What new music are you most anticipating this summer? The album at the top of my list released yesterday; I’ve got a couple of hours in the car today and will be enjoying Trouble Will Find Me by The National more than once.
Category Archives: uncategorized
“…dismantling whiteness and following the Jewish Jesus…”
The task of prophetic theology today includes dismantling whiteness and following the Jewish Jesus who is leading an intercultural movement of love and justice. While the colonial imagination viewed white Europeans as God’s elect in the New World, the Scriptures repudiate this hierarchical racial logic and ground Christian identity in the election of the Jews. Israel, understood as the covenant people of God, offers the roper horizon of Christian self-understanding because it roots identify in the God of Abraham, instead of the modern state apparatus that was forged through the flourishing of the white masculine ideal. God’s covenantal history with the Jews offers a robust theological alternative to modernity’s narrative of progress.
-Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation.
I’m just a chapter into the book and already considering who I’ll recommend it to. Heltzel is drawing here from Cater’s Race, a book I worked hard to understand, though a large percentage of it surely went right over my head.
Three Years
On Sunday our church celebrated our third anniversary. There’s a lot that could and probably should be said about this significant marker but, to be honest, I’ve run out of words. God has been good. That’s more than enough to capture the spirit of our celebration, but these photos may fill in some details. To those of you who have been tracking with our church’s journey over the past few years, thanks for your prayer and support. It means a lot.
The View From Here
Watching the snow fall. Again.
“…we revered heterosexual nuclear families…”
The casualties of this lack of imagination have been those people who don’t fit well into a network comprised of heterosexual nuclear families. This includes those sexual minorities who choose not to commit to mixed-orientation marriages, but it also includes people who don’t marry or can’t marry, people who don’t have children or can’t have children, and anyone else who does not follow a five-ten-fifteen year pattern of date-marry-procreate. The problem is not that we’ve catered our programming to the majority—that’s unavoidable for institutions—but that we’ve ceased to perceive anything outside of that majority as desirable or even viable. We didn’t err when we told our teenagers to wait for marriage before becoming physically intimate; we erred when we implied our teenagers were all necessarily waiting for marriage and that the only legitimate expression of their God-given sexuality was physical intimacy. We withheld other options in part, I suspect, because we revered heterosexual nuclear families and desired that outcome for our children, but we didn’t anticipate how isolated they’d feel when that didn’t happen for them or how readily they’d discover alternate options outside of the church.
- odd man out on family.
