Marginal Christianity

          To open the Bible is to open ourselves to all manner of the strange, unexpected, and even bizarre. The tragedy is that we have misread it so ham-fistedly that we’ve driven all that out and domesticated the Bible’s message to the bourgeois and conventional nostrums of the religious, therapeutic, and political demands of being Americans. No wonder few want to read it or hear its message today. -The right celebrates the Bible’s supposed valorization of what they consider virtuous and the left follows suit from their perspective. -Others prize its inspiration and instructions for daily life. -Yet others turn it into a rule book or ethics manual supposing the Bible is about defining and enforcing conduct. -Some find in it a system of truth that gives them intellectual purchase on the issues of the day. And on it goes. The Bible endlessly subjected to the indignities of our misuse and our seeming inability to read it o...

Posted by PeteEnns on October 26, 2015 in Christianity and evolution The Evolution of Adam 1 Comment Last Friday I gave the Religion and Civil Society lecture at the annual meeting of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture at Michigan State University on “Reconciling Human Origins and Religious Faith: Thoughts from a Christian Evolutionist.” (Go Wolverines . . . uh, I mean Spartans.) Many thanks to Malcolm D. Magee (director of ISCC) for the invitation to speak and to his assistant Kristin Whitwam for making everything run smoothly despite my best efforts to be difficult. Thanks, too, for all the wonderful people who came out to dialogue about evolution and Christian faith.  You remind me why I do this and why this is anything but a dead topic! I spoke for an hour from a manuscript, which I almost never do (the manuscript part . .. going on for an hour is easy peasy for a wordy guy like me), and complete with all s...

          To open the Bible is to open ourselves to all manner of the strange, unexpected, and even bizarre. The tragedy is that we have misread it so ham-fistedly that we’ve driven all that out and domesticated the Bible’s message to the bourgeois and conventional nostrums of the religious, therapeutic, and political demands of being Americans. No wonder few want to read it or hear its message today. -The right celebrates the Bible’s supposed valorization of what they consider virtuous and the left follows suit from their perspective. -Others prize its daily inspiration and instructions for daily life. -Yet others turn it into a rule book or ethics manual supposing the Bible is about defining and enforcing conduct. -Some find in it a system of truth that gives them intellectual purchase on the issues of the day. And on it goes. The Bible endlessly subjected to the indignities of our misuse and our seeming inability to r...

          Thesis One : Everyone knows the church is in trouble in North America. Thesis Two : Change, significant change, is required. We all know that too. Thesis Three : That change needs to be thought all the way down (i.e. to the very structure, form, and theology of the identity and vocation of the church). Not all know this or want to know it. This failure dilutes or vitiates their efforts at change. These simple theses lie at the heart of the church’s struggle to cope with our changing culture without and the dysfunction within. However different the symptoms, churches genuinely searching for faithful responses to the world today, face the challenge of a complete and courageous rethink as sketched above. Nothing less will suffice. Such a rethink takes us back beyond the beginning of creation. There in the mystery of eternity past the triune God [1] – himself the fullness of love, fellowship, and community – determine...

Behold Your god Posted on October 13, 2015 by Peter H. Davids I have watched with fascination and then boredom as each mass shooting or attempted mass shooting has unfolded in the USA. There is, of course, horror and anger. Then there are the calls for keep weapons out of the hands of such disturbed (as often proves to be the case) people. Then there are those who argue that what is needed is more guns: more police, more weaponizing of the police, indeed everyone should be armed or at least a lot of people should be armed. It is in having one’s own weapon that security is to be found. Besides, it is a right. The guns-as-a-right attitude always wins, of course, for it is part of the national narrative. Colonists arrived in the Americas with guns, and that enabled them to enslave, oppress, or outright exterminate the Native Americans as they stole their land. If only those Native Americans had had the weapons . . . but too bad for them. The colonie...

By Jeffrey Salkin 10-09-2015 Print Photo via Emka74 / Shutterstock.com Just imagine: John Lennon would have turned 75 on Friday (Oct. 9). I use the word “imagine” for a reason. According to Rolling Stone magazine, his song with that name was the third most important popular song in history (the first being “Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, and the second being “(I Can’t Get No Satisfaction".  . . - See more at: https://sojo.net/articles/why-john-lennons-imagine-actually-not-great-song#sthash.DlyDuJ6S.dpuf

October 6, 2015 by Andrew Stephens-Rennie Do you ever have those days? Days where Jesus is right beside you? And do you know those other days, those panic-stricken days it seems he’s up and left, you can’t remember if he’s ever been there, and you don’t know where to look, let alone whether you will find him? I began those reflections in a previous post . And maybe it’s just a season, but these days the latter are more prevalent than the former. And I just don’t know why. I could write for days and days about Jesus. I could write for days about the faith and the tradition of which I’m apart. I could write for aeons about the things I’ve been reading about him, how they’ve impacted me, how they’ve changed my worldview, my way of walking in this world. But these days I don’t feel as though I have a prayer of recovering the sense of Jesus’ imminent presence in my life. Read more at http://www.empireremixed.com/2015/10/06/return-to-the-table/