There’s nothing more obnoxious than authors promoting their books. It always makes me roll my eyes. Well for the next six months or so, I’m going to have to be that obnoxious author. I’ve written what I believe God told me to write after a seven-year prayerful process, so it seems like it’s my duty to try to get it out there the best that I can. There’s an incredible movement afoot among the evangelicals in my generation who were... Read more
In church yesterday, our community prayer included several quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King distinguished between a “negative peace which is the absence of tension” and the “positive peace which is the presence of justice.” He said that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny.” White Christians today would do well to be challenged by these words. To what degree do we value a peace that isn’t peace? Do... Read more
Is it lonelier being a grownup today than it was in the past? I often ask this question to myself when I have to go to my sons’ friends’ birthday parties, which I had to do yesterday. Nothing makes me feel more lonely than being around other parents in a social environment that is centered around our kids. Whether it’s a birthday party. Or a Cub Scout meeting. Or a basketball practice. The social distance between me and the other... Read more
The Larycia Hawkins situation at Wheaton has become fodder for a lot of conversation about evangelical doctrine and whether or not Hawkins has egregiously violated it. Over and over again, I’ve seen conservative evangelicals respond to Hawkins’ statement that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God” by saying that she’s a “universalist.” This puzzling deductive leap points to the presence of a subtext. Hawkins didn’t say anything explicit about whether or not Muslims are going to heaven. The connection only... Read more
Have we become what Jesus came to stop us from being? Many evangelical Christians in my generation are haunted by this question. The loudest Christian voices today sound too much like the first century religious elites who crucified Jesus. We’ve watched our tribe get co-opted into a partisan voting bloc. We’ve been taught to focus on protecting our nuclear families instead of seeking first the kingdom of God. Our theology depends upon non-Christians being wretchedly wicked, so when we meet non-Christians... Read more
This week, Dr. Larycia Hawkins received notice from the Wheaton College administration that termination proceedings would begin against her because of several statements she made on Facebook about Muslims and Christians “worshiping the same God” that supposedly contradict the Wheaton statement of faith. Wheaton has a history of pushing out professors for dubious, ill-defined reasons. The question is not whether Wheaton has a right to maintain a confessional standard of conservative evangelical doctrine among its faculty, but whether the Wheaton... Read more
It seems there are two kinds of Christians: those who think the world needs to be saved from some villainous other like Muslims, gays, or liberals, and those who think the world needs to be saved from Christians. I belong to the latter category. Let me explain what I mean by that. I don’t think Christians are necessarily worse people than anybody else. I just think as a Christian that I’m more responsible for helping Jesus save the world from... Read more
Since everyone is doing their end-of-year top 10 posts, I figured I would do the same. But I never really like doing my ten most popular posts because 1) it feels like bragging and 2) I figure they’re more likely to have already been seen. I prefer going the “in case you missed it” route. Blogging is a strange and sometimes frustrating adventure. The posts that I think are my best writing seldom go viral. So the following posts weren’t necessarily... Read more
Racism doesn’t always look like rage; usually it looks like fear. I had a strange day yesterday. After hearing about the fact that the white cop who shot 12 year old Tamir Rice will not be prosecuted, I watched the Wayans brothers’ movie White Chicks for the first time with my best friend from high school who happens to be black. We both needed to laugh until we cried, though for very different reasons. I don’t know what to do... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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World Table: an experiment in troll-resistant commenting
Everyone knows the number one rule of navigating the blogosphere: don’t read the comments! Which is really kind of a shame. What would it look like to cultivate an online community that actually interacted respectfully rather than constantly trolling the opposition? World Table is a new commenting platform that is exploring this vision. Patheos has asked some of its bloggers to give World Table a test drive. World Table has created a means for the commenting community to provide feedback... Read more