lazy girl's labor. Growing them out takes muscle and grit and quite possibly more time than I'd like to share. I don't know if Relative Inactivity was ever logged on God's calendar, or if I'm dealing with my familiar refusal to do the hard work." 4) I Don't Have My Shit Together by Micah Murray "I don’t want to be a Christian writer, if it means writing from the heart and then hitting backspace until it feels safe again. I don’t want to be a Christian writer, if it means pretending that faith is something other than what it is – brutal, clumsy, fragile, ugly. I don’t want to be a Christian writer if it means that we need to act like we have all our shit together. Because the truth is, we don’t." 5) What If Jesus Had Been More Like The Arizona House of Representatives? by Zack Hunt "Remember that leper Jesus embraced and healed? No more miracle service for him. Lepers in the Bible get leprosy because they sinned or their parents sinned. So they must be avoided at all costs, for their own good and the good of the community. The woman caught in adultery would have died, pummeled to death under a pile of stones. She was a sinner and undeserving of any advocacy service Jesus could provide her." Honorable Mention The Consoled, the Insiders by D.L. Mayfield To All of Us on the Fringe by Andrea Levendusky On Growing Up in Bill Gothard's Homeschool Cult by Micah Murray Tweets of the Week "I got 'A doctor in Portugal named Angela Valença' in Buzzfeed's Which One Of Earth's 7+ Billion People Are You Quiz" - @celebrityhottub "Just typed JESUS and my phone auto-corrected to TELL ARIZONA I DON'T HATE GAY PEOPLE." - @denisleary "Should I tell the barefoot kid in the Lipscomb Starbucks that he's a sellout, or should I just let the world tell him slowly and painfully?" - @Jesse_Baker On Pop Theology Week in Review On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 51 - Exodus w/ Terence Fretheim "This week on the show Sebastian continues our journey through the Bible with the book of Exodus." Grace Is Waiting by Lyndsey Graves "On a retreat this weekend, my mind wandered the way it can amidst the sudden freedom of escaping the city: I don’t have any idea what time it is, and it doesn’t even matter." The Ethics of Information by Dominick Dodgson "Currently, there are tens of thousands of human rights violations taking place throughout the world." Song of the Week
"Game Shows Touch Our Lives" by The Mountain Goats
Peace, Ben and Sebastian You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to help us pay the bills, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1) Bad Theology Can Kill You by Zack Hunt "You may have heard the tragic news over the weekend that Pastor Jamie Coots, a snake handling pastor who starred in the reality show Snake Salvation, died after he being bitten by a snake while handling it during a recent church service. The story quickly spread in large part because of our fascination with the odd and the taboo…and you don’t get much more odd or taboo in the church world than handling snakes. And if my Facebook and Twitter feeds are any indication, the story was also an opportunity for the rest of us to show how superior and sophisticated our theology is by mocking Pastor Coots and his kind across all social media channels for the inevitable result of their redneck ignorance." 2) Sermon on Jesus Rolling His Eyes (and also divorce) by Nadia Bolz-Weber "I thought, how the hell is it that the church can manage to take a text meant to protect people and make sure violence is not done to them, and then use this same text to do violence to so many for so long? I don’t know what to say. I just know that it is real. And if Jesus rolled his eyes when having to re-orient his disciple’s understandings of things, I can only imagine his reaction to what has been done with his teachings about protecting people." 3) The Cost by Rachel Held Evans "It’s painful to see your beliefs mocked in the media and satirized on TV. There’s a cost to sticking with your values when they strike others as old-fashioned or strange. It hurts like hell to be the butt of jokes at your office or called a "bigot" or "extremist" on your college campus when nothing could be further from the truth. It takes guts to raise your hand and challenge the professor in a secular classroom or walk away from a compromising situation when it may mean damaging relationships that have been hard-won. And it's got to sting to be called a fundamentalist by other Christians (like me) when you're just trying to do the right thing and do it in love. It must hurt to be subjected to the rolled eyes and the know-it-all attitude we progressive-types can conjure as well as anybody." 4) This is what actual ‘religious liberty’ looks like by Fred Clark "In doing so, Wright Allen also shredded the warped notion of “religious liberty” as a defense of religious privilege now being advanced by pseudo-intellectual Christianist chauvinists. Those chauvinists — from the billionaires of Hobby Lobby, to the U.S. Catholic bishops, to the Manhattan declarers — have been trying to redefine “religious liberty” to mean a “monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments” for their particular strain of religion. It’s not enough, they say, for us to be free to marry as we like — if we are not also free to prohibit others from marrying as they like, then we are not free. It is not enough, they say, for us to be free to reject the use of contraception — if we are not also free to prohibit others from using contraception, then we are not free." 5) What Jesus Said to the Transgendered Woman by John Stonecypher "Back to Facebook Jesus… One of his awesome-est followers was a transgender woman who never failed to come to Jesus’ aide when the Pharisees came trolling. Her sexuality just hadn’t been a topic of discussion yet. But I knew it was coming. I tried to prepare myself to have an answer when the question came. Something theologically nuanced and artfully worded; I’m pretty good at that…" Honorable Mention On Preferential Options by Maria Gwyn McDowell Inhabiting Fear by Jen Luitweiler For the Moms with Wild Ones by Flower Patch Farmgirl Tweets of the Week
