Every white ally has a little bit of Rachel Dolezal

Last updated on: June 14, 2015 at 2:29 pm By Morgan Guyton

By now, just about everyone has heard of the white woman Rachel Dolezal who’s been passing as a black woman in Spokane, Washington while teaching African American studies classes at the local college and chairing the local NAACP chapter. Many black people are understandably outraged by Rachel’s actions. The right wing is having lots of fun comparing Rachel’s “trans-racial” identity with transgender identity. When I look at what she did from the perspective of a white ally, I’m convicted by... Read more

If God is a cop, then every cop is God

Last updated on: June 12, 2015 at 11:16 am By Morgan Guyton

Over the past year, as police brutality against people of color has come under increasing scrutiny, a core group of white fundamentalist Christians refuses to concede that any cop in any of the questionable interactions has done anything wrong. While I imagine there are a variety of reasons for this ideological commitment, I wonder if part of the foundation is theological. If God is always described and contemplated as an authority figure whose primary vocation is to judge and punish,... Read more

“What if we were free to fail our way forward?”

Last updated on: June 10, 2015 at 10:05 am By Morgan Guyton

I’m at the Louisiana annual conference where Dr. Elaine Heath is one of our guest presenters. She asked a rhetorical question that was very liberating to me: “What if we were free to fail our way forward?” I know that one of my greatest stumbling blocks in life and ministry is my fear of failure. It sabotages my creativity and my relationships. So what would it look like to have the freedom fail our way forward? Let me say first... Read more

Church without chatter: a weekend with the monks of St. Joseph Abbey

Last updated on: June 8, 2015 at 3:19 pm By Morgan Guyton

This past weekend, I found myself home alone without my wife or kids, so I decided to go across Lake Pontchartrain to spend a couple nights at St. Joseph Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Covington. It was a wonderful experience. Four times each day, we sat in the chancel of their beautiful church to chant psalms and listen to God’s word together. Every meal was eaten in silence. It was a church without chatter. And it was incredibly liberating. Father... Read more

Worship and justice in the feast of first fruits (Deuteronomy 26)

Last updated on: June 6, 2015 at 9:14 am By Morgan Guyton

Yesterday’s lectionary reading included a passage from Deuteronomy 26 that gives instructions on what the Israelites are supposed to do with the first fruits that they harvest in the land that God has given them. This feast of first fruits helps to illustrate the relationship between sacrificial worship and justice that has always been part of God’s teaching. Basically, God tells the people that they’re supposed to give him the “first fruits” of their harvest (vv. 1-3): When you have entered the... Read more

Everyone is afraid: thoughts on the panic over identity politics

Last updated on: June 4, 2015 at 2:15 pm By Morgan Guyton

My Facebook feed has blown up with a Vox article by a “liberal professor” who says that “[his] liberal students terrify [him].” It’s part of the latest popular narrative about millennials. Not only are they lazy, entitled, and iPhone-addicted. They’re also extremely fragile to the point of swooning over seeing the n-word in Huckleberry Finn. They relish their victimhood and trust only their feelings and authentic personal testimonies. It’s quite rich that an article critiquing the exploitation of victimhood and personal... Read more

What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity

Last updated on: June 3, 2015 at 12:12 pm By Morgan Guyton

Predictably, there have been a lot of ignorant Christian responses to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out. Someone today shared an older article by Jonathan Merritt about transgender and intersex identity. In it, Merritt quoted Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore (accidentally) saying something right. Talking about intersex people who are born with ambiguously gendered bodies, Moore says that it’s “a question of epistemology not ontology.” Moore is exactly right (just not in the way that he meant these words). This whole “debate”... Read more

Breaking a child’s will: the idolatry of obedience

Last updated on: May 22, 2015 at 9:59 am By Morgan Guyton

I read a really chilling blog post on Homeschooler’s Anonymous about a disciplinary practice in the far-right homeschooling community I’d never heard of. It’s called “blanket training.” They put their toddlers on small blankets, tell them not to move off, and spank them when they do. Michael and Debi Pearl recommend putting an attractive object close to the blanket to bait the toddler. The idea is to “break their will” from a very early age so that they will do... Read more

Real evangelicals don’t gloat about church decline

Last updated on: May 19, 2015 at 9:29 am By Morgan Guyton

I’m not sure who’s getting more mileage out of the Pew report on church decline: the atheists or the evangelicals? There’s been a whole lot of hand-wringing and spin-doctoring in response to the survey which shows that while Christianity has declined overall in America, evangelical Christianity has held steady at around 25% of the population. This means that evangelicalism has dramatically increased its market share within Christianity, even if the evangelical culture wars have also alienated many millennials from... Read more

Sister Helen Prejean’s chat with the Boston Marathon bomber

Last updated on: May 16, 2015 at 4:58 pm By Morgan Guyton

This past week, our local New Orleans newspaper ran a story about Sister Helen Prejean’s testimony to try to save Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, from the death penalty. Prejean is the anti-death-penalty activist nun made famous by the movie Dead Man Walking. She had a series of conversations with Tsarnaev at the invitation of his defense team. She claimed that Dzhokhar showed remorse for what he had done. He had said, “Nobody deserves to suffer like that.” Prejean... Read more