by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust Reads of the Week 1)Seek by Andrew Johnson "But no. You didn’t come and find Me. Someone talked you down, explained it all to you. Yes, he said, we call this God’s house, he said, but it’s not like God actually is a person who lives in here, has a room here, you understand? You nodded with a head that suddenly felt weightier, so you bowed it more often, looked around in wonder less often." 2) Why Wright is Wrong About Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1) by Heath Bradley "To my mind at least, same-sex marriage is not so much a radical break with our Protestant American tradition as it is a logical extension of this trajectory and shift that can be found within it. Once you dispense, as most contemporary Christian Americans have, with the two elements that have dominated traditional understandings of marriage throughout history and across the globe, namely, patriarchy (that marriage must include a man and a woman because it is of the nature of men to rule and the nature to women to be ruled), and procreationism (that marriage is essentially about making babies and raising children) then it becomes increasingly hard to exclude two people of the same sex from this institution without special pleading or duplicity."
"The problem, obviously, is that when you apply the tiniest amount of pressure to these people, asking them what this Third Way looks like, how a church marriage policy could be crafted that way, how it would function, in real terms- the conversation gets convoluted. They meander into the abstract with zero evidence that all is right at the helm. Half the time you don’t know where it’s going. The word Nuance is said a lot. They give no answers, but they keep on saying it anyway: THIRD WAY. THIRD WAY. THIRD WAY."
3b)Follow Up: The Third Way (Station) by Benjamin Moberg "The Way Station is the transitory place every non-affirming church either will or will not enter into. That’s the reality. And some churches might emerge out of it with a reformed view of same-sex relationships and some churches might emerge with a more thought out, but nonetheless unchanged position. Every church is allowed their process, but it matters that they enter into it." 4) On Preterism, the Second Coming, and Hell by Richard Beck "What this means is that in the pages of the NT we have a mixed and matched eschatology. On the one hand you have early texts that seem to expect the Second Coming of Jesus in the lifetimes of the first century Christians, perhaps in conjunction with the destruction of Jerusalem. On the other hand you have later texts, written after AD 70, that push the Second Coming into the future in response to the delayed parousia." 5) Dance with Dirt and #WhyChurch by Mihee Kim-Kort "I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun. I am smiling the entire time. I’m laughing, talking, and making jokes. We’re cheering each other, we’re waiting for each other, we’re talking about life, marriage, and jobs, and I’m thinking why isn’t church like this more? People covered in mud and grime and nobody cares, in fact, we are encouraging it, it’s like the ultimate equalizer, one trail, all stains. The remnant of the pack has dwindled to just four of us and we are a diaspora of sorts and embodying the struggle and journey, embodying the dissonance of dirt and sunlight, struggling together, betwixt and between, broken down but finding the energy and strength in our being together, embodying Emmanuel, embodying faith, embodying hope and possibility even as we toil up this ravine, as we fight tooth and nail to climb over felled trees, as we counter and resist everything that says No way you’re going to do it even from the ones you love and the ones who don’t mean it in a terrible way, but in a passingway, really it’s okay, because uphills and obstacles and challenges are good." Honorable Mention This Forgiven Woman by Kerry Connelly How a Protestant Learned to Pray Like a Catholic (And Actually Started LIKING Prayer) by Elizabeth Esther Cough. Breathe. Cancer. Death by Shawn Smucker How to Ruin a Life by D.L. Mayfield Why I Talk About the Devil So Much: The Devil, Enchantment, and Non-Violence by Richard Beck Tweets of the Week "'Pick a number between 1 and 10,' said the nihilistic magician. 'Then multiply it by zero. Everything is fated for nothingness.'" - @VikramParalkar "a door is a wall that lacks courage and conviction" - @mallelis "Every time you try to be funny about America advancing by losing, the terrorists win." - @evanchill On Pop Theology Week in Review Why I Stopped Laughing at the Bed Intruder Song by Rebekah Mays "Many of us remember this immortal advice from Antoine Dodson, the unsuspecting star of one of the most famous YouTube videos ever. It all started in July 2010, when a man broke into the Dodson home and tried to rape Antoine’s sister Kelly." Song of the Week "Slow Motion" by PHOX
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by Ben Howard Reads of the Week 1)A Big Heart Open to God by Antonio Spadoro, S.J. "The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. There are only a few. These include an icon of St. Francis, a statue of Our Lady of Luján, patron saint of Argentina, a crucifix and a statue of St. Joseph sleeping. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of “harmonized energies,” as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary." 2)My DTR (Define the Relationship) with World Vision by Jamie Wright "I don't feel like you showed me the real you, World Vision. When I got on a plane, I thought I was going to see three different communities in three stages of development. I thought you would show me how your work saves lives and creates sustainable agriculture, and how you equip underprivileged Guatemalans, ultimately, to live apart from you. I thought I was going to fall in love." 3) Three Strikes Against White Evangelical Theology by Fred Clark "And if segregation was wrong, then the defense of segregation was wrong and the defenders of segregation were wrong. And the theology that was enlisted to defend segregation was wrong just as that same theology was wrong when it was used in the same way to defend slavery a century before. 'Biblical literalism and an intense focus on individual salvation' was a theological mistake that has been conclusively repudiated by history. Twice." 4) Binge and Purge: Praying to the Porcelain God by Mihee Kim-Kort "As time went on binging and purging was my coping mechanism for…life. For everything. It became a way to stifle my emotions and stuff them inside me. When I finally went to talk to someone about it she helped me see that I was praying to the wrong god." 5) The Facts Don't Matter. Only Love Does by David Henson "So often, we want to lead with the facts when we should be instead leading with our love for the other person. Because, in individual contexts, what’s important isn’t our rightness but our relationships." 6)Beauty Pagaents & Bible Stories by Kathy Khang "I’m still writing about the racist comments that may have disappeared in the constant flow of tweets, FB statuses and 24-7 news outlets because the Miss America pageant, as outdated, bizarre and sexist as it seems, the idea is as old as time. It’s as irrelevant and sexist as it relevant and sexist, which is to say I have no idea how God might redeem the Miss America pageant, but it’s not beyond God to do such a crazy thing." 7)"Lord, I Am Not Worthy That You Should Enter Under My Roof..." by Morgan Guyton "It’s a completely different thing to say generically that God is everywhere and loves everybody and to have the personal experience of God entering under your roof despite your unworthiness. The first is a farcical platitude; the second is the most authentic solid ground that a person can possibly stand on." 8)Christ is Always Colored. Contextualizing Christ as the Other by Jacobus de Keijzer "When Christ is contextualized as the other, when the center contextualizes Christ as the marginalized, something stirs within us. All of a sudden, the Lord of the universe is not necessarily on our side. He is no longer in the center; our center. All of a sudden this Lord invites us to get to know the margin; his margin." 9) A Secularist's Affirming Take on Evangelicals by Christian Piatt "I want to encourage progressive non-evangelicals, especially those with a simplistic and negative view of evangelicals—which used to be my view—to complicate and update their understanding of these people. A new time is setting in, and the lines of conflict and division are shifting. There is great potential for us to work with these new evangelicals for the common good." 10) She Yelled and Called Me Names by Susan Basham "She didn’t buy it. She continued with the name calling without taking a breath. I won’t write them down here, but the main mantra shared initials with the number one social networking site. Then something really strange happened."
