Midlife Meditation

"Could it be...SATAN?" Nope; it's all on you, well-meaning church lady. I knew it was just a matter of days. In fact, it was more like hours: I put the Facebook "rainbow filter" on my profile picture (as did at least two-thirds of my Facebook friends), and then a non-rainbowed friend from Oklahoma posted a link to this post by conservative blogger Kevin DeYoung : "40 Questions for Christians Who Made Their Profile Pictures into a Rainbow."  I don't advise clicking the link; chances are good that, if you're reading this, what you find there will make your blood boil (though it's not as if I can stop you--and I did embed the link, didn't I?). I did take a look at the 40 questions, thought seriously about responding to the damned thing by answering everyone of them (including the loaded and redundant ones), but then thought better of it. A few days later, I saw the link again on Facebook, this time with a helpful comment linking to ...

A monk, a priest, a rabbi, several ministers, and half a dozen nuns walk into the governor's office... So it's Indiana that takes the ball and runs with it. The Supreme Court opened the door for the  "religious freedom" excuse for state-sanctioned discrimination last summer with the Hobby Lobby decision.  At the time, Court-watching pundits warned that the decision would empower right-wing Christians to write their bigotry into law. Then came the waiting game: which state would be the first to extend a sanctimonious middle finger to the gay community? The answer came this week, as Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a bill giving business owners the right to refuse service to persons who offend their religious sensibilities. If you've followed this blog since its inception two years ago, you know I've had some very harsh things to say about Christianity. I've railed against the institutional cowardice that holds denominations back from impleme...

Once and future Presidential candidate Rick Santorum doesn't like hearing about Christianity's dark side. He's not alone. Nine days ago, in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama committed blasphemy: he spoke about the atrocities committed by terrorists in the name of Islam--this wasn't the blasphemy--and then made note of Christianity's long history of waging campaigns of violence against unbelievers, persons of other faiths, and even against other Christians who differed from the majority in terms of skin color, language, or interpretation of the Gospel. The President was not slandering the faith. All the crimes against humanity he referred to--and he did it in as diplomatic a manner as it is possible to say such things, short of simply not saying them at all--are well-documented historical truths, some of them taking place within his own lifetime. Truthful and diplomatic though these remarks might be, simply saying them was enough t...

Portrait of Faith: Victor, Elam Sr., Elam Jr., Colena, and Frances Anderson, c. 1932. Christianity was never meant to be a legacy faith. Reading the oldest portions of the New Testament, it becomes clear that the first generation of Jesus' followers never expected a second generation to arise. In Mark 9:1, Matthew 16:28, and Luke 9:27, Jesus says that "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul counsels the church to practice celibacy, so as not to be caught in flagrante delicto by the parousia . Of course, the Second Coming never happened, at least not in the way it was expected to, and every generation of Christians since has had to find a way to live eschatologically in a world that isn't going anywhere. The evangelical urgency of the gospels--of converting the entire world in fear of the wrath to come--lost much of its edge as churches had to shift their fo...

6-22-14 I grew up in church. Until last November, I spent almost every Sunday morning of my life in church. Even on vacations, I usually found a church, though as I grew older, I felt less and less need for that observance. Church had become a job, and little more. Finally, last November, I resigned from a good paying church job because I just needed, for the first time in my life, to have weekends. I haven’t looked back. With all that said, church is still a comfortable place for me to be. I speak the language, I understand the way people think and interact, and even though I may now find those customs and ideas far less attractive, and find some of them offensive, I know that church is, and always will be, a place I can fit right into, no matter where it is or what its practices are. So Sunday morning in Ghana, knowing we would be attending a church in Dzodze—though strictly for sociological reasons, to see how they made use of Ghanaian music in a western religiou...

This is not a review. I haven't seen Noah , the just-released blockbuster about the Flood, nor do I plan to see it. Between previews and word-of-mouth, I'm 98% certain I'd spend the entire two hours and eighteen minutes critiquing both the liberties it takes with the Biblical narrative and the ways in which it chickens out on the real scandal at the heart of that story. I've already written about that scandal, calling it " The Worst Story in the Bible ," and I don't intend to repeat much of that argument here. What I do want to do is just zoom in on the key aspect of it, which Noah  almost certainly glosses over, as does every popular interpretation of the story I've ever encountered. (Case in point, this:  ) Simply put, the central character in the story of the Flood is not an old man with a big boat; it's the bloodthirsty God who, on a whim, destroys all life that won't fit on that boat. This is genocide on a cosmic scale. When the com...

Be ye warned: the following essay says nice things about Christians. In the six months I've been writing this blog, I've had some harsh things to say about the church. The church that formed me, United Methodism, is, in my informed opinion, a spiritually and ethically bankrupt institution, incapable of acting courageously, its leadership hopelessly hobbled by the desire to preserve what power they have and to hang onto jobs that are rapidly becoming obsolete. Whatever convictions they have with respect to providing basic civil rights to sexual minorities take a back seat to covering their asses in the event of an assault from the right. Continuing in the disclaimer mode, I will also state that Christians in general are fond of imagery that just gives me the douche chills. I made the mistake of Googling "Christians" in a quest for an image to attach to this blog, and what I came up with was simply revolting: schmaltz, schlock, saccharine sentimentality with a fr...

The New Testament is anti-Jewish. There. I said it. Simply, without elaboration, a bald-faced statement about a collection of writings millions of people consider the Word of God. There was a time when I would have found this interpretation scandalous, offensive, heretical, even blasphemous. It's not that I was raised to believe every word of the Bible was literally God's word (however contradictory those words might be). My father never imposed any interpretation of Scripture on me. I was brought up to be a critical thinker, to approach texts with a skeptical eye, to look for the deeper meaning beneath the literal translation. But going deep does not come easily for an adolescent, and the most profound religious experience I ever had was when I was in middle school, and not prone to deep thinking. My mother was the organist and choir director of the United Methodist Church of Emmett, Idaho, of which my father was the pastor. One year for Holy Week, she taught the choir...