[I decided to take a Sabbath from the blog for the rest of my mission trip and let my fellow mission team members guest post for me each night instead. This first post is from Robert Greenwood.] I am 48 hours into my first international mission trip and I have been tasked with writing the first blog entry from our trip to the Dominican Republic. As a newbie fresh into the experience, I thought it might be most helpful to... Read more
The word jóvenes means the “young people.” It basically covers both youth and young adults. In Latin American culture, there isn’t a huge gap between people who are under 18 and over 18, probably because going off to college is an exception rather than a norm. In any case, the Iglesia Evangélica Dominicana is a church that is run largely by jóvenes. (more…) Read more
I’m pre-loading my Monday Mertons for the next two weeks in my insomnia before leaving on a trip to the Dominican Republic. So I don’t have enough mental energy to analyze the quotes I’m going to share, but they’re gems nonetheless. This first set of quotes is from chapter 6, “Asceticism and Sacrifice,” in No Man Is An Island. (more…) Read more
It’s Mother’s Day here in the Dominican Republic. One of the scripture readings for church tonight was Proverbs 31, which many evangelicals view as the prescriptive model for Biblical womanhood. I had never noticed verse 26 before: “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and on her tongue is the Torah of mercy.” If the Proverbs 31 woman speaks Torah and wisdom, why in the world would anyone want her to be silent in church? (more…) Read more
While I’m down here in the Dominican Republic, I’ve been reading some theology books in Spanish to improve my fluency. One of them is called La Palabra No Está Encadenada (“The word is not enchained”) by Xavier Alegre. He has a chapter on the book of Revelation that interprets it as “Christian resistance and prophetic hope.” Revelation is usually the anti-environmentalist prooftext par excellence. If God’s going to destroy the world anyway, why should we care about driving SUV’s (as... Read more
Maureen Glaser and I have come down ahead of our Dominican Republic missions team to visit a couple of places we’ve worked in the past. We are staying with Carolina Marinez, the pastor of two congregations in San Rafael and Samangola, which are two colonias of the larger town San Cristobal where Carolina lives in a house with about a dozen extended family members and works as a full-time pharmacist to pay the bills on top of being a pastor... Read more
For those of you Jesus nerds who haven’t read James K.A. Smith, you need to change that. Smith names what is probably the most important problem with the way that the church approaches teaching: we teach as though people are most fundamentally rational creatures whose actions are shaped by the abstract principles that they just need to get drilled into their heads, when in fact people are more fundamentally liturgical creatures whose habits shape them far more than their principles.... Read more
I posted recently about the debacle that Tony Jones got into partly because of his statement that “the nascent Pentecostalism practiced in much of the Global South would benefit from being in dialogue with the older, more developed theologies of the West.” Well, I’ve been reading The Spirit Poured Out On All Flesh, a book by Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong, who could hardly be called “nascent.” He’s kind of like the Pentecostal Scot McKnight, well within the bounds of what... Read more
Oh mercy! The evangelicals have so wanted to make peace with the Catholics, because they make for such great allies in the culture wars. They’re not just anti-abortion; they’re anti-condom! So we’ve tried to overlook the whole Mary thing. But then they elected this pope who washes the feet of criminals. And he says negative things about capitalism. And now he says that non-Christians are capable of doing good and are in fact redeemed by Christ. Is Pope Francis a... Read more
It doesn’t matter whether Rachel Held Evans took John Piper’s tweet about the Oklahoma tornadoes “out of context.” It doesn’t matter whether she used the incident as a springboard to talk about other problematic things that Piper has said in the past and polemicize against the underlying theology that she considers to be the source of such statements. The fact remains that tweeting Bible verses about houses falling down on children and killing them after that happens to someone in... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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