Marginal Christianity

I want to share with you a remarkable address given by the Reverend Jonathan Krogh of First Presbyterian Church of La Grange, IL at the 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast in his city. From his place of white privilege Jonathan undertakes a repentant reflection on what Jesus, “ an indigenous, brown, colonized man,” means for his empire, privilege-loving white followers in America. It is well worth, more than well worth, the time to read. Jonathan’s words will stay with you as they have stayed with me. Prayerfully, humbly read and reflect on them. It will cost you much to take his words seriously. But the end is well worth it! I will continue to reflect on his words here over the next few days. ----------------------------------------------- In preparation for this morning’s remarks I read the following words in a December 26  New Yorker article by Eliza Griswold entitled “Evangelicals of Color Fight Back Against the Religious Right.” Quoting social activist Sharon Ha...

by Michael Frost | May 9, 2017 | Homepage | 0 comments There has been a plethora of books in recent years about how Christians can change the world. Many of them urge us to engage society, mobilize our forces and win the culture wars. But let’s face it — whenever the church tries to rule the world it never goes well for us. Indeed, most of the criticisms leveled at the church by its detractors relate to the church’s abuse of temporal power. It’s nice to imagine the church as an ancient remedy that brings healing and repair to a diseased system, but increasingly, people have spoken of the church more in terms of a virus than a tonic. Journalist Christopher Hitchens wasn’t one to pull punches. In his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything , he said, “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought ...

We United Methodists of late don't appear to be united on many things, but for the most part we are opposed to gambling. Our Social Principles state , Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life, and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unnecessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling-including public lotteries-as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government (¶ 163G). I'm very much in agreement with our...

  April 18, 2015 Zeynep Tufekci   CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border . In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.   Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.   Not just low-wage jobs, either.   Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being a...