Your Guide to Weekend Reading: July 8

If you’re anything like me, it can be tough keeping up with reading throughout the week. Friends share interesting articles on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you set them aside so you can read them “later,” only later never happens. Perhaps it’s just me…

Here’s what I have set aside during the course of the past week to be read “later.” Cheers and enjoy!

From My Blog

Language Lessons: Leitourgia – “I’m not entirely convinced that it is does. At least, not in the way that everyone thinks. Leitourgia when used in its historical context does not mean “the work of the people” but more accurately “a public work on behalf of the people.” Sometimes the public work was performed by an individual and at other times it was performed by a small group/portion of the population, but it was always on behalf of the larger whole.”

On the Freedom of a Christian – “The point of Christian freedom is that we can now choose to subject ourselves to others, to serve others, to be dutiful to others. And as such we willingly subject ourselves to the Law of Christ—or the Law of Love—in that we aim to live as Christ lived, to love as he loved, to treat others as he did, and to work for the salvation of all people.”

From the Internet

Overcoming Alienation: Inculturation, Christology, and Prayer Book Revision by Calvin Lane (The Living Church) – “Could it be, however, that the 1979 BCP is already a rather ingenious vehicle for healthy inculturation, a book that speaks to our particular culture while drawing us into the universal?”

‘Trump wants you to be in his reality show” by Stanley Hauerwas (Christianity Today) – “He [Hauerwas] explained: ‘You only know that there is a world, if you know that there is an alternative to the world.’ The Church embodies the witness of an alternative reality, the people of God, telling the world to “come home”.’

Top Ten Reasons for Pastors to Avoid Politics by John Stackhouse via Scot McKnight (Patheos, Jesus Creed) – 10. Because no one trained you properly to get involved with politics—and a little seminar, however exciting, won’t make up for that yawning deficit. (Do you think politicians can be trained to be pastors by attending a seminar?)

Why I Don’t Flow With Richard Rohr by Fred Sanders (Gospel Coalition) – “But what I read here in The Divine Dance is very bad. At the fringes are telltale signs of universalism, rejection of the need for Christ to die to reconcile us to God, a low view of Scripture as a morally polluted text with false statements in it, and the idea that the incarnation is itself atonement with God. At the core of the book is a motivated misuse of the Trinity. The book tends toward the subversion and replacement of the Christian doctrine of the triune God. It’s a theological Trojan horse designed to bring a hostile metaphysic into the heart of the church.”

From the Magazine: The Hidden Spirituality of Teach for America by Ethan Richardson (Mockingbird) – “Maybe you, like me, don’t think successful adulthood necessarily means a college education, but that’s not the point. The point is that Backwards Planning is a way of making the invisible concrete, the future present. It is the business of bringing ambitious Big Goals into the realms of copy machines and math standards and overhead projectors. As Teach For America says it, it makes the problem ‘solvable.'”

If you’re really behind, you may enjoy last week’s Guide to Weekend Reading.

Remember, links and articles shared here are not endorsed or opposed by this blog–the goal is simply to promote reading and healthy dialogue.