“Don’t leave your brains at the box-office.” They are words that I try live by, hard as it is. Having a lifelong love for movies, all the way back to the Varsity Theater in Davis, CA for Saturday morning matinees when I was a little boy, I have spent hours of my life setting in one more time to a good story, cinematically-told. Along the way I met Donald Drew (author of Images of Man: A Critique of the Contemporary... Read more
In this 3-minute video, Mark Greene, the Executive Director of LICC (London Institute for Contemporary Christianity) articulates what the vision for LICC, which happens to coincide perfectly with the mission of (re)integrate. How would it revolutionize discipleship, evangelism, and culture-shaping if Christians saw their lives not as oranges (made up of compartmentalized, separate, sealed segments — some important to God and some not as much) but as peaches (a single non-compartmentalized fruit, with God at the Core, where all of... Read more
Is the local church an institution that does the mission of God, or is it the gathering of God’s people so that they can be equipped and empowered to do the mission of God? Skye Jethani, in his excellent book The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, exposes a damaging trend in our day. We treat corporations like they are people. This is due to the Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which applied the Fourteenth Amendment... Read more
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight– yes, Bethlehem. They are strange words to sing in the globalizing 21-st century. We live in a flat world, with the ability to know so much about what happens everywhere all the time. And mostly we are numbed by it all. Hopes and fears of all the years? And such a small little place, Bethlehem? I can never sing that song without remembering a meal I had... Read more
As we enter yet another heated political debate over the “fiscal cliff” and economic policy, here are a few things that have been floating around in my head that I am “for” and “against.” What would you add? For: Economic populism that realizes that corporations do not always pursue the best interest of the common good. Against: Economic populism that believes that all corporations are evil and believes that government could do any better. Against: Rhetoric that demonizes the government,... Read more
Andy Crouch, of Christianity Today and author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, wrote an excellent article at CT’s website, “What’s So Great About ‘The Common Good’?: Why Christians need to revive the historically rich phrase.” This phrase, “the common good,” is making a renewed comeback in evangelical Christianity. It is being spurred on by institutions like Gordon College and its president Michael Lindsay, Q Ideas and its founder Gabe Lyons, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good and... Read more
We are meant to find our identity in community. In his book God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, Jürgen Moltmann gives insight into the catastrophic implications of combining individualism with global marketing. “Like all other life, human life is shared life, communicated and communicating life, communion in communication. Today the necessary communities which make up human life are threatened from two sides: on the one hand by the stepped-up individualism of modern men and women, and on the other by the global marketing of... Read more
Finding a Third Way in Our Politics. __ Jürgen Moltmann, in his book God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, writes, “Without equality there is no free world. It is in the spirit of early Christianity that we call the truth that all human beings are created free and equal ‘self-evident.’ Equality doesn’t mean collectivism. It means equal conditions for living, and equal chances for living for everyone. As a social concept, equality means justice. As a humanitarian concept, equality means solidarity. As a Christian concept,... Read more
In a chapter on celebrity in the excellent book, A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor, the authors focused both on the human need for heroes and the contemporary problem of faux fame. “Celebrities perform a valuable social and theological function. Celebrities sharpen our ideals, bear our disappointments, and promote our hopes of immortality. The problem does not reside in celebrity itself but in the shifting sands of our criteria for fame. Rather than labeling stars... Read more
Work matters, for everyone everywhere. But in the wounds of this world, in the disappointments of a life and the distortions of money, sex and power, rather than being a gift, work is often a curse. From Father Adam on through Karl Marx and Johnny Paycheck, we feel more alienated than graced by the work of our hands. It was not meant to be that way, and does not have to be that way. Finding our way out is honest... Read more
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