The Company of the Eudaimon

Slouching toward excellence

[reseudaimon]

A Short Rant on the Conceit of Always Being a Moderate or Why You May Be All Wrong Because You Think Nobody Can Be All Right

You know, I’m growing a little weary of moderates and centrists who feel themselves to be so above the partisanship that afflicts the rest of us. From their standpoint—so conspicuously removed from the theological and political sty in which the rest of us wallow—the “left” and the “right” are merely dupes of liberal and conservative overlords. Whereas the moderates and centrists see through all the parochial agendas the rest of us are just too simple to perceive. This heroic cast of self-justifiers glide through life unburdened by a need to take a stand on anything—except on what they believe is the meritoriously self-evident issue of not taking stands. Their orthodoxy can be summed up simply: There is no issue so nuanced that it can’t be cleaved down the middle, leaving two halves that correspondingly (and by definition) miss the truth, which can always be found at some point equidistant from both poles.

Consequently, the only cause over which it is worth getting exercised is getting exercised over causes. Any conviction, on this account, must take a back seat to the primary conviction, which is that no one should hold any conviction more strongly than the conviction that no conviction is worth holding strongly.

And it is somewhat understandable. Staying so decidedly in the center is the most convenient place because it requires no real action; it requires doing not much more than staying in the middle, passing casual judgment on those convinced that some action or another is necessary. And it has the added virtue of looking wise since, by its own definition, it possesses the only real wisdom, which is that the truth of any issue cannot wholly exist on either the left or the right.

But here’s the thing: While those on the left or the right are obviously beholden to narrative structures that offer views of the world from particular perspectives, those in the center are too. The difference, however, is that those committed to life in the center as an end in itself are the least likely to recognize the debt they owe and the masters they serve.

[reseudaimon]

Learning the Language of Lament

I’m having a difficult time finding the words to express how I feel about what’s taken place in our country over the past week.

Angry words, I can find. I know how to articulate fury. I can do righteous indignation all day long.

And while all of those things are a potent part of the emotional bouillabaisse that makes up my inner life, there’s something pushing its way to the front of my feelings about the fact that two African Americans were shot just a couple of miles from my house in a Kroger by a white supremacist–after he’d tried to force his way into an African American church to unleash an even more potent murder spree. I’m speechless about the pipe bombs sent to critics of the president. I hold in my heart the people in Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania, who are trying to find a way to deal with the terrorism of anti-Semitism that left eleven people dead…in the sanctuary of a Synagogue.

Usually, I have no difficulty putting into words the outrage these kinds of utter moral debacles evoke in me. High dudgeon is a primary color in my emotional palette. I’m totally willing to cop to that.

But what I’m feeling is more than umbrage; it’s grief. And I don’t have the same verbal dexterity with grief. The appropriate words seem distant, unfamiliar.

But framing this lack of ability to express heartbreak as a religious problem provides gives me some sense of what those words of sorrow might sound like. In religion, we call this kind of social anguish communal lamentation.

Communal lamentation, in this sense, is a very public cry of despair in the face of injustice. It is a way of screaming out to God that the world seems to have turned to shit, and we just don’t know where to turn or what to do, or even how to put into words the feeling of lostness we experience.

The Hebrew Scriptures offer a model of what it looks like to cry out in pain:

O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers? You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure. You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves. Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved (Psalm 80:4–7).

The words of communal lament, the words we need to rediscover in this dark time, begin with the plea: “How long, O Lord?”—which is a way not only of expressing our distress, but of being honest about the fact that the world feels too much like God has abandoned us, like God has left us to reap the harvest of violence and hatred that have been sown while we remained silent.

So many of us are unfamiliar with the words of communal lament because the communities we inhabit have insulated themselves against the searing cries of our neighbors. We’ve had the “luxury” of ignoring the pleas for a justice from those who cannot afford such apathy.

But people like me cannot afford apathy any longer—not so much because people like me are in danger of the violence that spreads, but because people of privilege have a moral responsibility to attend to the desperate appeals for justice and peace from our neighbors who have every reason to believe God has left them holding the bag—or if not God, then the people who so casually claim to be in relationship with God.

