Favorite Blog Posts of 2014

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and I wish you all a wonderful New Year!

In the future I'm going to be posting links to other blogs I enjoy more often than once a year.  But for 2014, these are the blog posts I've saved as my favorites throughout the year.  I hope other readers will find them as profound and compelling as I did.

Trump Verse Hermeneutics  by Ken Schenck at Common Denominator

History has taken away from the American Bible reader the key to success when reading the individual verses of the Bible without contextual training. We have not given them an overall theological compass into which they might fit those individual verses. We have not taught them to see in the individual verses of the Bible the great truths of Scripture. We have not given them the "clear" by which to approach the "unclear" individual verse.
Instead, we have programmed them to come up with a thousand individual truths from a thousand individual verses, ripped from their contexts. We have not given them a dictionary by which to read the individual verses but have programmed them to see each individual verse as an individual truth. Their theologies are a loose collection of direct mandates and atoms to believe.

My Problem with the Bible by Brian Zahnd on his self-named blog.

Every story is told from a vantage point; it has a bias. The bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass. But what happens if we lose sight of the prophetically subversive vantage point of the Bible? What happens if those on top read themselves into the story, not as imperial Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, but as the Israelites? That’s when you get the bizarre phenomenon of the elite and entitled using the Bible to endorse their dominance as God’s will. This is Roman Christianity after Constantine. This is Christendom on crusade. This is colonists seeing America as their promised land and the native inhabitants as Canaanites to be conquered. This is the whole history of European colonialism. This is Jim Crow. This is the American prosperity gospel. This is the domestication of Scripture. This is making the Bible dance a jig for our own amusement.

Metaphysical Dilemma Part II by Austin Channing Brown on her self-named blog.

While I appreciate the small steps women conferences are taking to make sure that the line-up isn't all white, it is not uncommon to feel like I need to leave my blackness in the hotel room. It is indeed a metaphysical dilemma. I am both black and woman- both- all the time. Hard as I try, I cannot separate the two. I am sure I will not be able to adequately explain this, but if I cannot be fully black in white spaces, somehow my womanhood is also not fully represented in that same space.

It is not just women conferences where I feel like a metaphysical dilemma. I often feel it at justice themed conferences, too. You may not have noticed, but these conferences have a tendency to be dominated by men. I have found that it is not at all uncommon to find justice conferences perfectly willing to proclaim the equality of potential, value, and role of every human soul before God when talking about color but use an asterisk as a provision to exempt women from that statement.

The Five Stages of White Privilege Awareness by Nance at the Rusty Life blog.

This, here, is the critical juncture. This is the point at which we either keep shouting “not me! not me! not me!” or we admit that even though we may not fully understand it, we are a part of this. We are the dominant race in a country whose kids are choosing white dolls over black ones; whose preschoolers make the black kids play the part of the “bad guys” on the playground; whose black citizens are imprisoned for drug possession at a wildly disproportionate rate compared to their white counterparts; whose white students routinely outnumber Latino and Black students in the gifted programs in our schools despite the fact that science shows giftedness to occur at exactly the same rate across all racial groups. The belief that some races of people are better than others evidently exists at least on some level, although it might be simmering so far beneath the surface for some of us that we are unaware of it.

Does Christianity Really Prefer Charity to Government Welfare? by Elizabeth Stoker at The Week:

• [T]he notion that the state can play an important role in the best possible exercise of charity has profound roots in the Christian tradition as well. Though the conservatives who mount the case that social needs currently addressed by state programs should be relegated to private charity are often themselves Christian, the Christian ethical case for welfare and private charity co-existing is not often cited. So what is the Christian argument, then, for supporting a compound structure of state welfare programs and private charity when it comes to addressing the stresses of life, which range from poverty to illness and old age? Foremost is the idea that human dignity entitles people to an "existence minimum" which guarantees their basic needs will be reliably met without discrimination based on caprice, race, gender, creed, orientation, or any other marker. . . Another practical Christian consideration ruling in favor of a state-provided existence minimum arises from the troubling power situations created by leaving the necessities of life up to the auspices of private charities — even churches. . . When the wealthy have the power to determine who receives the necessities of life, they tend to reinforce the power structures that led to the entrenchment of their wealth in the first place, rather than to challenge them.

10 Things Real People Do Every Day by Micah J. Murry at Redemption Pictures:

I’m not sure where these mythical “rich successful satisfied extraordinary people” are, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never met one. (Perhaps they’re hanging out with Bigfoot and the unicorns?) 

