A Christian Nightmare

Last updated on: October 7, 2024 at 2:47 pm By Vance Morgan

What would happen if we actually took the things we claim to believe seriously enough to do something about them? Seriously enough to completely change our lives? Katie is a “good person”—doctor for the National Health Service, mother, wife, and socially aware—but is desperately unhappy with her life. Her husband David is angry and cynical; he writes a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway” in which he pillories everything from old people who walk too slowly getting off... Read more

Teach Us to Sit Still

Last updated on: October 5, 2024 at 8:51 pm By Vance Morgan

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In one month the most consequential Presidential election of our lifetimes will take place. People are already voting by mail, and all indications is that we may not know the winner for days after. Everyone is nervous, many are jaded, others have lost hope. A few thoughts about self-care are in order. Early in her 2018 book Almost Everything, Anne Lamott describes what an older woman in the midst of a twelve-step recovery program once told her. One of the... Read more

When Christians Do Un-Christian Things

Last updated on: October 1, 2024 at 2:12 pm By Vance Morgan

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One of the teaching teammates I have taught with for the last half-dozen years is a Victorian literature scholar. This, of course, includes Charles Dickens. Her choice from Dickens for the syllabus often is the über-familiar A Christmas Carol; she gave two lectures on this text earlier this week. A Christmas Carol in late September/early October might seem anachronistic, but the text is about far more than a particular time of year. Its moral themes are both timeless and remarkably... Read more

Living the Social Gospel

Last updated on: September 30, 2024 at 4:44 pm By Vance Morgan

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Next week in the interdisciplinary program I teach in will be “Social Gospel” week. Students will read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum for Tuesday lecture, then essays from Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie, as well as the introduction to Walter Rauschenbusch’s 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel for Thursday seminar. Rauschenbusch was one of the most important voices of the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, a movement within Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social... Read more

How to Delegate Authority

Last updated on: September 26, 2024 at 9:16 pm By Vance Morgan

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Today’s lectionary reading from the Jewish scriptures is from Numbers. We find the liberated Israelites in the desert, and they are complaining—again. God has miraculously provided them with a daily supply of manna to keep them from starving, but everyone is pining for the wonderful variety of food they remember eating in Egypt. We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength... Read more

Why We Believe Things That Aren’t True

Last updated on: September 26, 2024 at 2:01 pm By Vance Morgan

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Over the years that I have been writing this blog, those who describe themselves as non-believers or atheists have frequently expressed regular confusion and frustration about the same issue. It usually goes something like this: “How can someone who seems to be relatively normal and intelligent believe in something without any evidence?” I don’t get defensive when asked this and similar questions—I don’t want to be that sort of Christian. I often reply by suggesting that there is evidence to... Read more

How to Make God Interesting

Last updated on: September 23, 2024 at 7:39 pm By Vance Morgan

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It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [non-Christian] to hear a Christian, supposedly giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [scientific] topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people reveal vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. One guess as to who wrote the above. Most likely a progressive Christian denying the authority of the Bible, right? How about this one? Darwin taught us... Read more

The Wisdom of Trees

Last updated on: September 21, 2024 at 9:28 am By Vance Morgan

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In Psalm 1, one of the psalm options in today’s lectionary readings, the righteous are described as being “like trees planted by streams of water . . . in all that they do, they prosper.” We can learn a great deal about spiritual health and growth from trees. There are two kinds of living things, distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing... Read more

Why Being Uncomfortable is a Good Thing

Last updated on: September 20, 2024 at 8:44 am By Vance Morgan

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A new podcast that I’ve been enjoying recently is Ali Velshi’s “Banned Book Club”–I highly recommend it. An item popped up on my Facebook news feed not long ago reporting that Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird had recently been pulled from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district. Lee’s novel has raised controversy ever since its publication for racist language and dated racial stereotypes, but in this case the explanation for banning the book was straightforward.... Read more

Jesus and a Four-Letter Word

Last updated on: September 16, 2024 at 3:13 pm By Vance Morgan

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Next week will be one of my favorite teaching weeks of the semester as I get to give a lecture, then lead two seminars, on the work of Karl Marx. I always feel like a bit of a reprobate when I teach Marx–and that’s a good thing. I get to teach many of the people I was taught as a child to both fear and ignore–Marx is the first of them. My impression growing up was that “Marx” was one... Read more