Marginal Christianity

Just posted the second installment of podcast as titled above to Soundcloud. Just google me there and you'll find it. Love to hear your response!

For Holy Saturday this year I’ve selected some rock songs from my young adulthood which in singing about love and relationships sound some surprising reflective notes consonant with the movements of Lent. The selections (all available on You Tube with lyrics) are listed below. If this music is not to your tastes try to find some that is. These two songs speak to the Lack Lent calls us to own – our fallibility and frailty. All Out Love – Air Supply (fallibility) Dust in the Wind – Kansas (frailty) The Longing that drives Lent – both the love sought and the faith  needed to seek it. I Want to Know What Love Is – Foreigner (object) Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey (subject) The Love that fulfills Lent – God provides the love we find, in finding we grow towards that love and its practice. The Search Is Over – Survivor (finding) Can’t Fight This Feeling – REO Speedwagon (responding) When You Love Someone – Bryan Adams (practice)

What is theology? This question cannot be answered once-and-for-all time, a template and corpus requiring merely competent internalization and reproduction. This way of thinking about theology can take two main forms. -theology as a flotation device: here theology is used to distance and separate believers from the world and its hurts and struggle. It centers one’s interest on a God whose interest is to “save souls” from a world gone wrong and now destined for destruction. Theology in this mode spawns an inner-focused spirituality looking upward to return to God in heaven at death or at Christ’s return. Focused on a God somewhere else interested in getting us somewhere else for some other kind of existence (non-bodily), the believe “floats” above the life and the earth he or she had been freed from with little concern for that world and those left in it, save for their “souls” which needed saving. -theology as a belt: here theology is used to secure the believer in faith as a be...