Marginal Christianity

·   Self-focus: I start to lose interest in a conversation that's not about me or in a story that I'm not telling. ·   Self-glorification: I do what I do to make a name for myself, to get noticed, to get recognition, or to be seen as someone important. ·   Self-obsession: My internal dialogue is all about me. How do I look? How do I feel? What should I do? Why didn't so-and-so acknowledge me?  ·   Self-rule: Me determining the rules of my life, silently or not so silently demanding that others keep my commandments. ·   Self-righteousness: Not thinking that I'm better than others in the traditional sense of the term, but looking down my nose at people who don't realize they're bad like me. ·   Self-reliance: Living as if I don't need divine intervention to do life, which especially manifests itself in pockets of prayerlessness. See more at: http://redmeatforthesoul.com/article/six_types_of_selfishness_that_jesus_died_to_kill?utm_sou...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/02/26/why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatheosJesusCreed+%28Blog+-+Jesus+Creed%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher Feb 26, 2013 @ 10:15 By scotmcknight 3 Comments   From Time, by Steven Brill , and this set of clips from Josh Wooden … and we need to have a good conversation about the issues raised in this article: Why are costs so high? We all have some crazy stories about some medical item or procedure. When I had shoulder surgery, about a decade ago, I asked the kind woman at the counter when I was paying the bill why the extreme prices — to which she said matter of factly in a kind of “Here’s why, honey!” set of statements: “This is how much your doctor got; this is how much we got; and this is how much is left over to pay for those who don’t have insurance and can’t afford the same procedure. Next question?” “When you look behind the bills th...

          The first four signposts F & H identify for our search for a prodigal Christianity deal with a journey into the life of the missional triune God – our context, God’s mission, missional Jesus, and missional witness.   How we make this journey is the subject of the next three signposts:   scripture, gospel, and church.           Signpost Five takes on the contentious issue of scripture.   F & H begin to develop a new approach in line with the narrative and missional theology they deem integral to prodigal Christianity.   Scripture, contrary to the tenor of much biblical study in the last three hundred years, is a source/resource for our journey that we cannot control but must proclaim and live.   No matter how closely we read the text and grasp its language and teaching in detail, the text never becomes an object we can domesticate and (worse) use...

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/02/being-enough-shame-and-cultures-of.html Posted on 2.25.2013 Last week in my post Good Enough I argued that our cultural success ethos is based upon a lie, a delusional anthropology, a false conception of who we are. Specifically, I argued that our success ethos presumes that we are gods rather than finite creatures. The success ethos--believing we are gods--presumes that we have inexhaustible resources of time, energy and talent that can be leveraged into greater and greater success, improvement, betterment, and excellence. But we aren't gods and we don't have inexhaustible resources. We are finite. We have limits. Only so much energy. Only so many hours in the day. But still the call for more, more, more. Better, better, better. And as I argued last week, the only way for a finite creature to give more, more, more or get better, better, better is to make greater and greater sacrifices. To spread the but...

http://bigthink.com/rightly-understood/did-walker-percy-really-write-the-last-self-help-book?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fmain+%28Big+Think+Main%29 by Peter Lawler February 24, 2013, 9:20 AM So lots of readers (about six) have written ME asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around. Here's my recommendation:   Lost in the Cosmos  by the philosopher-physician-novelist Walker Percy.  It was published in 1983, and I'm one of the very few Americans celebrating the book's 30th anniversary.  Several posts will be required to lay out even the basics about being lost in the cosmos.  This, of course, is the first. Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos is subtitled “The Last Self-Book.”  He said he gave the book that title so that it would end up in the self-help section of bookstores.  And it did. From Percy’s view, our bookstores are mostly filled with two kinds of b...