Meanwhile, I’ve been conducting extensive research (and by “conducting research” I mean “scrolling through Twitter”) and have created a definitive list of what actual non-unicorn people do every day: 

1. Make coffee, then forget to drink it.

Because how can we be expected to remember to drink my first cup of coffee if my caffeine-starved brain can’t function without coffee? But it’s totally ok, twice-microwaved coffee tastes great too, right? (SPOILER: It doesn’t.)

Why I Will Not Leave the Evangelical Church Today by Esther Emery:

I am remembering my instructions.

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ And ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 

I will not draw a line around the evangelical Christian church. Not as the solely holy saved, but also not as the untouchables. Certainly not as the dead zone in which the failing power of redemptive grace makes change impossible.

This Idaho back country is where I live. And these are my neighbors. This is the religious language of my heritage. And these are the songs I like to sing. I will not leave.

But neither will I be frozen and stuck and let myself feel that I am out of options.

From the Lectionary: An Open Letter to Jesus on this Whole Ascension Business by Rachel Held Evans:

I don’t know, Jesus. I guess I just can’t get over how miraculous and infuriating and profound and ridiculous it is that you trust us, that the God of the universe allows sinners to do His work. It’s quite an unconventional plan. There are days when I’m convinced it’s going to fail.

But we won’t know until we try, right? 

So I suppose that on Ascension Day, I best quit standing here staring at the bottoms of your feet, Jesus, and instead get to work—feeding, fellowshipping, healing, teaching, loving, hosting, sharing, breaking bread and pouring wine.

One day at a time.

Ready or not.

A Whisky Priest is Not the Same as a Nazi by Slacktivist:

This is not a matter . . . of fretting over the foibles and peccadilloes of great thinkers. It is, rather, a vitally important matter of identifying the way these men fell into the holes in their own thought so that we can avoid falling into those holes ourselves. We can’t shrug off Yoder’s sexual abuse or Jefferson’s slave-owning as, in Olson’s compartmentalizing phrase, “sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of.”

Farewell, Strong Black Woman by Christina Cleveland:

Black women embraced the hard-working, stoic, sacrificial ethic of the StrongBlackWoman and covered up any signs of weakness or vulnerability in order to show the world that black women aren’t immoral, lazy, and selfish. Ultimately, this goal wasn’t achieved as the Mammy, Jezebel and Sapphire stereotypes remain alive and well in the American consciousness today. Meanwhile, the StrongBlackWoman identity, which at first glance seems like a positive identity, has wreaked havoc on black women’s emotional, physical, spiritual and relational health. In an attempt to escape one set of racist/sexist stereotypes, black women have run smack dab into another stereotype, one that is also maintained by societal racism and sexism. The StrongBlackWoman identity continues to ensnare black women like myself, as we work to disprove the racist stereotypes that society simply refuses to relinquish.

Dear White Moms by Keesha Beckford at Huff Post Parents:

Right now my son is a little boy, like yours maybe, or maybe like the one you remember. He's goofy and silly. He loves to do all those stereotypical "boy" things (please don't bring up any gender issues -- you know exactly what I'm talking about). Sometimes he likes to tussle, straddling the line between play and real. Sometimes he can't control his temper. But right now he's like a puppy to most people. He's cute and non-threatening. 

What happens when he's grown up and not so cute and non-threatening? When he's walking through the world alone? No more the floppy-eared, playful youngster -- he's now the feral stray dog, worthy of extermination. 

Can you imagine that? Do you see it?

Insomniac Christians by Benjamin Moberg at Registered Runaway:

Every path we’ve tried to take to get to God has been nothing more than a momentary thrill and then a steep unexpected fall. The prayer doesn’t feel the same when we feel anxious or sad. The books feel foreign when we need the answer now. The isolation sets in and we end up just collapsing in it, waiting and waiting and waiting for some formula of our youth to be complete and for us to feel held again. When we don’t, we think we’ve lost Him. We think we have to win him back. We think we’ll spend all our days hustling after him, trying to get him to look our way, to give us the precious good of his Love. And maybe it’s because somewhere along the line, we understood that love of God is a fragile kind, a fickle easily frustrated kind.

This is the lie of religion. This is what keeps us up, groggy and grumpy, this is what extinguishes the light of our lives. We can’t let go of the control on our belovedness.

My "Enlightened" Christian Friends by Doug Bursch at Fairly Spiritual:

I agree with you up until the point you abandon me; the point where your theology becomes more pristine and mine more antiquated. I’m inspired by your words until they turn against me and accuse me of close-mindedness. I close my heart to you when your enlightenment labels my sacred convictions as ignorance, darkness and immaturity. I don’t want to close my heart, but I can’t help it…I can’t help but feel as if I’ve been betrayed by a friend. Once again, I’m not relevant enough to sit at the cool kids’ table. 