'Mr. Jay-Z, I hate to bother you, but I ran the numbers & came up with 107 problems.'" - @earfdae
"When God closes a door, he opens a window. Our heating bill is outrageous & six raccoons got in last night. Please God, this has to stop." - @robfee
"Dear Huffington Post, that was no where near the best goat video I've watched today. Signed, Disappointed Goat Video Watcher" - @_lxnx On Pop Theology Week in Review Come As You Are by Ben Howard "It’s meant to be inviting. And I’m sure it’s well-intentioned. For all their sins, churches are certainly well-intentioned when they invite strangers to come and join them." Bad Music Theology: "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry (feat. Juicy J) by Ben Howard "Every so often I come across a pop song so catchy that I can't stop listening to it, but with lyrics so terrible that I hate myself every time I press play. Such is the case with "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry and Juicy J." On Being Too Serious (Or, Why True Detective Sucks) by Charity Erickson "I’ll get right down to disagreeing with the general critical community at large: True Detective—which debuted on HBO in January—sucks." On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 50 - The Winter Olympics by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust "Sebastian and Ben settle in for a discussion about the Winter Olympics in Sochi."
Song of the Week "When I Write My Master's Thesis" by John K. Samson
Grace and Peace, Ben and Sebastian You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to help us pay the bills, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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by Ben Howard Reads of the Week 1) The Bible Was 'Clear'... by Rachel Held Evans "But these quotes should serve as a humbling reminder that rhetorical claims to the Bible’s clarity on a subject do not automatically make it so. One need not discount the inspiration and authority of Scripture to hold one’s interpretations of Scripture with an open hand." 2) What Are Biblical Values? by Zack Hunt "In our attempt to discern what biblical values are, we need to begin by keeping in mind that if we are able to establish biblical values, that does not necessarily establish that they are good values. In other words, just because the Bible says it, doesn’t actually make it good." 3) Moving Downward, In Spite of the Safety Net by Annie "Maybe these examples are extreme, but they just begin to describe how I sometimes I feel like I am just playing dress-up. I put on a costume and play the part of friend to the poor, friend to the sick, and friend to the orphan, but remain so far above them (much to my dismay) that it seems a laughable feat to really live in solidarity with them." 4) Dreams Not Drones #MLKDay2014 by H00DIE_R "We should stop looking at how Martin Luther King Jr. changed the world; let us ponder what changes he fought for, and how this world has remained stubbornly the same. What we should do, on this day, and maybe every day, is look at the values he embodied, and the places where he placed his body." 5) Religious Meteorology Needs More Rigorous Science by Fred Clark "Let’s stop wasting money on weather satellites and meteorological studies and put that funding to good use. Form a joint commission of top religious scholars and top property reinsurance actuaries and set them to work at the task of identifying the specific kinds of sin that produce specific kinds of severe weather events." Honorable Mention Social Media as Sacrament: A Thought For Rachel by Richard Beck #Instagrown: In an Age of Instantaneous Everything, What Happens to Adolescent Yearning? by Amanda Wortham Of Embarrassing Prayers and Naked Talks with God by Natalie Trust Tweets of the Week "Every time someone lets you merge in front of them, and you don't wave, the terrorists win." - @Jesse_Baker "Before you rush to judge Justin Bieber, take a minute to laugh very hard." - @TheTweetOfGod
"I was born in the wrong decade, I should have been born in the dystopian future." - @7amkickoff On Pop Theology Week in Review On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 47 - Genesis w/ Robert Alter "This week on the podcast we're starting a new series on the Bible. Once every month Sebastian Faust will be interviewing a different prominent thinker and scholar on a different book of the Bible." Looking for the Kingdom Coming Down: The Alternative Reality of the Poet-Prophet "I was driving full-speed on an empty desert freeway, tumbling words & melodies over & backwards in my head and over my tongue like so many gathered crystals." Chaos and Conspiracy Theories "4% of your fellow citizens believe the United States government is run by 'lizard people.'" Facial Hair & Christian Resentment "We were a group of seventh-graders on the bus, making our way to the first basketball game of the season. “I think facial hair is gross; it’s so itchy,” I said with a look of disgust." Song of the Week "Dirty Floors" by Andy Suzuki
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