Marginal Christianity

Posted by Wesley Hill   My friend Alan Jacobs, a traditional sort of Anglican Christian, wrote this the day after the Obergefell ruling: Perhaps I am soft on sin, or otherwise deficient in serious Christian formation — actually, it’s certain that I am — but in any case I could not help being moved by many of the scenes yesterday of gay people getting married, even right here in Texas. I hope that many American gays and lesbians choose marriage over promiscuity, and I hope those who marry stay married, and flourish. I know what he’s saying. I felt that too.   But I was thinking more today, What is that experience? For those of us like me who hold to a Christian view of marriage that contradicts the SCOTUS definition , what does it mean to be moved by scenes of gay marriage?   Well, for starters—and I’m speaking for myself here, not necessarily for Alan—I think that for many, many (not all) gay people in America today, the options have not been...

by Maria Popova “Friendship … has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival.” “What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling?” Emerson marveled in his exquisite meditation on friendship . But what, exactly, is at the heart of this “just and firm encounter”? In his insightful 1960 book The Four Loves ( public library ), C.S. Lewis picks up where Aristotle left off and examines the differences between the four main categories of intimate human bonds — affection, the most basic and expressive; Eros, the passionate and sometimes destructive desire of lovers; charity, the highest and most unselfish spiritual connection; and friendship, the rarest, least jealous, and most profound relation. In one of the most beautiful passages, he considers how friendship differs from the other three types of love by focusing on its central question: “Do you see the same truth.” Lewis writes: Lovers seek for privacy....

http://www.faithandleadership.com/content/l-gregory-jones-and-kelly-gilmer-cultivating-institutions-nurture-holy-friendship?page=0,0 Shared practices that enable us to recognize the interconnected character of our stories and to re-narrate our lives in more life-giving ways must be at the center of our institutional DNA. August 14, 2012 | Throughout his life, Tsietsi Mashinini, a young black South African, had been told he had no value as a human being. That changed in the mid-1970s, when he found a discipleship group in a local Methodist congregation. The people in that church befriended him, not just as casual friends, but as holy friends. They challenged his sense of having little self-worth. They encouraged him to claim his gift for leadership. They helped him dream of the end of apartheid. Mashinini went on to become one of the leaders of the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976, an event that South Africans name as pivotal to the beginning of the end of apartheid. His dream bec...