People like me–people who don’t live in constant fear that an angry white guy with a gun or access to bomb-making equipment will emerge from fever dreams long enough to tear their world in two–need to develop not merely the words of communal lament, but an understanding of why some know those words only too well.

How long, O Lord?

[reseudaimon]

A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Foreigners from Clogging Up Our Immigration System, and for Making Their Children Beneficial to the Publick

In 1729 Jonathan Swift wrote a piece of satire, A Modest Proposal: For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Publick. In it Swift argued that the large number of children in Ireland born to the poor had become a social strain. To confront this problem, Swift proposed that the children of the poor could be put to good use by offering them up as food for “persons of quality” and “Gentlemen of fortune.” Eating poor children would succeed in “advancing our Trade, providing for Infants, relieving the Poor, and giving some Pleasure to the Rich."

Ah, the good ‘ol days, when satire actually meant something.

I was thinking about updating this satire for the current nightmare involving the separation of families at the U.S./Mexico border. Because among the geniuses terrified by the influx of breast-feeding brown babies, “a big name of the game is deterrence”—and tearing hysterical crumb-hustlers from their parents is the tactic designed to achieve it.

But I immediately ran into a dilemma: How do you satirize something as absurd as holding kids hostage to attack a non-existent crisis? Satire requires an even more absurd step beyond what is already taking place. (Not to mention the fact that I have a dim view of the ability of many people to grasp satire.) And let’s be honest, how do you get more absurd than holding a bureaucratic gun to the head of a child, saying, “Do what we want, or the kid gets it?”

The hostage-taking of the Peppa the Pig set is elegant in that it allows you to kill two birds with one stone … wait, that’s a less than satisfying metaphor in this case. You know what I mean. The Trump administration can say to the parents of these children and to intransigent bleeding heart Democrats: “That’s a nice baby you’ve got there. It’d be a shame for something to happen to her.”

That’s when I had an idea: If you really want to deter parents escaping unspeakable violence from bringing their children into the country, if you really want to crack the whip on those effete liberals, all you need to do is start killing a few of those babies. Line them up under the klieg lights and shoot ‘em.

Make sure you get “real media” to cover it—not the “fake news,” which would only try to construct a narrative of humanitarian outrage. No, you need some hairy-chested, red-blooded American journalists who can look atrocity square in the face and still go home at night and coach T-ball, journalists who can connect with real Confederate flag-waving Heartlanders and tell the untold story about how MS–13 has secretly embedded itself within the deep-state and is now running the Mueller investigation, the FBI, and the Department of Motor Vehicles, journalists courageous enough to cover, you know, real conspiracies.

Then, you can send out surrogates who’re willing to absorb the outrage of the benighted and willfully obtuse, repeating your claims that all of these state-sponsored Playskool™️ executions are being done out of compassion for the children (think: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength). Have someone else look the country in the eye and say, “We hate these executions. If the Democrats really cared about these children, they could stop them.” Get as many knuckle-draggers as you can to say that the whole execution thing was Obama’s idea. Then have the Secretary of t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶i̶n̶i̶s̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶T̶r̶u̶t̶h̶ Homeland Security deny that executions are even taking place (Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?).

Start whacking these tiny “crisis actors” and pretty soon a significant portion of the country will get acclimated to a fresh, new way of dealing with the b̶r̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶h̶o̶r̶d̶e̶s̶ immigration crisis. They’ll be g̶o̶o̶s̶e̶-̶s̶t̶e̶p̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ walking bravely into a w̶h̶i̶t̶e̶r̶ more American future, singing t̶h̶e̶ ̶H̶o̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶W̶e̶s̶s̶e̶l̶ ̶l̶i̶e̶d̶ God Bless America!

And the last step, the pièce de résistance? Get as many white evangelicals as possible to chime in: “This is what God wants. God put this president in office. And God is blessing his efforts. If you want a r̶a̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶u̶r̶e̶ God-fearing country, you’ve got to be willing to s̶a̶c̶r̶i̶f̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶r̶e̶n̶ make some sacrifices.” 

