@Tim_Suttle: You’re not imagining it. Our society is a mess. We’re stuck in a rut of malignant tribalism and gridlock, while facing no less than five serious crises at the same time, and we’re making exactly zero progress. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Humans didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being inept at solving problems. Why are We Stuck? Our political and social systems have been ground to a halt by ideology. Here’s... Read more
. I read a fascinating thread by Anand Giridharadas that puts our current moment in stark perspective. We’re dealing not with one major crisis right now, or even two or three. There are five. We’re dealing with five massive, overlapping, and interlocking crises at the same time, each touching the core of our common life in America and beyond. They are: Crisis 1: Global Pandemic “The pandemic and the already unhealthy host society the virus attacked.” We were cooking... Read more
. . A LITURGY: FOR THE CONFESSION OF RACIAL INJUSTICE Trinity Sunday, 2020 Redemption Church, Olathe KS Ldr: In fervent hope that the arc of history does, indeed, bend toward justice, we lift up our prayers for racial healing, asking that you would bind our hearts together as a church, O Lord, empower us to break the chains of poverty, ignorance, prejudice, and despair which degrade the sacred dignity of humankind; teach us to love each other and... Read more
If you’re like me, COVID-19 has laid waste to your daily routines. Short estimates say 8-12 weeks, longer ones predict 12-18 months will pass under this state of emergency. This means that one of the most important things you can do right now is to sit down with the people you love and design a healthy routine to ground your common life throughout this season. Author Rebecca Solnit once noted that imbedded in the word emergency, is the word emerge.... Read more
This a letter I wrote to my church, to help us frame what’s coming our way… Hello RC Family, In light of all that is happening with the COVID-19 situation, I’m writing to loop everyone into what Redemption Church is doing to adjust. It’s a strange reality to acknowledge, but it seems likely the coming days will involve difficulty and challenge for our society and church. Our strength will be tested, but I have every confidence in the goodness... Read more
The central confession of the Christian faith is: Jesus is Lord. We don’t really use the language of “lords” anymore, but the phrase just means the Christian is supposed to live in obedience to Christ, as though Christ were a lord, or ruler, or king. Jesus is the boss. Whatever he says, goes, even when it comes to things that are not explicitly religious. Christian attitudes and postures are meant to imitate Christ’s attitudes and postures. So what would it... Read more
At the Nelson Atkins museum right now, there’s an exhibit by an artist named Andy Goldsworthy called the Walking Wall. Goldsworthy is a world-renown artist who works almost exclusively with natural objects: rocks, trees, flowers, and leaves. Usually, when his work is completed, they film and photograph it and it floats away downstream or succumbs to the forest and the wind. Goldsworthy is teaching us to see the beauty of the moment—of things that are here for a moment... Read more
“Christianity is mostly a matter of politics—politics defined by the gospel. The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a countercultural phenomenon, a new polis called the church.” Resident Aliens, p.30 When Stanley Hauerwas says, as he often does, that Christianity is a matter of politics, he doesn’t mean American liberal or conservative politics. He’s saying Christianity is not a belief system. It’s way bigger than that.... Read more
One of the popular academic conversations (spilling out into the wider culture of the 1970s) involved new scholarship in the arena of human development. Cognitive Psycho-Social development theory was undergoing a renaissance. Three in particular: Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Erik Erickson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development—first took academia by storm, then worked their way into popular culture, inventing a new vocabulary with which to describe human development & maturation. Scholars from other fields began... Read more
Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell used to tell a story about a mission he flew in his F2H Banshee off the coast of Japan in 1950. He had missed the rendezvous point when his instruments mistakenly picked up a signal leading him away from his aircraft carrier. Lovell felt hopelessly lost as he flew circles in the dark over the stormy Sea of Japan. As he tried to use his map light, suddenly all of the electronics in the cockpit... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In