Marginal Christianity

Faith Improvised   http://timgombis.com/2012/10/31/whos-really-running-the-world/ October 31, 2012 By timgombis   To everyone who has ears to hear, let them hear: When read carefully, none of the biblical apocalypses, from Ezekiel through Daniel to Mark 13 and John of Patmos, is about either pie in the sky or the Russians in Mesopotamia.   They are about how the crucified Jesus is a more adequate key to understanding what God is about in the real world of empires and armies and markets than is the ruler in Rome, with all his supporting military, commercial, and sacerdotal networks . Then to follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness.  It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity.   It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict ma...

          The imagery and mythologies surrounding Halloween are numerous, multilayered, and full of multiple significances.   In the West, the rites and liturgies of this day cumulatively gesture towards what I am calling “Halloween’s Big ‘O’.”             No, it’s not THAT “Big O”!   Rather I mean the Big “O” of Otherness, the Other, and Ourselves.   As fallen creatures we have fallen into fear – fear of Otherness, of the Other, and of Ourselves.   Halloween objectivizes these fears and externalizes them in the macabre creatures we fear in movies and books and seek to tame through costumes and toys. -We dread the sense of Otherness in the world and universe we experience as sheer transcendence, a nameless, faceless, weighty presence that neither knows us or cares for us.   Aliens in particular express this fear of Otherness.   We cannot help but rec...

By AMY WILENTZ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/opinion/a-zombie-is-a-slave-forever.html ZOMBIES will come to my door on Wednesday night — in rags, eye-sockets blackened, pumping devices that make fake blood run down their faces — asking for candies. There seem to be more and more zombies every Halloween, more zombies than princesses, fairies, ninjas or knights. In all probability, none of them knows what a zombie really is. Most people think of them as the walking dead, a being without a soul or someone with no free will. This is true. But the zombie is not an alien enemy who’s been CGI-ed by Hollywood. He is a New World phenomenon that arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical ...

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-william-stringfellow-project-free_30.html Posted on 10.30.2012 This is Part 2 of my review of William Stringfellow's book Free in Obedience (an installment of my William Stringfellow Project ). Part 1 (for future readers finding this post) can be found here . In Part 1 of this review I discussed the first two chapters of Free in Obedience . Here in Part 2 we'll discuss the final three chapters in the book. In Chapter Three of Free in Obedience --"Christ and the Powers of Death"--Stringfellow turns to a discussion of the principalities and powers. Much of Stringfellow's notoriety among theologians is due to his particular take on the principalities and powers. Stringfellow's great treatise on this subject is his book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land , published in 1973. But we we find the seeds of this later work in Chapter Three of Free in Obedience . Because of t...

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-william-stringfellow-project-free.html Posted on 10.29.2012 This is a continuation of my William Stringfellow Project where I read through all of William Stringfellow's books in chronological order in their first editions. This is the fourth installment of this series. We've already done the first three of Stringfellow's books: A Private and Public Faith , Instead of Death , and My People is the Enemy . In this post we turn to Stringfellow's fourth book Free in Obedience . Given the rich content of this book I'm going to do this review in two parts. Here in Part 1 I'll share from the first two chapters of the book. In Part 2 I'll discuss the final three chapters. Free in Obedience was published in 1964 by Seabury Press. Unfortunately, the first edition copy I purchased didn't have the dust jacket. But pictured here is the title page of the first edition. Free in Obedience is a bo...

          A short summary of the biblical story is this: -God created his dream in the beginning but his creatures revolted seeking to enact their own dream instead but ended up with a disordered, damaged nightmare; -God chose a people through Abraham and Sarah through whom he would demonstrate how intended his creatures to live and set right all that had gone wrong – let’s call this people God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (GSCRM); -even when Israel failed at it task, Jesus, the one faithful Israelite came, served, died and was raised from death and vindicated as God’s one true and faithful GSCRM; -as Jesus’ people, the church is now GSCRM implementing and extending the fruit of his victory at the cross and resurrection; -as Jesus’ people who live between his resurrection and his return in a still-not-yet-fully-redeemed world, we are like soldiers in World War II who served between D-Day and V-Day – sti...