By Daniel Fan News Flash: White Cis Hetero Male finds Empire Not So Bad After All A response to Tony Jones’ “In Praise of Empires” Courtney and I are in Rome this week, compliments of Focus Features and A Different Drummer, to visit the set of a movie based on Anne Rice’s novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. We are embargoed from writing anything about the movie (yet), but my fifteenth trip to the Eternal City has brought on... Read more
It’s a four-year-old’s game of infinite regression, yet more profound than she can possibly know. “Daddy, what would we do if we couldn’t buy gas?,” she asks with an impish grin when she knows she should be eating breakfast. I will play the game if she’ll have another bite. “Well, sweetie, I guess we’d go to a different gas station!” “And what if that gas station was out of gas too? And the other one. What if all of them were... Read more
Two days ago I purchased my monthly copy of Mantra Yoga+Health magazine. I was anticipating my “highlight” as I had submitted an answer to the question ‘What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for L O V E?’. I had answered in an honest way that is uniquely me; expressing my voice and hoping to marry my emergent Christian faith with my yogic sensibilities. No sign of my Joe Longo pic I submitted, no talk of foot washing humility….hmmmm? The... Read more
My friend Dylan first introduced me to the show “Girls” during a brief stint I had living in Brooklyn. I fell in love with it. The writing was quirky and intelligent, Lena Dunham’s character didn’t look like someone from Sex and The City, and the strange manner in which it dealt with millennial life was refreshing. And even though it was wrought with Long-Island-white-girl issues (“first-world problems”), it had a flair and contemporary élan worthy of praise and notoriety. But is... Read more
Cricket: Jesus is never mad at us — if we live with him in our hearts? Tommy: I hate to break it to you, but he is. He most definitely is. I [Heart] Huckabees (2004) Election Day, 2014. Our votes today will be translations of our political ideologies into a series of choices from a limited option set. These ideologies are the products of many factors including our life experiences and personal faith/worldviews. But there will be more happening... Read more
“Oh Father rescue me from doubt Deliver me from grief Let your joy in me abound Remove my unbelief, remove my unbelief” These are the words from a song by Jenny & Tyler, titled “When Darkness Falls.” And while the closing line is taken from Mark 9:24, these words strike me this day quite differently than I would normally expect. When I first read these words, I thought they might be from a Psalm, because of the generally poetic nature... Read more
Several years ago, after what I thought was a horrible ordination process, I decided to leave the church. It was a weekday when I decided that I would never step back into the church. The only problem was that I was serving as a chaplain in a level II trauma center outside of Chicago, IL, so I had to be confronted with normative Christian discourse and theologies that I found to be hugely problematic. But, nonetheless, I decided to leave.... Read more
This is a guest post by Rod T. Rod is one of the founding members of Killjoy Prophets, a writer, and supervillain at large. He blogs at Political Jesus and can be followed on Twitter at h00die_R. “Because this was now being handled in public, I was fortunate to receive the support of hundreds of people on Twitter – as well as attacks from others. I always expect some form of trolling, but I did not expect one of the... Read more
By Micky ScottBey Jones Spaceships. Neon Slaves. Androids. A Metropolis. Not the usual ingredients for a theological discussion. A world that is “now and not yet” – existing in our hearts and minds – in our imaginations – with only glimpses breaking through in lived experience – that could describe what Jesus called the kingdom of God, yet I feel like it also describes the worlds of Afrofuturism. Dare we imagine a future that doesn’t seem possible in order to... Read more
In 2012, a Pew Foundation Survey on religion revealed the rising number of religiously unaffiliated Americans — sometimes referred to as “the rise of the Nones” (not to be confused with “The Rise of the Nuns,” a movie script that’s been floating around in my head since the day I discovered “nunzilla”). Of course, labeling millions of people “Nones” (as if they stand for nothing) is a bit disingenuous. In reality, the study showed that most of the Nones self-identify... Read more
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