There’s a new meme on twitter called #jadapose. A girl named Jada was at a party and she got raped after being drugged. So her rapist took a picture of her lying on the floor afterwards and called it #jadapose and put it on twitter. Then a bunch of his twitter followers thought it was funny so they took pictures of themselves mimicking the way she was lying on the floor and hashtagging them #jadapose. And it viralized. And that’s... Read more
A West Virginia woman named Holly Fisher stirred up a social media storm with her picture holding an assault rifle and a Bible with the American flag, particularly because it looks very similar to the 2004 photo of Hamas suicide bomber Reem Riyashi on the right above. No, Holly Fisher cannot be equated to a suicide bomber. But her publicity stunt showcases the absolute failure of Christian witness in our age of mockery. (more…) Read more
I’ve been dragging my heels on writing this post because referring to God as a “victim” and “rebel” elicited a fierce visceral reaction and pile-on from my conservative evangelical friends on Twitter a couple of weekends ago. But I had a realization the other week as I was contemplating the way that evangelicals like me end up with a banal “Mr. Rogers God” despite the best efforts of our youth pastors to make God appear as mean and strict as... Read more
I’ve been meditating on two things that my brother Jonathan Martin said during our rave sermon at the Wild Goose Festival a week ago: “The Trinity is a dance” and “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is no inhibition.” I realize that at first glance, these two statements might seem like the kind of flippant blasphemy that confirms the worst stereotypes about a progressive Christian gathering like Wild Goose. Make God into your personal art project; give yourself... Read more
One of the most toxic things that happens in our social media world is the phenomenon of mocking. We really really enjoy it. And in our warped slacktivist brains, we turn it into a duty. We make it our responsibility as concerned citizens to show those angry arrogant progressives/conservatives how stupid they look so that they’ll stop being such idiots, since making other people feel stupid and under attack is such an effective way of changing hearts and minds. I... Read more
There’s a wonky term that gets thrown around a lot among Christian educators called “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The term was coined in 2005 by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton in a book about the spiritual life of American teenagers. Moralistic therapeutic deism describes the phenomenon by which (white middle-class) Christian kids, whether they’re evangelical or mainline, seem to wind up believing that God is a lot like Mr. Rogers. He’s a gentle, infinitely understanding, introverted man in a cardigan... Read more
We’ve been having a stimulating conversation at the campus ministry summer institute at Candler School of Theology about the nature of young adult spirituality. Part of the presentation described many millennial young adults as “spiritual tinkerers,” a phrase which had a slightly pejorative edge to it and rubbed some people in the room the wrong way. The implicit critique in this phrase is that you need to make up your mind whether you’re “in” or “out” instead of just dabbling.... Read more
One of the things that grieves me about the social media era is the way that we cordon ourselves off into ideological echo chambers where we don’t have to interact with anyone from the other side. I think this is a real tragedy and I’m very passionate about not living that way. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I’m a progressive who needs conservatives around as conversation partners. That being said, I’m done with trolls. If you troll... Read more
Despite the fact that I’ve been pretty vocal on my blog about LGBT issues, I haven’t been fully “out” as an ally in my face-to-face interactions with my congregation and other clergy, though it’s probably been very silly to think I can somehow separate the two worlds. Today represented somewhat of a milestone in that regard. Two years ago, when the rainbow people held communion outside of the annual conference, I had a very brief and nervous conversation with one... Read more
Yesterday, my colleague Tom Berlin put forward a motion to postpone the resolution that had been put forward to change the United Methodist Discipline‘s language on homosexuality so that we could have a year of dialogue as a conference about sexuality as proposed by our bishop. I imagine that there were some people in the room who felt quite betrayed by this motion (which I not only supported but encouraged Tom beforehand to propose). A woman stood up to say... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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