Most-read posts in 2011. Hope this blesses you through agreement and disagreement.
January 6, 2012
Music that moved me in 2011(music that captured me in 2011, not necessarily music released in 2011):
All I Wants is You (U2)
Let it Be (Beatles)
Yesterday (Beatles)
We Shall Overcome (Bruce Springsteen version)
Up in Flames (Coldplay)
Reign of Love (Coldplay)
Forgive them Father (Lauryn Hill)
If I Die Young (The Band Perry)
Miss Sarajevo (U2)
Love Rescue Me (U2)
Paradise (Coldplay)
Made in America (Jay-Z)
Someone like You (Adele)
Most meaningful song of 2011:
January 4, 2012
A list of some of the books I read in 2011 (not necessarily books that were written in 2011). If you are hungry for good books, do some research on the ones you’ve not read on this list. It will be worth your time!
These fiction books moved me:
The Art of Fielding
The Sense of an Ending
Water for Elephants
Freedom
The Help
Unbroken
These non-fiction books moved me:
Decoded
Simply Jesus
Allah
Who is My Enemy?
Willie Mays Biography
Megan’s Secrets
King Jesus Gospel
Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me
The Jewish Annotated New Testament
Love Wins
How Lucky You Can Be: The Don Meyer Story
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Living the Sermon on the Mount
I Knew Jesus Before He Was a Christian
America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity
Poet and Peasant: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes
My personal favorite (Ian will be speaking with me @ OTTER CREEK CHURCH April 22):
December 21, 2011
I remember reading an article by a music critic in which she noted that most of the great musicians of the last 40 years share one thing in common–they come from broken homes. Those who have lived/currently live in Metro Detroit, are painfully aware of the way in which a broken family shaped the worldview of Eminem. This pain drips from every lyric Eminem utters. The Masterful Marshall is just one example of artists/musicians who transform the pain of a volatile family experience into the genius of their art. Kurt Cobain. Tupac. Bono (mother died when he was young). Mary J. Blige. Lady Gaga. Madonna.
Music becomes a way of screaming pain in redemptive fashion.
Sometimes that transformation is for destruction, pain, and perpetual violence. Sometimes that transformation is for beauty, healing, and true understanding. Sometimes its both at the same time (this is probably the case with Eminem).
Frank Warren says that it’s the children whom the world almost kills who grow up to save it. It is also the children whom the world kills who grow up to kill more children.
That’s why every Thanksgiving and Christmas I think about how cold, desolate, and distant many feel in our cities. These seasons are not, in any sense, times of hope and affirmation. These are times in which others are reminded of how truly desolate, painful, and brutal life can be.
My friend, David, and I got together and put this video together. Because it’s what we want our families and church community to be about. We want it to be the main thing.
I don’t know if this speaks to you (wherever you are in life). But it speaks to me. Pass it on. Use it. Share it. Like you would bread and wine.
December 9, 2011
Many writers and theologians have written recently about the necessity for Christians, and people of all faiths, to develop double vision. That is, when it comes to friends, strangers, and enemies, we must learn not simply, to look, but we must also cultivate the art of seeing. Jesus implored his disciples to do look and see two thousand years ago. Jesus’ message to his disciples in 21st century America is no different.
Christians can both stand from within a particular story while also appreciating other stories. We can both be followers of Jesus while also appreciating those who follow other traditions. In Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian unpacks these concepts. In the midst of the Croatian/Serbian conflict in the 1990’s, Volf discusses forgiveness as the only thing that will stop the journey from exclusion to abuse. He talks about double vision as an important part of forgiveness. Double vision is “letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives.” I appreciate how one writer states this: “We are all finite human beings, belabored not only with our finitude but also with our prejudices and presuppositions and our own experiences.”
Action and vision are mutual, they go together. Sometimes action compels one to see differently. Sometimes seeing differently causes one to act in new ways. The paradigmatic parable at hand is direct: The praxis point of Jesus’ answer to the expert was to not just redefine neighbor or not let him turn it into “who is not my neighbor?” Rather the point is to completely reframe the whole issue so that any answers to who is or who is not my neighbor become irrelevant. The definition of one’s neighbor (the theoretical issue) is completely taken over in the story by the praxis charge: “Be a neighbor,”—no more questions or answers required. This is Jesus at his prophetic best.
Because in loving his neighbor totally, he also loves God with “heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Can we finally agree that it is better to acknowledge the humanity, and the potential to do good, in the enemy, rather than choose death? Will we be able to bind up their wounds rather than blow up their cities? And can we imagine that they might do the same for us? The biblical text . . . tells us we must. Bono, the lead-singer of the famous band, U2 reminds humans that our enemies define us more than our friends. “They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends/Gonna last with longer than your friends.”
In summary, because of Jesus’ subversive yet life-giving teaching in the parable of the Merciful Samaritan, the Christian community can affirm the following:
- All human life is valuable because
- All life comes from God.
- All humans reflect the divine image.
- God became human to show us the kind of humans he intended us to be even so much as dying for us, his enemies. This is the essence of Jesus’ gospel, the kingdom of God.
- Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate end to all forms of dualisms, especially ethnic, religious, and social animosity (e.g. “us versus them”).
For this reason and all the other reasons mentioned previously, the Christian church must be on the forefront of learning, conversation, and appreciation of our Muslim neighbors. Because we don’t get to decide who constitutes “neighbor” and who serves as “enemy.” Jesus has already rejected this false premise and called us to be a neighbor to every person we encounter.
To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms. A religion is above all an external word, a verbum externum that molds and shapes the self and its world, rather than an expression or thematization of a preexisting self or preconceptual experience. The verbum internum traditionally equated by Christians with the action of the Holy Spirit is also crucially important but would be understood in a theological use of the model as a capacity for hearing it, and accepting the true religion, the true external word, rather than (as experiental-expressivism would have it) as a common experience diversely articulated in different religions.