You promote the absence of certainty as a virtue. Often I agree; I agree with your rebuke of angry fundamentalism and the rigid systematizing of faith and God. I often agree with you; I sit at the table and interject my affirmations. You let me talk when I agree, you smile when I agree, you agree with me when I agree. 

But you are so certain of the absence of certainty....My attempt to defend my contrasting truth will simply codify your conviction of my immaturity and closed-mindedness.

Cute Little Black Boys Do Grow Up to Be Black Men - And Now They Are 10 by Heather Johnson-McCormick on the Never a Dull Moment blog:

But the world doesn’t see them as I do. No matter how perfectly they present themselves, no matter how spectacular they are, they will be disproportionately extremely LESS SAFE than if they were white. Kyle and Owen’s stellar reputations and hard-earned achievements and family-privilege will not necessarily get them as far as they choose or could go. Because the world might just choose for them and against them — in ways that would simply not occur if they were white. That is what it means to be entangled in structural, entrenched, historic, and systemic racism. No amount of privilege — or charm, or charisma, or pure raw talent — can protect them from the fact that they are black boys.

And finally this holiday piece: Jesus was Born in Bethlehem, NOT Rome: Choosing to Lose the War on Christmas by Kurt Willems on the Pangea Blog:

If we sell a Jesus who demands to be the center of popular culture, then we fail to remember that Christ came to us from Bethlehem, not Rome. Had Christ wanted to fight the culture wars he would have positioned himself in the center of the “pagan” world, the capital of the Roman Empire. 

Instead, he didn’t demand the central place in culture, but humbly “emptied himself” (Phil. 2). Or as the Message puts it: “When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human!”

Jesus reminds us that donating our lives from the margins of culture is where we will most effectively make and impact for the upside-down kingdom of God. The moment we try to “sell Christmas” to culture, or rather, coerce Christmas (our holy version of Christ-Mass) back into the center of public discourse, we’ve failed to model our witness after Christ.

Favorite Blog Reads of 2013

For New Year's again this year, I'm remembering the past year by highlighting what I think are the best things other people have said on their blogs during 2013.  These are the things that moved me, that made me think, or that made me shout, "Yes!"  Things that uplifted me, or humbled me-- or both.  Things I needed to read, and I'm so glad I did.

In roughly chronological order, then, here are my favorite blog reads of the year, with a quote from each:

The Missionaries Brought the Bread of Life, but We Choked on the Packaging by Jenny Rae Armstrong.

I grew up ultra-aware of two important facts: It’s extremely rude to talk about a group of people as if they’re all the same, and if you try to make people act the way you think they should act, you may actually drive them away from Jesus. The shudder-worthy image of someone choking, gagging, and suffocating as a well-intentioned outsider shoved a loaf of cellophane-wrapped bread down their throat was hard to shake. The gospel can be deadly if you don’t remove the cultural packaging and offer it freely, instead of forcefully.

The Day It Got Broke by Jessica Clemmer.

Imagine with me, if you will, splitting a piece of wood, via a good ‘ol karate chop, to the middle. When the wood breaks, what happens? The middle pieces drop downward, and the ends fly upward. Summary: when something breaks, one part goes down, the other part goes up. It’s the natural result. 

I propose to you the same result occurred when sin snapped the one-flesh relationship of that first husband and wife. 

One went ‘above’ the other.

When It Matters Because of Two Gardens by Preston Yancey.

I think of how one little verse, one little verse of a redemption in the twentieth chapter of the most beautiful Gospel, the story of us, could mean all this. 

Could mean systemic patriarchy has been overthrown. Could mean that equality is now. Could mean that the Law of Moses would be overcome by the law of grace. Could mean that a woman is a person not a thing, joy of father or husband, and that her word is worth, her voice use.

This Doesn't End with Salvation: From Inspiration to Disabled Superhero, But Never Human by Hel Gebreamlak - a guest post on Black Girl Dangerous by various authors.

The heroic and inspirational tropes assigned to acceptable enough people with disabilities and ‘successful’ people of color, albeit in different ways and inseparably intertwined for disabled folks of color, is not simply the result of unawareness of well-intentioned white and nondisabled people. It is a way to deny their entanglement in our oppression by individualizing our experiences, removing it from the context of identities and social group membership. It is away to justify the ones who were thrown away, because they couldn’t plan their way out of the danger. Besides, everyone can’t be a superhero, and the families we left behind were living proof of that.

