by Brandon Gilvin In August of 2014, not long after Mike Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO, and much of that town erupted in protest, I noticed a clear division among my social media contacts. It wasn’t so much a “Pro-Brown/Pro-Wilson” divide, though I did see the debate manifesting in that way. What I was finally able to articulate was this: “Two deep divisions I’m noticing in conversations on Ferguson, MO: disagreement on whether the criminal justice system is truly,... Read more
Modern applied science and our current economic systems have failed us. They are responsible for the environmental crisis that is putting our future and that of our fragile, interconnected biosphere at risk. Equally, the world’s religious leaders have also failed us with their all-too-quick acceptance of the status quo and dereliction in working to protect the divine gift that is creation. Most readers are already aware of the evidence for these claims: the greenhouse gasses we’re pumping into the air... Read more
Recently, I talked to a young African American man, Andrew Roby, about the prevalence of racism in America. I argued that America needed to heal its racial wounds before it could move forward and reconcile its past with its present, to which he responded: “How can America’s racial wounds be healed if they are still open?” Andrew Roby’s question remains painfully relevant. On April 4, 2015 Walter Scott—a human being, a black man, a father, friend, and son—was killed in... Read more
By John Holbert I was not raised in the church—no Sunday School, no youth camps, no sermons, no Easter trumpeting. Yet, I went to seminary anyway. I will not tell you just why in detail, but it was 1968, and some will remember a very long and terrible war that was raging then, and for us liberal arts types (English/Philosophy in my case), that 4D on the required draft card was somehow better than a one-way trip to Canada. In... Read more
For many Christians, Easter is a high holy holiday—it’s the religious bedrock that not only anchors them in their faith, but it also shapes and governs their view of the world. I’m one of them. My passion for Easter is like that of author and Christian C.S. Lewis. In his 1945 essay “Is Theology Poetry?”, Lewis expressed his passion for the whole of Christianity thusly: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because... Read more
“God understands our pain. That is good theology for Good Friday. And that kind of theology only happens when we connect the Bible to the world we live in. It happens when worship and activism meet. We don’t have to choose between faith and action. In fact we cannot have one without the other.” We call it Holy Week. But it was a terrible week. His trial reeked of injustice. His own disciple sold him out for a few pieces... Read more
By Bonnie Halford It was the morning of Good Friday, 1995. I was driving towards downtown Mill Valley, coming up to a 4-way stop that I have passed through hundreds of times. My mind was elsewhere. I had been laid off from IBM several months before, and had gone through most of my severance. My previous five years had been spent dodging bullets as the company had gone from 400K employees to 250K. I had a mortgage, no financial net,... Read more
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth and final in a weekly Lenten series on the body and blood of Christ by Church History Professor Kelly Pigott. Even though the Reformation became an era when people were killing each other over, among other things, Eucharistic theology, at least the reformers made it so that the bread and the wine were once again offered to the average sinner in the congregation. But Martin Luther changed other elements of worship as well that put this early reemphasis of... Read more
“The way we view the crucifixion of Jesus and the posture of God when that happened affects everything we think about God. It affects how we pray, how we worship, even how we raise our children. We can’t afford to get it wrong.” — Tony Jones, author of Did God Kill Jesus? Tony Jones, popular theologian, speaker, blogger, and a founder of the emergent church movement, has an important new book out this week, perfectly timed for Holy Week. Did God Kill Jesus?... Read more
“Because of Easter and consequently Jesus’ exalted divine status, we are left in the Gospels with the best of Jesus’ humanity, but we lose the worst of his humanity. And yet there are strands of a fallible, imperfect Jesus that remarkably did not get completely edited/redacted out.“ Every serious student of the Gospels knows that in the oral transmission (the retelling) of the stories and teachings of and about Jesus, and in the final editing/redacting by the author, changes were... Read more
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