I spent a bit of time today listening to Ms. Sara Houranpay describe the destruction of her family’s restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Her family immigrated to the United States thirty years ago and in a matter of minutes their restaurant was destroyed. It is located in a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood, and the restaurant has a reputation for welcoming people from every walk of life. There were no police there to protect them. One patrol car passed by but... Read more
The four thugs in uniform who committed murder today do not represent me. They do not represent the people of Minnesota or this nation. They do not represent white people. They represent what happens when people become their own gods. People who act out of hatred and cruelty. People who lust after dominance and power. People who hide behind and pervert justice. They are the people who live in every generation, who exploit the defenseless and call cruelty courage. They... Read more
In breaking news, it has been revealed that in 1998, Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, defended slavery and condemned the bravery of Harriet Tubman. An article from the Religious News Service resurrects the conversation and the context for Mohler’s remarks: On June 12, 1998, Mohler was a guest on “Larry King Live,” along with the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. and Patricia Ireland, then-president of the National Organization for Women, to discuss the Southern Baptist Convention’s... Read more
“Is the Resurrection a sequel or a reversal?” At first glance, one might think it is a sequel. Over two thousand years later, most people think of the Resurrection as one event in a set of three. We often hear people talk about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as three saving moments. Others emphasize the death, resurrection and ascension as the critical events in Jesus’s life. And, if by sequel, one means “events in a sequence”... Read more
For some time now, I’ve been thinking a good deal about the importance of cultivating the virtue of fortitude as a dimension of spiritual formation in the modern seminary. The spread of Covid-19 has added focus to that reflection. Many clergy have waded into the challenges posed by this pandemic and have provided solid leadership for their congregations. But, at the same time, a vocal handful have publicly rehearsed how stressed and disillusioned they are by the demands that... Read more
Well, strictly speaking, Covid-19 was the presenting issue. Your role was changed by something called “Hospital Incident Command.” Hospital Incident Command HIC is a “standardized approach to managing complex incidents” that was developed in the 1970s in California to give hospitals “a framework on which to build a response quickly and scale it” to fit the demands made on hospitals by large scale emergencies, including the wildland fires in California that originally prompted its development. After the 9/11, those protocols... Read more
There are already countless articles that explore what we are learning about the life of the church in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. There will be many more. Some of the lessons we have learned will be harder to absorb and may go unnoticed. They are also lessons that we didn’t need a crisis to learn. One of those lessons goes straight to the heart of what it means to be the body of Christ: Church has always... Read more
Three weeks ago, in the first of three articles I outlined what I believe to be a way to move beyond the zero-sum games that shape public discourse. Relying on game theory, I pointed out that while there are viable ways of talking about an infinite game that does not presuppose a belief in God, for Christians the best way forward is to nurture what we might call “God’s infinite game.” That game is theocentric and is predicated on the... Read more
Last week, in the first of three articles I outlined what I believe to be a way to move beyond the zero-sum games that shape public discourse. Relying on game theory, I pointed out that while there are viable ways of talking about an infinite game that does not presuppose a belief in God, for Christians the best way forward is to nurture what we might call “God’s infinite game.” That game is theocentric and is predicated on the... Read more
Recently it was revealed that Yale will no longer offer its widely popular, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present”. Yale’s “celebrated” professor of art, Vincent Scully has taught it “for decades”, and – perhaps, predictably — the chair of the department argued that the focus of the course was “too white, too European, too male” and “too ‘problematic’”. So, it is being shelved in favor of a class with a “global” theme, that will take into account... Read more
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