Feeling at Home in My Smallness by Jonathan Martin.

There is so much weight assigned to us to be special, to be unique, to distinguish ourselves. There is a great deal of pressure to be “great.” But what if, today, I want to enjoy my status as my Father’s awkward, backward son, absurdly treasured and irrationally loved?

The Day I taught How Not to Rape by Abby Norman of Accidental Devotional.

If you want to keep teens from being rapists, you can no longer assume that they know how. You HAVE to talk about it. There is no longer a choice. It is no longer enough to talk to our kids about the mechanics of sex, it probably never was. We have to talk about consent, what it means, and how you are sure you have it.

The Most Difficult but Greatest Lesson I've Learned in One Year of Marriage by Lauren Dubinsky at The Huffington Post Online.

I have looked around at the empty faces of the women around me, knowing that their hearts are crying out to hear that they are okay if they don't fit every gender role, every gender expectation. That their husbands are okay if they don't fit every gender role, every gender expectation. That they are not screwed up women with broken femininity, and their husbands are not being 'girls.'

"Defrauding" or how men can keep women from stumbling! by Hopewell Takes on Life!

Women cannot respect a man who is defrauding them with a brazen display of thick, luscious chest hair or smooth, freshly waxed bare chest. Don't be fooled! At church, your white shirt maybe crisply starched and ironed by a loving wife or sister, but it can still DEFRAUD. This then is your essential "shade shirt." There's a reason Mormon's have special underwear beyond it's spiritual uses! This shirt shows a girl you care and shows her, more importantly, that you know modest really IS hottest. Save that sexy Godly chest for the wedding night please.

'In Which I Know, I'm Sorry, and I Hope I was Kind" by Sarah Bessey

These are just two seasons of my life: I also had my anti-instutitional church season, my I’m-not-a-Christian-season, my agnostic season, my angry feminist season, my new-wanna-be-theologian season, my screw-it-let’s-knit-things-season, my I’m-a-new-mother-and-I-know-everything-now season. I have had seasons for my marriage, for my work, for my processing, for my mothering, for my relationships, for my writing, and so of course, I’ve had them for my journey with Christ. I imagine I’ll have a dozen more, I’ll look back on the me-right-now with wiser eyes someday, I’m under no illusions.

Everyone's a Biblical Literalist Until You Bring up Gluttony by Rachel Held Evans.

In short, we like to gang up. We like to fashion weapons out of the verses that affect us the least and then “clobber” the minority with them. Or better yet, conjure up some saccharine language about speaking the truth in love before breaking out our spec-removing tweezers to help get our minds off of these uncomfortable logs in our own eyes.

It's Not the Rules That Are the Problem by Samantha at "Defeating the Dragons."

Because this system is built on an ugly foundation of power, abuse, domination, and control. The people who perpetuate it aren’t there because they genuinely love people and want to protect them. Legalism gives them the power to wield massive control over entire groups of people– but they can only do that not because of the rules, but because of belief.

Belief in a God whose most dominant, over-riding characteristic is a demand for absolute righteousness, for the acknowledgement of his children that they are completely broken, miserable, worms, barely even worthy of his attention.

In Which Love Looks Like an Empty Parking Lot by Sarah Bessey.

Could we have imagined? Could we have imagined the life we now live and the choices we’ve made? Could we imagine the places we’ve gone and the tears we have wept together and the babies we’ve lost? Could we have imagined the way we smile at each other in such perfect knowing when our son – our son! – raptures over a plane ride? The way you make our daughters laugh until they shriek over tickles and the way we sleep altogether at night on our family holidays? Could we have imagined even something as simple as family holidays together with your parents and your sisters and their families? 

We could not. But here we are, nearly fifteen years later , kissing in an old abandoned breakfast restaurant parking lot while the rain falls and we remember?

400 Years of Blinders, Counterintuitive Solidary, and the Epistemological Advantage of the Oppressed by Drew G. I. Hart.

What we are moving towards as a solution is completely counterintuitive. It is to trust the intuition of oppressed people over against one’s own gut and experience, which is proven to lead you astray when operating from a vantage point of dominance. Privileged people must do something very absurd and unnatural, they must move decisively towards a counterintuitive solidarity with those on the margins, while allowing the eyes of the violated to lead and guide the way.

I Am Not a Sex-Fueled Robot by Micah J. Murray

It doesn’t have to be this way but when these systems are reinforced and repeated from the time we’re teens, we tend to assume that it’s just the way it is. Men just give love to get sex, and women just put up with sex to get love. 