Get those folks to ground their p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ analysis in the Bible. Romans 13 is good: “We have to kill these kids. It’s God’s will.”

Surely, you can see the possibilities. We could solve our immigration problems and teach the pointy-headed liberal elites a lesson at the same time. It would be like Christmas, Easter, and Confederate Memorial Day all rolled into one!

It’s just a modest proposal, mind you. I mean, I’m not looking for any praise—well-deserved as it is. But it’s got possibilities.

[reseudaimon]

Kentucky's Governor Might Be a Christian, but I Don’t Think Much of His Christianity

Gov. Matt Bevin claims to be a Christian. And while I’m not saying he isn’t, I don’t think much of his Christianity.

I can feel the evangelical apoplexy burning like the heat of a thousand suns. “How can you question what’s in a person’s heart? Gov. Bevin loves Jesus. I mean, he talked about praying for an end to violence in the West End of Louisville. He’s looking to prop up Christian religion in schools. You’re just another liberal who ‘hates God’ and the Bible.”

Fine. Let’s talk about Gov. Bevin’s Christianity and its relationship to the Bible. He’s about to oversee, for instance, a new rule that would require those who are physically able to work 80 hours a month, either at a job, in community engagement, or in vocational training for the right to receive Medicaid. Such a regulation would mean that almost 100,000 people would find themselves dropped from the Medicaid roles.

Medicaid work requirements like this are the product of a cost-benefit analysis that reads something like this:

Some fraction of those who would lose healthcare benefits under this regulation are gaming the system. (Though we don’t actually know how many, we’re prepared to say that it’s probably a lot—because you know how poor people are <winks>.) Indeed, we find such cheating so objectionable (no matter how rare it is) that we’re willing to deny healthcare to tens of thousands of innocent people, just so we can be sure that we’re not being screwed by clever but morally deficient poor people.

To be fair, Gov. Bevin and his supporters would most likely argue that requiring people to work for healthcare benefits is a good thing, insofar as it incentivizes personal industry and gets people out of the habit of expecting something for nothing. After all, Paul said that those unwilling to work should not eat (2 Thess. 3:10). 

But this threadbare argument is an instance of what the great theologian and preacher, Fred Craddock, used to refer to as getting an A in Bible but an F in Christianity. (For what it’s worth, this passage is a reference to the Thessalonian Christians who’d quit their jobs in anticipation of Jesus coming back, and were therefore convinced their material needs were a sign of their spiritual superiority.)

But here’s the thing Gov. Bevin seems to have missed about what’s at the heart of Christianity: Jesus never attached negative moral valence to economic status . . . except to the wealthy who failed to use their resources to protect the economically vulnerable (e.g., the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19–31; Jesus and the rich young man, Mark 10:17–31, etc.).

Common mistake. Gov. Bevin isn’t alone in this misreading of the faith. It’s a theological staple for many white evangelicals convinced that they’ve enjoyed no extra advantages, and are thus both deserving of their own good fortune and convinced that their contempt for those who’ve not experienced good fortune is morally and theologically justified.

Bad theology, but widespread nevertheless. What Gov. Bevin does that pushes him into another category of moral and theological reprehensibility, however, is what he threatens to do if he can’t force poor people to, you know, stop being lazy and get to work.

If the courts don’t allow him to require people to bust rocks for their medicine, he’s going to explode the whole Medicaid expansion, jeopardizing the healthcare of 500,000 Kentuckians. You read that right. Our “Christian” governor would rather let hundreds of people a year die and countless others face financial ruin than have a healthcare system that would unwittingly treat a handful of the “undeserving.”

Look, I don’t care how many Jesus fish you’ve got on the back of your car, or how many times you’ve sung Shine Jesus Shine, or how stirringly you can talk about orphans in foreign countries, if you refuse to help the people you have it within your power to help, then the Jesus you’re so publicly selling doesn’t have anything to do with the one found hanging out with lepers, giving sight to the blind, and holding the hands of the untouchables in the Gospels.

