Marginal Christianity

  The most important movie to watch at this moment in America, especially for Christians, is After Earth, starring Will Smith and his son Jaden. The 2013 science-fiction movie was panned by critics and spent just a few weeks in the public eye, but it captures perfectly our current situation. It is the story of a father and son stranded together on an extremely dangerous planet, Earth. Long ago abandoned by humanity, this future Earth is now overrun with outsized predators, toxic plants, and wildly unstable weather. The ship that carried them has crash landed and the elder Smith’s character lies in the ship’s shattered hull with broken bones unable to move. From that captive position he charges his son with an almost impossible task: to traverse miles of the most dangerous terrain imaginable and activate the beacon that will call for help. There is one complicating factor, however. The son will not be alone on his journey. He will be hunted by a creature skilled at killing. T

Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b, 64:2-7 Psalm 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 Mark 13:33-37 Advent’s familiar themes of waiting and hopeful expectation have a different ring this year. “Waiting” works if you live in a world where you know that a little more patience generally would do you good. “Hopeful expectation” has a pleasant enough sound if your life is going reasonably well at the moment. But how do these admonitions sound–“wait!” “be patient!”–in a context of violence and despair, of deprivation and gross inequality? What does “hopeful expectation” sound like, look like in places where justice has long been delayed, meaning, of course, that justice has been denied? What if you’re sick of waiting? What if your patience has run out? What if you have no hope? Is it possible that affluent churches in nice neighborhoods (or even churches of modest means in safe communities) often make of Advent an aesthetic :   a carefully rendered “experience”–beautiful, tasteful, m

  In the aftermath of a precious life lsot, a movement emerges BY Cornel West , Peter Goodwin Heltzel NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, November 26, 2014, 7:00 PM I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. — The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On Monday night at 9 p.m., I (Peter) boarded a JetBlue red-eye in San Diego to fly back to JFK from talking about prophetic witness all weekend at the American Academy of Religion meeting, the annual national gathering of religion educators in North America. Somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, I watched Fox News and CNN spread images of flaming buildings and smashed windows all across the nation in light of the grand jury’s decision on the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Yet Fox and CNN missed the

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/11/honor-outrage-reflection-on-1.html Posted on 11.25.2014 In 1 Corinthians 6 Paul chastises the members of the Corinthian church for taking each other to court. Suing each other was one of the many ways that church expressed and experienced disunity. We don't know why the members of the Corinthian church were taking each other to court. But scholars are relatively confident that the lawsuits were being brought by the wealthier members of the church against the poorer members. Given the power structure at play in Corinthian society the legal system "worked" for the wealthy and disadvantaged the poor and less privileged. Thus, lawsuits could be used by the wealthy to get their way. In his book Conflict & Community in Corinth Ben Witherington describes the situation and its relevance for the problems Paul calls out in 1 Corinthians 6: From at least the time of Augustus certain people--fathers, patro

  by christena on August 17, 2014 [ Content note: discussion and photos of lynching and other forms of brutality ] Young protestors lighting and preparing to launch a Molotov cocktail at Ferguson police Can you see the Imago Dei in these young men? Can you see the suffering Christ in their rage ? This morning at church, the black female preacher said aloud what many of us have been thinking: that Ferguson could have happened in our community. It could still happen in our community. Our north Minneapolis neighborhood is so much like Ferguson, it’s scary. Both communities are lower income and predominantly black. Both have overwhelmingly white police forces. Both have a history of police misconduct toward people in the community, especially lower income black men.  And if you hang around long enough, you’ll feel the rage that many blacks carry in response to long-standing injustice. Yesterday, my neighbor broke down while we talked about the realities of police brutality