Then fear and suspicion become the common factor in all our interactions, and we go along with it. Men just give up and allow themselves to become the slaves of their sexual urges, which women are then forced to accommodate and avoid and control. We eventually realize we that we have emotional and sexual desires that don’t fit neatly into categories, but we keep quiet because we know our roles and we play the game. 

Let’s be human again.

Come Hither Men, For I Have Sex Demons by Grace Biskie at A Deeper Story.

When a white-haired, 60 yr. old, married, white dude practically broke his neck trying to stare me down last week, I walked it through: “Grace. You look normal today, you aren’t showing cleavage, you aren’t communicating sexually, your proverbial demons aren’t hanging out, you are walking to your car, in flats with a laptop bag and his nasty ass has nothing to do with you. Ignore this stank hoe and keep steppin’.” 

“This has nothing to do with you,” I say to myself now. ”You have no responsibility for his lustiness.”

Learning the Words: Love - guest post by Timothy Swanson at Defeating the Dragons.

Thus, the series of half-truths twists the meaning of “love” as it is commonly understood until it is unrecognizable. I actually had a Reconstructionist friend of a friend make the claim that forcing people to obey God’s law was the same as sharing the Gospel with them. Not “as important as,” not “similar to.” The same as. Because forcing people to follow the rules is now defined as the best way to show love.

25 Biblical Roles for Biblical Women by Marg Mowczko at New Life.

Our culture and customs in western society today are vastly different to the culture and customs of the Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world of Old and New Testament times. Differences in culture are factors that must be considered when trying to extract biblical principles from the text for application today. Not everything that was done in the Bible has a universal, timeless, or useful application.

On Labelling Women "Crazy" by Harris O'Malley at Huffington Post.

At its base, calling women "crazy" is a way of waving away any behavior that men might find undesirable while simultaneously absolving those same men from responsibility.

Love is the Basis of Everything by Metacrock.

When I say love is the basis of everything, I mean it really is. I believe that when the Bible says "God is love" it means it literally. In other words, we should put an "itself" there. God is "love itself,": the thing that love is actually the essence of what God is. Now you may ask how can God be both being itself and love itself? Because these two are inextricably bound up together.

What Women Want from the Church: Voice, guest-posted by Rachel Haas at Preston Yancey's blog.

They didn’t hear the words that were coming out of my mouth. They heard the words that my neckline expressed. They noticed when I said something that might not have been the most “fitting.” I was a child. I was a rebel. They had to fix that. There was duct tape on the shelf, and it found a place across my mouth.

Cultural Exchange in the Multicultural Church - a guest post by John Farmer at By Their Strange Fruit (various authors).

Cultural exchange is a way we move towards knowing our brothers and sisters. And cultural exchange is a way that we move towards knowing our God, whose image can only be represented by a mosaic of many different cultures.

So that's it for this year.  I could have gone on, since there were many more blog posts I read this year that impacted me-- but these are the ones that impacted me most.  I highly recommend spending some time clicking these links!

And happy 2014, everyone!

My Favorite Blog Reads of 2012

I wanted to celebrate the New Year this year by turning this blog into a celebration of things other people have said in the blogosphere in the year 2012.  These are the messages that had the most impact on me in the last year; these are the things people said that made me gladdest that someone had said them.

So in no particular order, here are my favorite blog reads of 2012, with quotations from each and brief statements of my response and why I liked them.

Disability and Autonomy

Suzanne McCarthy over at "BLT: Bible Literature Translation" discusses dignity and autonomy as basic human needs, and how the authority/submission relationship paradigm espoused as "biblical" by patriarchal Christians is actually dehumanizing and thus contrary to the teachings of Christ:

Today, working with children who have severe cognitive disabilities, I rejoice at the child who learns the first step of the pyramid of learning – to initiate. The child with no language must learn that he can initiate communication. This is done with pictures, accompanied by words, if and when that is possible. But here is the thing. You have to have something that the child wants badly and it has to be something that you can give him or her over and over. In my case, it is the train track. The child requests each piece, and he can also request the engine and the cars, the straight track or the curved. This is the first task of human dignity – to initiate, to want, to request, to build.

In another episode this afternoon, another child protested, “I don’t want to. Stop! I want this.” Yeah, I know, I did close that browser window and offered him something else. But, we rejoiced that he expressed his opinion, he tried to assert his autonomy. We did not view this as rebellion. It was healthy resistance. It was another aspect of being human, saying no. How important that is.