I, and a number of clergy, have been to Frankfort several times over the past month with the Poor People’s Campaign, trying to make this point with him. He won’t even let us in the building. I suspect he doesn’t think much of my Christianity either. But the difference is, the Bible’s on my side.

[reseudaimon]

The Jesus Gap

(Excerpt from The Mainliner's Guide to the Post-Denominational World, available from Chalice Press (here) or from Amazon (here).

“If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do.” 

—Terry Eagleton

There’s a gap. I’m convinced of it. A Jesus gap. 

There’s a growing dissatisfaction with the traditional view of the church among emerging generations. This dissatisfaction has any number of causes, which the disaffected would name as anti-institutionalism, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, etc. But there’s one area of vexation that always seems to come up: the Jesus Gap. 

People, especially young people, are having trouble squaring the Jesus they read about in the Gospels with the infinitely malleable Jesus they see placed on offer by popular Christianity: Jesus as personal genie, Jesus as chief security guard at the courthouse of private morality, Jesus as a cheerleader for free-market capitalism, etc. In my work with emerging generations, we often return to the same complaint: “The Jesus I read about in church doesn’t look like the Jesus I see in church.” Whether it’s Jesus as either a clearinghouse for heavenly bus passes or Jesus as Affirmer-in-Chief whose primary function revolves around endorsing middle-class American values, the Jesus of the Gospels fails to come through. This Jesus, when stripped of the layers of religious spackling used to domesticate him, is irremediably subversive. 

Subversive. That appeals to me. Of course, I’d like to continue writing clinically about the religious climate shift underway at the hands of restless “young people” fed up with a tame Jesus. I’d like to make it sound as though I’m just a disinterested observer of religious trends. But the truth is that I too find myself growing dissatisfied with that tame and restricted image of Jesus. After all these years of a Jesus who I thought would help make me _______ (holier? kinder? more spiritual? more self-actualized?), I’ve come to believe that Jesus has a more cosmic, more interesting agenda in mind than super-tuning my soul. On my way to spiritual superstardom, 

I’ve found it increasingly difficult to squeeze past the Gospels’ Jesus, who stands in the middle of the road pointing to the weak, the homeless, the sick, the widowed, the displaced and unembraced. Following Jesus; I think it boils down to that, really. 

I’ve struggled for some time with the realization that when the church fails—as it often does—it fails most egregiously in giving people the resources necessary for the outrageously radical act of following Jesus. My reading of Emerging/ent theology has led me to conclude that there is increasing energy around the simple idea that followers of Jesus ought to embody the revolutionary spirit found in the Gospels. 

I’ve tried. I’ve put forth a valiant effort. But I can no longer envision Jesus the way I once did. I can’t, for the life of me, picture Jesus saying, “Healthcare isn’t a right; it’s a privilege.”

I can’t figure out a way to get Jesus to say, “Being gay is a capital crime, but fleecing the poor is a misdemeanor.”

I can’t imagine a world in which Jesus says, “If you don’t let children pray to me in school, I’ll let armed gunmen come in and kill them indiscriminately.” 

I’m trying to track down, but as of yet have been unable to find, where Jesus says, “If you fear someone will strike you on one cheek, dial in a Predator drone.” 

The church has too often been asked to give religious cover to moralities that were conceived absent the theological reflection provided by the church. I find that the chasm between the revolutionary Jesus of first century Jerusalem and the domesticated Jesus of twenty-first century America grows more difficult for me to span all the time. 

In the final analysis, the good news of the reign of God is not first that the well taken care of will be even more well taken care of in the next life. The good news of the reign of God is that God’s reign is present wherever the homeless are sheltered, wherever the hungry are fed, wherever the rich give away their money and power in defense of the poor, wherever the forgotten ones gather to be remembered and embraced, to be told that as long as we follow God, not one of God’s children will be left to die alone and unloved. 

[reseudaimon]

Dreamers and the Re-White-ification of America

Video Commentary

It feels morally wrong to hear people protest how much they care about the Dreamers, young people who've only ever known America as home, but then go on to attach conditions unrelated to their protection as necessary to, you know, actually protect them.

