Jason Coleman

Sammy Adebiyi shares his vision for how the Christian church should relate to the LGBTQA community:

[H]ow do you love someone whose actions or behaviors you find really unacceptable?  How can I love someone who I believe is living in sin?

Great question. Do your thing Mr. C.S Lewis.

“There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is……me.”

(If you can’t say amen, say ouch).

via The Gay Community and That One Time Jesus Called Me the ‘N-word’ – Prodigal Magazine.

Richard Beck quoting Dorothy Day:

“You love God as much as the one you love the least.”

via Experimental Theology: The Credo of Dorothy Day.

The story [of the prodigal son and his father’s eager forgiveness] isn’t about conversion to Christianity. It’s about God being on the look out for those in the family who have wandered off, and God simply can’t wait to welcome them home.

I read stories like this and I wonder, What if this is actually true? What if there is a God who is really like this?  What if God can’t wait to have us around–even with the garbage we keep carrying around and our half hearted “I’m sorries?”

What if God is glad to see us?

And the much more threatening question, What difference would really believing all that make in how I look at, well, pretty much everything?

via “But While He was Still Far Off” (or, what if God actually loves us?).

Paul Salopek is setting off on a seven year walking tour of the world. After more than two decades traveling the world as a journalist, he’s now going to spend the next seven years walking from Africa to South America and finding stories to cover along the way.

Why?

“The short version is I’m interested in narrative, I’m interested in storytelling,” Salopek, speaking by satellite phone, tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. “After jetting around the world as a foreign correspondent, after flying into stories, after driving into them, helicoptering in, even, I thought about what it would be like to walk between stories. Not just to see the stories we were missing by flying over them, but to understand the connective tissue of all the major stories of our day.”

via What Do You Pack For A Seven-Year Trip? : NPR.

Interestingly, his wife will also travel the world, arriving ahead of him at places where she can find a few months’ work. Then Paul will spend weeks walking to her. Very romantic.

From an article grappling with why we have such a difficult time getting our bodies to fall in line with the responsible and health-conscious plans that our brains make:

People of earlier ages didn’t have “selves,” didn’t see themselves as “thinking things” inside their heads who had to get out of their own mind to interact with the world. … The revolution of [René] Descartes’ thought was that the basis of human existence is thinking: I think, therefore I am. The fact that we know ourselves to be thinking inside our own minds makes it impossible to doubt that we exist. From this came the entire philosophical enterprise of proving that the external world also exists. We can’t doubt that we’re there, at least as a mind, but how do we prove everything we perceive isn’t an illusion?

Fast-forward 500 years, and nearly everyone in the Western world thinks of themselves as minds “inside” heads. A person is their mind, or the thinking part of themselves.

via You Can’t Help a Self You Don’t Have | Patrol – A review of religion and the modern world.

This post make me think that we’ve progressed beyond the classic philosophy class experiment of proving that you’re not just a brain in a jar hooked up to a computer simulation of the world. Instead, we’ve developed the impression that even if our skulls are real they’re still just a kind of jar that holds the “real us” — our thinking part.

I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer via Everything’s Fragile.

Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.

Lawrence  M.Krauss via scinerds

From the slacktivist:

I appreciate the Reformed contention that we finite, fallible humans are not capable of grasping perfect justice. But that insight becomes a blindness when it gets twisted into the idea that we are utterly incapable of distinguishing justice from injustice, or that we are wholly mistaken when we perceive something as more or less just.

We are imperfect and limited, and our best approximation of and understanding of justice will never be perfect or complete. But those who want to argue that our fallen nature makes us incapable of the knowledge of good and evil really need to re-read that story in Genesis.

God’s idea of justice surely transcends our own. And just as surely it cannot violate our own.

Eternal torment for temporal sin is monstrous. The claim that God is so transcendently good that God’s goodness appears monstrous to us is, frankly, perverse.

via Soul freedom, Baptist baptism, and the knowledge of good and evil.

Peter Enns — an Old Testament scholar well known in evangelical Christian circles for engaging in the “historical Adam” debates about Bible and evolution — comments on the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

Well, like I said, who cares what I think. But these moments test one’s faith more than most. And it makes other “challenges to our faith,” like whether there was a historical Adam or whether the Bible was written after the return from Babylonian exile, look like a splash in a shallow puddle compared to the deep, black, ocean storm of 5 year olds getting shot because they went to school one day.

I can easily get my arms around a God whose book begins with a mythic story of a naked first couple holding a conversation with a serpent, or a Bible that wasn’t written until the 5th century BC. But yesterday? There is nothing “easy” about it.

And from later in his post:

If you believe in God, there will always come a point — and sooner than we tend to think — where our understanding hits a wall at 80 mph.

via On God, Shooting Children, and Having No Answers.

So here’s what I would have posted on Facebook, if I didn’t care about souring my relationship with many church friends. I know this is what I would have posted because it’s what I typed in the FB post box before highlighting, cutting, and pasting here instead.

The Bible, book of John, chapter 15, has Jesus saying, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  I’ve read the stories about teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary prepared to — and sometimes actually — laying down their lives for their students. I think my prayer-and-Christianity in public schools FB friends are missing the big picture. Whether or not they said a prayer over the intercom that morning, you have to deal with the fact that God was standing by as this tragedy happened. An whether or not they were Christians, you have to admit that those teachers showed exactly the love that Jesus wanted us to aspire to. What happened represents a theological minefield, but proud and public Christian piety wouldn’t have prevented this tragedy.