I am not unrealistic. We deal with the kicking and biting, the toileting problems, the non-compliance. But we celebrate the humanity of the child. And that is dignity, autonomy, agency, inclusion and choice. . .
Why do some Christians say that women do not have the right to those things that I work every day to provide to the child who doesn’t even have language? Why are women told that their role is to submit and respond, to be lower than the so called trainable mentally handicapped? To live without what are considered basic human rights, initiating, choosing and deciding. But no, it is only for men to initiate, choose and decide, not women. I lived that pain. I live now to prevent others from living that pain. The relationship of authority and submission, the trainer and the trainee, that is a model that once was. Man and woman, human and animal, the intellectual and the handicapped, the trainers and the trainees.

If anyone ever says that being the submissive in an authority and submission relationship is of equal human dignity, tell them to flush that thought down the toilet where it belongs. I don’t treat even the ones who can’t talk as the submissives in an authority and submission relationship. We take that child, and we teach him or her, to initiate, to resist, to choose, to raise bloody hell, but please live your life as a human being with equal human dignity.

I think this is possibly the most important thing I have read in the blogosphere this year.  To elevate a supposedly "biblical" principle of hierarchy and rule, over the real needs of the humans for whom God's revelation was intended, is to turn the gospel-- the "good news" -- into bad news for human beings.  And that means all human beings, ruler and ruled alike; male and female, adult and child.  Inasmuch as we demean any human being in the name of Christ, we demean all human beings, including ourselves.  And because Christ participates in humanity, we demean Christ too.

I Was Wrong About Being Right

Perfectnumber's blog "Tell Me Why the World is Weird" talks about how she used to understand Christianity when she was in high school:

I thought becoming a Christian was about arguing. People would debate, and then if one of them ever didn't have an answer, they'd have to change religions. And the "answers" weren't things I'd decided after thinking through everything on my own- they were from books of apologetics, written by experts who were totally infallible.

It was a very "us vs them" mentality, about arguing and needing to always be right. Actually, I guess I subconsciously thought being right was more important than being honest.

She compares this with the way she thinks about her faith now:

I don't believe that any more. I believe in actually wrestling with those questions. If God is good, why do bad things happen? Perfectnumber, take a minute to actually consider it, and understand why it's such a tough issue with so much emotion behind it. And maybe people don't need a bunch of words in the form of an argument- maybe they need my understanding and whatever compassion I can give.

And maybe it's okay for me to say I don't have an answer. Or, I have a couple thoughts but I understand if that doesn't answer it for you.

. . . I conclude that no question threatens God. Now I believe everyone has something to say, and everyone is worth listening to. And I realize more and more that I was wrong about a lot of things- and that's okay, everyone is wrong about a lot of things- but I try not to be.

And "trying not to be" means actually thinking about these questions, not being afraid of doubt. It means listening to people. It means that compassion is more important than informing others about what "the right answer" is.

I really liked this.  It reminded me of the kinds of things I was thinking about as I came out of Maranatha Campus Ministries.  It occurred to me that it was really important to me to be taken seriously, listened to and heard, and to have my point of view seriously considered and not summarily dismissed. And also that Jesus said, "whatever you want others to do for you, you do for them."  So if I wanted to be truly listened to, how could I do anything other than start to truly listen?


Why the Church Failed Me Yesterday

Chandra at the blog "Dispelled" articulates beautifully a heart-cry that encompasses the feelings of many different kinds of people who show up in churches today.  This is something I think every Christian in every church (including me!) should listen to:

Yesterday, I went to church. Yesterday, you didn’t see the tears that had caused my mascara to run. Yesterday, I needed understanding, a soft place to land my hurting heart. Yesterday, you told me that I wasn’t strong enough, that I hadn’t forgiven enough. Yesterday, I went home feeling defeated.

Yesterday, I was proud of myself for taking my girls and myself to church. It was something I wanted for all of us. Yesterday, I walked in with my hands full of two rambunctious girls who were missing the daddy they barely knew. Yesterday, I was met with cold judgment. Yesterday, I felt unwelcome. Yesterday, I heard, “Where is your husband?”

Yesterday, I went to church for the first time in years. Yesterday, no one said a word to me.Yesterday, I went to church and pulled out a cigarette. I felt the scorn of the holy ones. They don’t understand how hard it is to break the cycle of addiction.

Yesterday, I went to church.

Tomorrow I won’t be back.


This is only a selection from what she had to say.  All of it is well worth reading.

The Modesty Rules: Is a Woman Responsible for a Man's Lust?

Emily Maynard at the "Church Leaders" blog makes this common-sense distinction between lust and sexual attraction:

I propose we’ve lost sight of what lust actually is.