[reseudaimon]

I’m calling on Sen. Mitch McConnell to protect DREAMers. Call a vote on the bi-partisan compromise. #DREAMActNow thndr.me/qtDXiw http://thndr.me/qtDXiw

[reseudaimon]

Not everybody can take the same things for granted

People like me can afford to go through life taking for granted that because we’ve never been harassed or profiled that maybe other people are just making it up in their heads when they say they have been. Because for one thing, we almost never understand other people’s motivations—and so we often project our own motivations onto others, supposing them to be about the same. 

And for another thing, if we’re wrong, and people actually are the target of racist, xenophobic, or sexist motivations, it doesn’t have much affect on us personally.

[reseudaimon]

Prayer after Sandy Hook

Since yesterday was the five year anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook, I thought I'd share the prayer I wrote that night.

I’m angry. And maybe now isn’t the best time to write—especially since I don’t have adequate words to express the potent mixture of grief, sadness, and fury.

Children. Little kids in Kindergarten, for God’s sake.

I’m bracing myself for the tired response from gun rights advocates. It’s inevitable. Guns don’t kill people, people kill … blah, blah, blah. I’ve never found this a terribly persuasive argument—even on my best days. But today isn’t my best day. Today—looking into the eyes of my four year-old, trying desperately not to imagine holding his little body in my arms after a gun shot has taken all that is beautiful and kind and good in this world—I can’t even believe those arguments are persuasive to people who think we’d all be better off if everyone had a gun.

I don’t have any coherent argument at this moment. All I have are the images of tiny sheet-draped bodies … and anger. I have lots of anger.

Anger that we live in a world in which people (Sick? Mean? Struggling? Evil? What kind of people are they?) walk into schools, stare into the face of innocence, and proceed to try to blot it out.

Anger that some folks will continue to maintain in the face of the carnage that society has no overriding interest in regulating weapons designed to kill and maim from a distance, simply by contracting the muscles in a single finger.

Anger that God watches over this fiasco in silence. (I’m not defending God on this one. God’s going to have to defend God’s own self, since, at present, I don’t even know where to begin figuring out where God is in the midst of all this. But about the only thing I have right now is the threadbare hope that somehow God is there in the midst of it all.)

I guess that’s my prayer:

God of all children, please be there in the midst of it all. In the midst of the tears, and adrenaline, and stark horror . . . please be there. And more than that, help us to find you there . . . with tears on your cheeks and the blood of your children still on your face. We need to know that you’re there with us, in the thick of it . . . where the vomit and the gore ruin our khakis, and the smell settles into our pores, threatening to become a permanent part of the way the world smells to us.

Please be there, O God. For those parents and friends who feel abandoned by you, please be there in ways that offer if not comfort, then at least the strength to make it through the next few minutes until the next wave hits. For the teachers and the police and the people who have to clean up this mess, who also feel afraid, and sad, and like they’ve failed, please bear them up to be able to face the horror that lies in front of them, and to be able to transform the memories of what lies behind them into something more than just raw terror and disgust.

And for us. Please be there for the rest of us who struggle to figure out how we’ve come to a point where Kindergartners must fear armed strangers in the womb of our educational system. Help us to find the words to put to our rage and despair, to find the words to comfort those who need be comforted, to find the words to speak justice and peace to a world bent on filling graves with the bodies of children, to find the words necessary not to meet this violence with more violence.

Please be there, O God. Please.

I’m a pastor, and part of my job is to help people find words for the experiences for which there are no words. But I don’t have it in me today. I can’t find them.

All I’ve got is a stupid prayer. I wish it were more. I wish we were better.

[reseudaimon]

Dear White Evangelicals: An Intervention Letter

Dear white evangelicals,

Roy Moore? That seemed okay to you?

He's a more unpleasant and shriveled version of Donald Trump (how is that even possible btw?)—except he speaks the evangelical lingo with considerably more facility.

And the political dopes who are running interference for them? What're you thinking?

Look, I’m probably the last guy you want to hear from. I know I’m an imperfect messenger, having so publicly left the evangelical fold years ago, but somebody’s got to say something: Please stop.

