Marginal Christianity

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...

    There is one word that has been batted around lately that I would like to see being used less.  That word is “privilege.” Actually, what I want to see used less is a more specific application of privilege.  It has been used in issues dealing with race to talk about the invisible ways that whites tend to be privileged because of their race.  It is important to talk about privilege and devise ways to lessen it in our lives. But lately, I’ve started to see people abuse the word.  Instead of talking about privilege as a way to help us become a more authentically diverse society, the word is being used to attack anything that people don’t like when it is told by the “oppressor” meaning mostly white males. As I’ve said, privilege is something that happens in race relations, issues involving gender and other areas.  We all have an inherent bias, something that needs to be addressed and corrected.  As Christians we should be able to do tha...

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/16/there_is_no_meritocracy_its_just_the_1_percent_and_the_game_is_rigged/                                Thomas Frank                             Enlarge ( Credit : AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Salon) The big news after President Obama’s State of the Union address in January was that he didn’t really talk about the issues of inequality that everyone expected him to talk about. Instead, he shifted the “conversation,” as we call it, toward the subject of opportunity. He shied away from the extremely disturbing fact that when you work these days only your boss prospers, and brought us back to the infinitely less disturbing fact that sometimes poor people do get ahead despite it all. In...