In fact, we have confused biological sexual attraction with lust and called it sin. This is one reason why shame is so rampant in Christian circles, why we hide rather than confess our reality, why we try to control rather than offer each other the open love and freedom of Christ: We have made into sin something that is not sin.

God created you to desire another person for affection, intimacy and relationship!

Being physically attracted to someone is not lust.

Wanting to kiss someone is not lust.

Enjoying kissing someone is not lust.

Those desires can be a catalyst for lust, but in themselves, they are morally neutral, God-created, biological and chemical reactions. Your body recognizing sexual compatibility with another person is not inherently evil.

And she counters the whole "you're causing me to stumble" dialogue with this freeing advice:

In fact, nothing you do or do not do can influence lust in someone else.

Only Jesus can lovingly confront and heal a lustful heart through the working of the Holy Spirit. You can’t change anyone, control anyone, make someone sin or not sin, and you’re only responsible for taking your own heart to Jesus.

I’m asking you to pause and think about this issue differently than you may have encountered it before, especially if you grew up with the Modesty Rules on your side.

If anyone tells you that you are responsible for the hearts or minds or actions of any men or women, particularly with your clothing choices, don’t accept it!

Jesus Himself taught that it is not just looking, but looking "in order to lust," according to the actual Greek text of Matthew 5:28.  The Greek words there indicate choice and decision, not simple attraction.  And Jesus placed the responsibility squarely on the one doing the lusting, not on the one being lusted after. Ms. Maynard is quite right that we should do the same.

Modesty, Body Policing and Rape Culture: Connecting the Dots

Along the same lines, Sierra, who is one of the regular contributors at "No Longer Quivering" (a collaborative blog written in resistance to the patriarchy/Quiverfull movement), writes as follows:

Definition: The “modesty doctrine” is the belief that women need to cover their bodies to prevent men from being attracted to them, because sexual attraction is lust that leads to sin and death for both. The modesty doctrine is not the same as wearing conservative clothing. You can do the latter without believing the former. The modesty doctrine is found in fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism and Islam, with milder echoes in mainstream Western culture. . .

The hyper-vigilance of fundamentalist men and women to root out “immodesty” conceals a hatred of female sexuality: secondary sex characteristics should not be visible except in approved circumstances. The system is designed to ensure that the only time a man is “turned on” by a woman is when he is allowed to act on his urges: in the marital bed. In other words, if a woman’s body is visible, it ought to be available for sex. Although I don’t think many men think this consciously, the idea crops up in misogynist rhetoric all the time. “Immodest” women are “asking for it,” or it’s “false advertising” if a woman in a short skirt won’t go home with you, or (in the terms of the Christian patriarchy movement) a woman “defrauds” a man (literally, deprives him of a right or property) by allowing herself to be attractive in a situation wherein sex with her is illicit or unwanted.

The modesty doctrine frames this idea in terms of clothing to preserve the veneer that women are somehow to blame for this, and that there’s something they can do about it. There isn’t. . . 

The woman does not have any agency in this model of male sexuality. What she wants or doesn’t want is either erased or subordinated to what he wants or can’t have. The relationship is between the man, her body, and the law (monogamy). Similarly, entire facets of male sexuality are written out. Men are not allowed to see themselves as objects of desire, to consider themselves attractive or to enjoy the idea of sex with an initiating woman.

Emphases and links in original.

I believe that this blog post, though confrontational, is something that very much needs to be said.  By putting the responsibility for men's lust on women, Christians are, whether they want to or not, perpetuating a thing called "rape culture"-- defined as  "'a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women … a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent' ( Buchwald et al. 1993 : v). An earlier definition was offered by Herman (1984) , who characterized the US as a rape culture because the image of heterosexual sex is based on a model of aggressive male and passive female."   

And this mentality hurts both women and men.

Why Does God Allow It? (Also see Theodicy: The Problem of Pain and Short Lives by the same author)

The Newtown shooting caused a lot of Christians to ask "why?" and I found most of the responses to be fairly self-righteous and unhelpful.  However, Metacrock over at the "Doxa" blog said some things that I thought were wise, helpful, and compassionate:

[T]he best time to think about such things and to ask "why does God allow this" is not right after the tragedy strikes but when one is safe and happy and there's no tragedy on the horizon. That way we can think in a rational and detached manner about it.

During the tragedy when we are grieving and outraged, this school shooting was a total outrage, is not the time to ask the question and expect an intellectual answer. During such a time we have to blame God because we have to blame reality. Reality is what it is and we can't change it. When those things strike that we can't stand all we can do is blame the basis of reality for ordering things in such a manner.