I’m not sure how else to say it. Just. please. stop.

You can’t date these guys. You can’t. They're only going to leave you with a hangover and an overnight case full of bitter recrimination. I know it’s difficult to hear from me, a guy who walked out on you all those years ago. And I’m not going to insult you by saying that it wasn’t you; it was me. Clearly, I had some problems (I know I can be a jerk); but just to start out on an honest footing, a lot of it was you.

But I’m not writing to rehash our old quarrels. You see, the thing is, as infuriating as you are to me, I still love you—not in the can-we-get-back-together-and-share-housekeys-again sense—but in the sense of the nostalgic fondness old lovers sometimes share for simpler times. It may not seem like it, but I still care about what happens to you.

And I’ll be honest, I don’t want to see you headed down the aisle with these halfwits. You deserve so much better than them. For all our differences, I still believe that you and I share a common love. That we choose to express it differently doesn’t mean we don’t still have some important history together. That’s why I feel like I have to say something before you find yourself at the altar with a partner who doesn’t really want you, but only wants something from you.

Oh sure, they say they love you. They say they care about all the same things you care about. But I know you—or at least I thought I did. The you I remember had a set of convictions that animated your passions, convictions that not only don't they share, but convictions, the largest portion of which, I suspect they couldn’t even name. Love, compassion, integrity, refraining from sexually abusing or harassing women . . . seem totally foreign to those who are using you.

You’ve been jilted in the past—like systematically dumped by others who made big promises they never had any intention of delivering on. And the culture has made you feel like hidebound yokels who still believe in the Great Pumpkin. You're tired of being sneered at by pointy-headed snobs. I get it.

I get the feelings of betrayal and vulnerability you carry around with you.  I understand the seething resentment at being treated like dolts. But you have weaponized your grievance. You've made it into a cudgel with which to punish those people who've shamed you.

And I just can't square that with the memories of you I have.

You've felt yourselves losing cultural influence for some time now. Once, an influential socio-political force, white evangelicals have fallen on hard times of late. Same sex marriage is legal. Planned Parenthood hasn’t been destroyed. The general population is more concerned with income inequality, systemic racism, regressive taxation, sexual misconduct, and the plight of 11 million undocumented workers than with the fact that people are saying “Happy holidays!” on the lawns of city halls unadorned by Ten Commandments exhibits. (Oh, don’t look at me like that; I’ve seen your Facebook pages.)

And the understandable reaction when you’ve been the cultural homecoming king and queen forever—but then start finding yourself repeatedly stuck at the “wrong” lunch table—is to feel like dark forces are conspiring against you. These dark forces get filed under the heading, “political correctness,” which is really just that state of affairs in which it’s no longer safe to disparage people you feel are undeserving of your respect.

And that’s a tough pill to swallow. So, when somebody comes along and seems genetically engineered to say the kinds of things you might like to say about the changing shape of the cultural landscape, your ears perk up. But even more than the things you agree with, how can you not love people with the stones to say things that aren’t safe anymore, to say things that give you hope that your time at the cool kids’ table doesn’t have to be over?

That’s what I think it is. That’s what attracts white evangelicals to Donald Trump, and Roy Moore, and the rest of the shameless hypocrites who make them possible: The dream of relevance.

How about this: Would you agree to leave them if everybody promised not to make fun of you anymore?

Some of us have been talking—yes, the old gang. We still care about you. So, this is an intervention. Enough is enough. We can’t bear the thought of seeing you debase yourself, selling your soul to these scam artists.

What would your parents say if they knew you were running around with people who play footsie with the KKK and the Kremlin?

How would you even begin to explain to them the reflexive lying? They raised you to value the truth, not to treat it as a fungible commodity that can endlessly shaped or ignored by those who don't have any reverence for it.

How will you hold your head up down at bridge club when the little old ladies ask about your new love interest, and you have to admit that they can be charming . . . at least when they're not defrauding the unwitting and the vulnerable—pretty much little old ladies?

