Last year I wrote a rap for Advent about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and their implications for those of us who live very safe and privileged lives today. Basically, my thesis is that you can’t hold a baby who was born in a manger if you’re living a life that’s designed to avoid all danger. For a hook, I used a combination of the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Look Down,” the opening song of Les Miserables.... Read more
If God tells you to sin, is it still a sin? What if God tells a king to sin because he’s mad at the king’s people and he wants an excuse to punish them? That’s precisely what happens in 2 Samuel 24:1, “Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.'” As “punishment” for the census, which God told David to take, God sends a plague... Read more
It’s been a hard couple of weeks to be a Wahoo in the wake of a Rolling Stone article calling out the rape culture on the University of Virginia campus. Even though UVA’s official mascot is the Cavalier, we call ourselves Wahoos, a fish that can drink its weight. That says a lot about who we are and the crisis of our student life. There has been a lot of push-back and criticism of the article because some aspects of... Read more
One thing that I never tire of pondering as a Christian is how Jesus’ cross saves me and what it saves me from. Growing up evangelical, the answer was simple: Jesus took the punishment for my sin to save me from an angry, perfectionist God who wanted to burn me in hell forever. But this explanation looks nothing like the salvation that takes place in response to Peter’s first sermon about Jesus’ cross in Acts 2. Peter says nothing whatsoever... Read more
I don’t go shopping on Black Friday, not because I’m a virtuous person, but because it’s the one day when I get to wag my finger self-righteously at the concept of responsible consumerism, i.e. things like doing your homework, writing lists, making plans, comparing prices, and making responsible adult decisions, basically all the things I’ve always sucked at which the girls in my middle school class with the color-coded binders were always so good at. But there’s nothing virtuous about... Read more
The transphobic Polish town council of Tuszyn has banished Winnie the Pooh from being a mascot for their playground, and Fox News wants you to know all about it. The reason: Pooh doesn’t wear any pants (just a shirt) and there is no bodily indication of which gender Pooh is. I’m used to defaulting to a “he” for Winnie the Pooh, but I’m realizing that might not be Pooh’s preferred gender pronoun. After all, Pooh’s character is not depicted with... Read more
We have a broken immigration system. And it’s broken in a way that is incredibly unfair to people from south of our border who have the wherewithal and the work ethic to come up to the United States and work in the temporary labor market. You cannot get a visa to migrate to the United States if you are a blue-collar independent contractor. The solution is simple: we need about ten million temporary work visas for blue-collar independent contractors. If... Read more
During the past couple of weeks, two arguments have surfaced on opposite sides of the gay marriage debate that are based upon offensive analogies (or “provocative” ones, depending which side you’re on). At the Reformation Project conference in DC, evangelical ethicist David Gushee made an analogy between the Biblically-based, tradition-affirmed anti-Semitism of the pre-Holocaust church and the church’s opposition to homosexuality. Then in response to the Reformation Project, British neo-Calvinist Andrew Wilson wrote a “satire” in which he substituted the... Read more
25 years ago, on November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally murdered by a US-trained Salvadoran death squad at the Universidad de Centroamerica in San Salvador. It was one of the lowest points in the shameful story of the US-orchestrated Central American civil wars of the 1980’s. This incident triggered an ongoing protest movement led by American priest Father Roy Bourgeois to close the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, where some... Read more
The short term mission trip industrial complex is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Unfortunately, many short term mission trips are designed to cater to the participant more than the people being served. According to the book Toxic Charity, one church in Mexico was repainted seven times in a single summer by a series of mission teams. That is why NOLA Wesley is so pleased to be partnered with the Highland Support Project to build stoves for our spring 2015 mission... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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