Marginal Christianity

December 16, 2014 What Psychology Says About Materialism and the Holidays Six questions for materialism expert Tim Kasser, PhD Reporters/editors/producers note: The following feature was produced by the American Psychological Association. You may reprint it in its entirety or in part. We only request that you credit APA as the source. We also have a photograph of Kasser for reprinting.   Would the holidays be the same without some materialism in the mix? In today’s consumer society, what does it mean to be materialistic, and is that necessarily a bad thing? Psychologists have conducted research that has helped answer those questions and many more. APA recently asked Kasser the following questions:   APA: What does it mean to be materialistic and why is it generally viewed in a negative light? Why are some people materialistic and others not? Read more at http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/12/materialism-holidays.aspx

Everything in the life of the church starts, ends, and depends every step of the way on identity, God’s identity. And from that flows the church’s identity. God’s identity is confirmed in Consummation, adumbrated in Creation, and fully revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.   1.     In creation, God inaugurated the realization of his dream – a community of humans to call his people and with whom he could live forever in loving fellowship on the creation. 2.     Humanity’s rebellion trashed that dream and put humanity and creation in mortal disarray. Good established order – rebellious trashed disorder: the original revolution . 3.     The rightful king, now the ruler in exile, begins a counter-revolutionary campaign of reclamation and restoration to subvert what humanity has become and demonstrate what God always wanted.   In reclamation and restoration, God is a subversive counter-revolutionary .   ...

Editorial: A biblical call to remember must be written in the future tense. Appears in Winter 2015 Issue: Remembering Forward by James K.A. Smith December 1 st , 2015 One of the saddest books of the modern world is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything —not because the plot is heartbreaking (it’s a cookbook) or because it documents the ravages of hunger. What’s sad is that we need it: it’s a cookbook for a society that forgot how to cook. Read more at https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/4728/editorial-memory-forgetting-and-hope/

by Peter J. Leithart 11 . 19 . 15   Modern sports are not simple competition between the two teams. If they were only about physical competition, games would be shorter, less glitzy, less energetic. Sports are ritualized events, liturgies. The crowd’s behavior is deliberately intensified with ritual elements – with mascots who emblemize the team, with fight songs that energize and bind the fans into a single singing unit, with the moments of drama like the team’s bursting through the paper barrier as they come onto the field from the lockerrom for the first time, halftime entertainments. At higher levels, the ritual gets more complex. The Super Bowl is the great annual rite of America’s athletic-military-entertainment complex. The game is integrated into the American dream not only by the singing of the national anthem, but by the F16 flyover. Halftime is extended to make room for popular celebrity singers to perform to raucous crowds. You don’t have to be at the g...

          Our relationship to God occurs in at least three grammatical moods. First, is the indicative mood. Faith in this mood is declarative, stating what is true, usually with a fairly high degree of certainty. Fundamentalists of all stripes (right, left, center) can be found here. Intellectual assent is the key virtue in this mood.           Secondly, we have the imperative mood. Here demand is the main thing. The rules are there and they must be kept. Purity cultures (again, of all stripes) thrive on this imperative mood. Taboo subjects like sex are high profile here. Performance is the key.           Thirdly, we have the subjunctive mood. Here we find the “perhaps, maybes, hopes, doubts, perplexities” of faith. This is the mood we all live in much of the time if we’re honest. The rough edges and loose ends of life are where this mood th...

By Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma Essay November 16, 2015 As I write, I’m sitting in my living room watching football on a Sunday evening. I just finished eating a meal made with organic tomatoes and peppers we grew in our garden this summer, and now I’m enjoying a craft beer, made not far from my home. Tonight’s Sunday Night Football game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Seattle Seahawks begins with a moment of silence to remember the victims of the Paris terrorist attack on Friday night, followed by a slightly altered version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” When the singer reaches the line “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,” he changes “our” to “your” in a show of solidarity with France. As the song finishes, war helicopters fly over the stadium. As Arizona quarterback Carson Palmer narrowly avoids a sack, ...

In Uncategorized on November 17, 2015 at 12:43 pm Today in Sydney the Daily Telegraph reported that the ‘merciless’ response promised by President Francois Hollande of France had begun with revenge bombings of cities in Syria. There should be no doubt that non-combatants will suffer in these attacks. I write this with a profound sense of anxiety and personal misgiving. But I feel like I cannot not write when, as I’ll explain below, it looks to some observers as if  the church I love has publicly merged its identity with that of Western capitalist democracy. Almost overnight, we have shucked off the theological practice of over a 1000 years.* At its best, the church has kept a clear distinction between itself and the state; suddenly, we have begun using words like solidarity and phrases ‘standing with Paris’. And I think that somewhere in our Spirit-led rush to the kind of compassion that has marked the church through the ages, we have forgotten that to be pastora...