What Does it Mean to Lament?

July 23, 2012 By 4 Comments
Grief

This post is a follow-up to Saturday's post on Lament and the Aurora Theater shooting. Over the last couple of days, I have realized that lament is such a foreign concept for many of us as Westerners that I might have been making too big of a leap in assuming that people knew what I meant by lament.  So, I offer a few more thoughts here about what lament is and what it might mean for us to lament the recent theater shooting in Aurora. To lament is to come alongside those who grieve, to sit with them (literally or figuratively) in the silence and to recognize there that in God's … [Read more...]

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Enter to win a copy of Reborn on the Fourth of July (Patheos Book Club)

July 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Reborn4th

Nationalistic faith is one of the "sins of abstraction" that we push back against in the in Slow Church book because in preferring one nation over others, it fails to consider the whole of God's work in reconciling all creation. Thus, I was delighted to see that the current Patheos book club title is Logan Mehl-Laituri's Reborn on the Fourth of July... For decades now, the United States has proudly claimed the mantle of "the world's only superpower" based on military might and the scope of military interventions throughout the world. As a result, whole generations are growing up with the … [Read more...]

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Conversation, Identity and Christian Unity.

June 15, 2012 By 6 Comments
BTA-Convo

I have been keenly following Timothy Dalrymple's posts this week about partisan scorn and his critical response to Rachel Held Evans' well-traveled post “How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation”...  Although I'm a bit skeptical of Dalrymple's choice of Evans as an example of  "selling scorn," I'm not really going to comment on their back and forth, as I don't have a stake in either side of that conversation. What was of interest to me, in light of my concern for our churches as hubs of conversation were these excellent three points that Dalrymple offered at the end of his most … [Read more...]

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Serving the Common Good: An Interview with Miroslav Volf

January 31, 2012 By 1 Comment
Miroslav Volf

Chris and I recently collaborated on an article about the political role of the local church for the upcoming February/March issue of Neue Magazine. In preparation for writing the article, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miroslav Volf about politics, the local church, promoting human flourishing, and his most recent book, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. Dr. Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of numerous books, … [Read more...]

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