While the laws that we live under matter a great deal, Christians need to recover the primacy of the personal over the political more than anything else. If we can’t love our neighbors in a personal, politically agnostic, face-to-face way, they’ll turn to synthetic and unreal ideological communities to fill the gap left by the loneliness of their daily lives.
The road back to sanity, solidarity, and social trust on both sides of the political spectrum will involve turning away from this ideological cul-de-sac and back toward personal communities once more. If Christian churches won’t do this, they risk being exploited as political playthings of the powers that be. — Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March
Posts Tagged → Christianity
Shaming the Devil by Alan Jacobs
The essays read not as lectures but as conversations exploring interesting topics with a very well read friend.
Continue readingReforesting Faith: Are trees essential to every Christian’s understanding of God? (5/100)
Dr. Sleeth moves through scripture pointing out the near constant connection between important moments and trees, bushes, seeds, etc. all the while extolling the planting of trees as a spiritual gift to the planet and our neighbors.
Continue readingThe Lost Message of Paul by Steve Chalke
Given my theological journey, if anyone is open to a book about the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Paul, I am. But in the end, I think there are better books out there to tackle this important subject.
Continue readingInstead of the virtues of classical republicanism, the romance of nationalism, the ructions of democracy, many modern liberals give us a vision of an Open Society that is informed by the dreams of Communism itself, a withering away of nationality, religions, social distinctions, and even the family that occurs underneath the tutelage of liberal democratic capitalism rather than a Communist party. That is why, so often, the legal suppressions aimed at Christianity are aimed at things like the principled refusal to profit from one’s labor. None of these cases involve the systematic and conspiratorial deprivation of goods, as Jim Crow did. What offends the modern liberal is something else. The mere assertion of a higher good beyond the Open Society, and beyond ourselves, something higher than profit, is itself counted as an injury, as treasonous. — Michael Brendan Dougherty
Suicide of the West and Its Critics
Goldberg does not deny the tensions involved in this conservative project within a liberal democratic capitalist system but rather accepts it as the challenge we face. The question is whether we are up to it.
Continue readingThe Commodification of God
Commodification has led most people to view God as a device to be used rather than an all-powerful Creator to be revered. This also explains our abundant and careless words about him. Is it any surprise that a divine butler would fail to provoke reverent silence? What need is there to rein in one’s tongue if God is merely a cosmic therapist? The god of Consumer Christianity does not inspire awe and wonder because he is nothing more than a commodity to be used for our personal satisfaction and self-achievement.
— The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity” by Skye Jethani
The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins
This is the kind of book where you want to lose yourself in the story and are compelled to read it whenever you have free time. But instead I had to force myself to finish it after I had invested time in starting. If you like big, messy, sprawling stories about a secret history with lots of violence and sex then this may be for you. Just didn’t work for me.
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