theology

What I started out writing, churlishly and petulantly, is that I could only surmise that the market for books like this consists mainly of somewhat innocent readers; of people who whose only previous conception of Christ’s atoning work is of the standard, unreconstructed, washed-in-the-blood variety. For them, discovering what Jones is writing about would come as manna in the wilderness, and in that regard Jones has performed a mitzvah by publishing this book.

I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…

The prophetic tradition of black Christianity remains alive, if embattled. It is impossible to conceive of the civil rights movement without placing black Christianity at its center, for it empowered the rank and file who made the movement move. And when it moved, it was able to demolish the system of legal segregation. The history of black Christianity in America made that transformation possible, even as it frustrated some of the deeper-rooted aims of some activists who sought to address issues of income and wealth inequality as much as the formal legal structures of “civil rights.” That remains the prophetic task of the generation misleadingly labeled as “post-racial.”

People are watching The Tebow Show because he’s a second-rate quarterback… and winning games, often against great odds while playing his best at the most opportune times. For a large segment of the population (43 percent according to a recent poll), Tebow’s success is proof that God intervenes in history, even in football games.

Some relationships are so bad that the only thing you can do to save your life is leave. And that takes tremendous courage.

Author/activist Bill McKibben led this past weekend’s encirclement of the White House urging the the Obama Administration to block construction of a 1,700-mile pipeline to transport tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf. As McKibben savored a new protest-triggered State Department inquiry into a too-cozy environmental review process related to the pipeline, contributing editor Peter Laarman caught up with him on some religious dimensions of climate-change activism.

It’s all about destabilizing our certainties, whether theological or scientific.

You think you understand, but you don’t

“We are constituted, in every moment, by our relations. Some of them we compose, but they comprise the conditions in which we are composed. Theological entanglement is a form of what’s called ‘relational theology.’ Entanglement is meant to give a more physical, and spooky edge to our interconnectedness. This isn’t just about the apophasis of an infinite God, but about the element of unknowability in all of us—as creatures made in the image of the unknowable.”

The history of Christianity, as atheists are fond of reminding us, is one that has been drenched in blood. Whether religious war, inquisition, or colonial violence, there’s been great evil committed in the name of God. What role has the idea of Satan played in the development of this culture?