What are you going to tell your children about them stealing money from nine million children who need health insurance—so they and their friends can buy an extra Lexus?

How are you going to look the rest of the family in the eye at Thanksgiving and tell them that, sure they call many of your sisters and brothers “rapists” and “murderers” and “pigs” and “terrorists,” and they treat women like toys and baby repositories, but then so does drunk uncle Leo from Schenectady—so it's all pretty much the same thing?

You’re headed down a road that’s going to break your heart. But that’s not even the worst of it; the road you’re headed down looks like it's liable to break the world—at least the one we’ve known. You’re the one who always used to talk about “universal absolutes”; the only absolute these shape-shifters recognize is the one that allows them to do absolutely as they please, for whatever reason amuses them at the moment.

Do you really want to hook up with a love interest who doesn’t know how to say "sorry," who thinks asking for forgiveness is for suckers? That doesn’t sound like your true love, the brown Middle Eastern refugee you’ve always claimed to be so attached to.

If I remember correctly, that guy was always about humility and sacrifice. These jackasses believe that getting rich is a sacrifice.

That guy spent his time on the wrong side of the tracks, hanging out with the loan sharks and hookers. Your new flame has made money assiduously avoiding the “riffraff” at best, and actively sticking it to them at worst.

That guy used to talk about turning the other cheek, about loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you. These chuckleheads have a personal creed that revolves around revenge for even the most passing of slights.

Seriously, if you told these guys to take up a cross, they'd probably think you meant for them to gold plate it.

So please, for Christ’s sake, just stop. There are a lot of people counting on you to wake up and remember who you are.

I’ll always love you, but I also want to respect you.

Love,

Derek

[reseudaimon]

Maintining My Own Moral Purity at Your Expense: State RFRA Laws and the Return of Pharisaism

In Christian hands the Pharisees have always been an easy target. The way the Gospel writers customarily depict them doesn’t leave much room for...

"Loathing religious hypocrisy offers the satisfying advantage of being ill-disposed toward a shortcoming from which most of us feel certain only other people suffer, but from which we ourselves have built up through force of will and strength of character a rather robust immunity. In that sense, hypocrisy is the ethical equivalent of literary irony—a defect in me everybody else sees but about which I remain blithely unsuspecting." 

[reseudaimon]

Thomas Merton's Prayer and My Intention to Do the Right Thing When It Comes to White Privilege — [D]mergent

"I think that’s why white privilege is such a tough nut to crack among white folks. We’re the heroes of the stories we tell about ourselves, and admitting to hitting the racial and economic lottery drains the narrative of a certain amount of heroic élan." #mainliners

[reseudaimon]

What if the Kids Don't Want Our Church? — [D]mergent

But what happens when a generation comes along that doesn't care about the game you've spent so much time buying equipment for, has little invested in the durable nature of the stuff you value? What happens when your kids say, "Don't give me all that stuff. I'll just have a yard sale, and call Goodwill to haul away what's left over"?

[reseudaimon]

The Magnificat: God's Socio-Economic SmackDown — [D]mergent

"Mary knows. God is where justice breaks through the self-interest of the rich and the powerful, where the poor and the forgotten finally get a place at the table."

[reseudaimon]

Why Does Jesus Have to Be Such a Lousy Role Model? — [D]mergent

"So, Jesus is exactly the wrong guy to appeal to as the inspiration for a 21st century version of the personal morality police."

[reseudaimon]

What One Thing Would You Need to Have to Finally Get on with the Work You've Been Put on This Earth to Do? — [D]mergent

"Think about the work Jesus had to do and the resources he used to get it done. Stomping about the Judean outback with a band of inveterate point-missers couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a dream scenario for unleashing the reign of God. But the great thing about the work we have in front of us is that God doesn’t need much in the way of raw material to accomplish God’s purposes." #mainliners

[reseudaimon]

A Pastoral Letter to Older Generations about Those Frustrating Millennials — [D]mergent

"Young people are going to do some amazing things in the name of God’s justice. Moving forward, we’re going to need to ask ourselves if those things will be done with the support and encouragement of the church … or in spite of it."