Like so many others, my heart was ripped open this past weekend when I learned the news of Jean Vanier’s sexual abuse of half a dozen women. Vanier was a Catholic mystic who wrote incredibly beautiful words and started an incredibly beautiful movement that honored the dignity of mentally disabled people. And he was a sexual predator. There’s a very specific lesson that I was given to learn from this story. I am absolutely not saying this is the... Read more
I don’t know how atypical we are, But I do know that we’re not from here. We are children of the stars, Utterly alone amidst the humans. Why do I always know when I’ve met another? Is it because we fought on battlefields together thousands of years before the present age began? Or because I intuit that you speak elf telepathically also? There’s a winking that we do without moving our eyes; There’s no small talk — We overshare Immediately.... Read more
What is the difference between happiness and joy? I remember this being a common evangelical youth group Sunday school topic. Happiness is feeling good when everything is going right, but joy is feeling good no matter how things are going because you have Jesus in your heart. I’ve always been a bit dissatisfied with the official Christian answer that joy is simply the more reliable, eternal version of the same thing that happiness is. But lately I’ve been reading a... Read more
Last weekend I was very uncomfortable during a Saturday Night Live sketch in which the one Asian guy in the cast was put in the role of being China’s corrupt health minister talking about the coronavirus. Then I read that UC Berkeley had created a scandal because they said that “xenophobia” was a natural result of the coronavirus hysteria. So I wanted to reflect on the hysteria around this virus because something feels very white about it. It may be... Read more
I wasn’t going to post anything about the Superbowl halftime show. But people kept talking about it. And kept talking about it. And finally I saw something that was so ridiculous and perfectly emblematic of the ridiculousness of this whole conversation that I got sucked in. I know we’re supposed to have moved on in the news cycle by now, but some people apparently have not. At one point in the show, Shakira, who has Lebanese and Colombian heritage, ululated... Read more
One way to talk about the tragic division in contemporary American Christianity is to say that it has pitted the ideas of love of God and love of neighbor against each other. Team Family Values tends to define sin and morality in the vertical terms of our relationship with God while Team Social Justice tends to define sin and morality in the horizontal terms of our relationships with other humans. When I read the Bible, I come away with the... Read more
A couple of weeks ago, a Calvinist bro on Twitter was talking about how liberation theologian James Cone was a heretic because he defined sin in an “unbiblical” way. So it got me thinking about how I define sin. And then I started thinking about the homeless mothers in Oakland who were violently evicted from a vacant investment property they had been squatting in. And the question came to mind: who was sinning? The mothers who broke into somebody else’s... Read more
I had a unique experience today that I’ve never had before. I found out that one of my local friends knew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. personally and worked under him at the very end of his career when he had shifted into anti-war organizing. My friend shared something that King said to him over and over again that was really convicting to me. He said, “Do not succumb to the disease of cynicism for it will justify all of... Read more
I had a powerful mystical encounter today while I was talking with a friend and later reflecting on our conversation as I walked the prayer labyrinth at Audubon Park. I want to try to relate what I think I received hopefully without too many careless heresies when my words fail to capture the strange wonder that I experienced. The basic realization is this: Christian discipleship is becoming the breath of God. It is living in the complete belovedness of our... Read more
[Mike Pompeo: U.S. Department of State, Public Domain] Donald Trump may not be an evangelical Christian, but his administration is filled with evangelicals who have weekly Bible studies together. One such evangelical Mike Pompeo, our Secretary of State, said about Iran that “force is the only language they respond to.” When I hear this statement, I don’t just hear crass political speak. Within it is a theological appraisal of human nature. It’s an application of a popular evangelical doctrine of... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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