But the question of evil in the light of belief in God does have to be asked, and even though there are no fully satisfying answers, Metacrock comes closer to anyone else in his theory, which he calls "the Soteriological Drama." As defined in his foundational post "Theodicy: The Problem of Pain and Short Lives":

Soteriology means the study of salvation. I am saying there's a drama, not entertainment but the kind of real drama one finds in life, concerning the pursuit of salvation. God has designed a search into the process because it is only by searching that we learn to internalize the values of the good. . . God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

And in "Why Does God Allow It?" he elaborates:

God wants us to have free will so we will have a moral universe. Moral universe doesn't necessarily mean one in which nothing immoral ever happens, but one in which free moral agents willing choose the good. . . The reason it's important to allow moral decision making is because it's part of growth. God could make a world of robots who never disobey but that would not be a moral universe, because they would not be free moral agents, there would be no moral decision making. Through moral decisions we internalize the values of the good. To make moral decisions we must seek truth and answers to major questions all of which requires more internalizing of values. So the real bottom line of what God seems to want in creation is a universe in which free moral agents grow in their heart's choices of good over evil and in which they come to be wise, progressive, adult, mature citizens of the kingdom. The price God pays for that is the world has to be screwed up.

When my speechless pain over the Newtown shootings began to abate, I again found the idea of a God who wants us to grow in moral maturity, even if it means allowing bad things to happen, very comforting, and I think it makes a lot of sense. 

The Inconvenient Truth About Mental Health and Gun Control

The Newtown school shooting also raised issues of gun control in the United States, and the problem of access to guns by the mentally ill.  Along those lines, Kristen at the "Rage Against the Minivan" blog suggests:

We can change our gun laws to make sure that only mentally competent people can own a gun.

Would this be challenging? Yes. Would it require people to pay more out of pocket to obtain a gun? It would. Might I have to pay some more taxes for this? Yep, but I’m willing. If I have to take a test to prove my ability to safely operate a motor vehicle, it only makes sense that we would apply the same criteria to gun possession in our country. It’s the best way to rule out people with mental health issues that are highly correlated with antisocial and violent behavior.

Here are some ways that we could do that, while maintaining 2nd amendment rights for a majority of the population.

She goes on to list some common-sense measures, like requiring references as part of gun-ownership applications, and selling guns with lockboxes as a required part of the sale.  I found this to be a balanced, common-sense approach that refrains from falling into the false dichotomy that the U.S.'s only two choices are to either allow all guns, or forbid all guns. 

Christmas and the Status Quo in Churches

Wade Burleson at "Istoria Ministries Blog points out:

I sometimes hear evangelicals condemn churches and pastors for being accommodating to culture in their ministries. . . I propose in this post that the adoption of cultural mores and norms to communicate the message of Jesus Christ is precisely what the inspired Scriptures mandate we Christians should be doing. . . 

It is what Paul did in Acts 17:19-30. He went where the people of his culture gathered. He learned what the people of his culture liked. He met people in their comfort zone, and then he delivered to the people of his culture the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.

The apostle wisely made the distinction between cultural traditions and gospel truth. . .

In love for the people of Athens, Paul stood on Mars Hill and quoted pagan poets (like Aratus). But before he could quote the pagans, he had to read them. Paul walked with comfort and ease among the philosophers of Athens. He conversed with them on their turf, in their language, and with a singular purpose. Paul met the pagans of Greece on their playing field in order to give them Christ. 

Christians throughout the ages have adopted cultural norms to communicate Christ.

Pastor Burleson goes on to explain that just because Christmas is set on the date of a pagan holiday is no reason for Christians to refuse to celebrate it:

Christians, don't be afraid to change. Don't be afraid to take cultural norms and adopt them as your own in order to share Christ. The celebration of Christmas ought to be an annual reminder to us that Christians throughout the ages have adopted pagan customs as their own to give the message of Jesus Christ to a people comfortable in their culture.

I couldn't agree more, and this applies in many other areas as well, such as Christian marriages.  Most things having to do with human-to-human relations are products of passing cultural norms.  It was not the intention of the Bible's authors to set their cultural practices in stone.  As long as we uphold love and righteousness, changing things like marital customs (from male authority to full equality) will help spread the gospel, whereas holding women to the customs of the first-century world manifestly hinders it.

So those are my favorite blog posts for the year.  I know not all my readers will agree with everything that was said-- and certainly many of these bloggers would not agree with one another about many things!  But these posts can make us all think, and that's always a good thing.