Marginal Christianity

In the “Outline for a Book” that Dietrich Bonhoeffer intended to write but did not live to do so, he offers a fascinating “anatomy” of the German Church under Hitler that I believe is worth reflecting on for the U.S. Church today. He writes that the pietistic churches are the last chance to save Christianity as a religion, the Lutheran Orthodox the best chance to save Christianity as an institution, and the Confessing Church retrenching behind the objective statements of Christian faith. This is a useful anatomy for us in North America. Though it doesn't capture the complexity of the scene here his descriptions can be useful. Bonhoeffer calls “pietistic” those churches interested in maintaining Christian faith as a “religion.” This is Bonhoefferian code for a faith that is inwardly-focused, limited to a part or sphere of life, and directed to gaining life after death with God in heaven. Much of what we would call “conservative,” “e...

A new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Let's stop pretending it’s not happening. By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch March 20, 2015     Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name. And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.   Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections...

by Branson Parler ,  March 20, 2015   Off The Page We all have stories, and the stories we share today are passed on through pop culture, such as TV, movies, ads, and social media. These stories shape us; they don’t just reflect our culture but project and create it. This series explore how these pop culture “liturgies” form our identity by teaching us what we should value, what should do, and how we should live. This Part 4 of a four part series on Pop Culture Liturgies. Access the rest of the series here: Swimming Upstream  | I’m Lovin’ It  |  Imagine | Story & Props It’s been more than a year since the movie came out, but my two daughters can’t stop playing Frozen. They saw the movie, learned the songs, and know the story line. Even better, they’ve got props: the dress-up dresses, shoes, some kind of crown, and gloves (at least for whoever is Elsa). Here’s the simple formula that shapes their imagination: story + pr...

“The task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.” — Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor I am on a journey. I know I am not the only one. I am on a journey to know God, a journey to be seamlessly integrated into the life of God, into what Eugene Peterson calls “all the operations of the Trinity.” Our God, the Christian God, is not a stagnant monolith. As we Christians speak of God, we do not talk about a God who is immovable, impersonal, or impenetrable. We have not received a faith tradition which describes God as a long-forgotten, far-removed idea or an insignificant element tucked away in the material attributes of all things. Our God has existed from before the beginning as a dynamic, self-giving, active, moving, living, communion of persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We find our journey on the well-traveled path of our faithful a...

Posted: 19 Mar 2015 11:52 PM PDT Recently I went along with a friend to a Hillsong worship service. I was reminded again that one of the distinctive marks of Pentecostal worship isn’t just the style of music but also the prominence of the first person singular. In mainline Protestant worship, the prevailing trend has been to replace the worshipping “I” with the communal “we.” The “I believe” of the creed is changed to “we believe.” The newer hymns are all about “our” needs, “our” lives, “our” relationship to God and one another. When older choruses are sung, the pronouns are often updated to reflect the plural preference. I have been in a service where the deeply personal Geoff Bullock song, “The Power of Your Love,” was amended, from: Lord, I come to You Let my heart be changed, renewed Flowing from the grace that I’ve found in You And Lord I’ve come to know The weaknesses I see in me Will be strippe...

                            Joseph E. Stiglitz                                                     Enlarge                                                    (Credit: Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock ) This article was adapted from the new book The Price of Inequality How, in a democracy supposedly based on one pers...

Posted on 4 March, 2015 by Jason Goroncy Some more on apathy , this time from  Dorothee Sölle : One wonders what will become of a society in which certain forms of suffering are avoided gratuitously, in keeping with middle-class ideals. I have in mind a society in which: a marriage that is perceived as unbearable quickly and smoothly ends in divorce; after divorce no scars remain; relationships between generations are dissolved as quickly as possible, without a struggle, without a trace; periods of mourning are ‘sensibly’ short; with haste the handicapped and sick are removed from the house and the dead from the mind. If changing marriage partners happens as readily as trading in an old car on a new one, then the experiences that one had in the unsuccessful relationship remain unproductive. From suffering nothing is learned and nothing is to be learned. Such blindness is possible in a society in which a banal optimism prevails, in which it is self-evident ...