I dedicated my book How Jesus Saves the World From Us to my dad because he’s the smartest man I know and he taught me how to think. He’s the best conversation partner I’ve had over the years even though I was a complete jerk to him for about a decade of smarmy young adulthood. I wanted to share a few links from my dad’s blog because I really want to see his platform grow. It’s got a weird quirky... Read more
I blew up at a guy on the Internet for trying to make a comparison between alcoholism and homosexuality. To sexual traditionalist Christians, it may seem like a valid analogy to make. Just because you’re born with a certain genetic proclivity doesn’t mean that you have to act on it. If drunks can get sober, then gay people can stay celibate or go straight. But it’s only possible to make this analogy without really thinking about how 12 step recovery... Read more
It’s a measure of how morally depraved the church has become that a Southern Baptist Convention resolution condemning overt racism and fascism is considered a major victory. The “alt-right” presents conservative evangelicalism with an easy target, but white supremacy is a lot bigger than the alt-right and pretending that it has been addressed by condemning the alt-right will only serve to perpetuate it. White supremacy is thoroughly embedded in every aspect of a theology that has been distorted for the... Read more
The book of Numbers was the source text of the message this year at Louisiana’s United Methodist annual conference. It’s a story of conquest. The Israelites send spies into the land of Canaan to figure out how to slaughter its people and take their land. Which is exactly what the Europeans did to the native Americans to form our country. All in Jesus’ name. So I was not thrilled to have genocidal colonial conquest as the operative metaphor for a conversation... Read more
How should Christians respond to Donald Trump’s meltdown? My first instinct is schadenfreude. Because 81% of my fellow white evangelicals voted for him. And that means if he goes down in flames, then maybe they’ll finally lose their power and their ability to alienate millions of non-Christians from ever considering Christ. But if I’m honest, Donald Trump’s behavior is the public repudiation and total exposure of my own sin. Every time he tweets impulsively, every time he lies, every time... Read more
When we did a series of video interviews with our students this spring, I was a little nervous. What would they say and how would it reflect on what I’ve tried to teach them? As an evangelical, I’ve been trained to be very suspicious of the concept of inclusivity. There’s a shallow liberal idea that accepting people who are different and not judging anybody (except people who judge) is the whole of morality. That’s how I was taught to understand... Read more
Today, Donald Trump announced that the US is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an international agreement which seeks to set goals for reducing each country’s pollution and impact on climate change. Almost 200 countries have committed to the Paris accord. Every other major industrialized nation is part of it. What makes the US special? For the past four decades, our politics has been dominated by a bizarre electoral alliance that aligns the fossil fuel industry and conservative evangelical Christians... Read more
A few weeks ago, I went to my neighborhood Catholic bookstore to get a new rosary. I often flip through a few books on the shelves, but rarely do I buy one. When I opened the book Listen to the Desert, I stumbled upon the following passage between two desert fathers: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him: Abba, as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and... Read more
“It would be one thing for a candidate to throttle and hit a reporter, but to do so in the presence of other journalists, in this case a crew from the Fox News Channel, is just plain reckless.” This beautiful quote came from Chris Stirewalt, Fox News’ politics editor, about Greg Gianforte’s assault on a newspaper reporter the night before his special election in Montana. In other words, next time, don’t body slam the guy when our Fox crew is... Read more
In announcing the Trump administration’s proposed budget this week, White house budget director Mike Mulvaney said two different things that were very revealing. He talked about the importance of requiring jobs for recipients of Medicaid for the sake of their moral betterment and he bragged about the hundreds of billions of dollars that the federal government was going to save on Medicaid in the future. In other words, he made it very plain that the purpose of requiring jobs was... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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