Category: theology
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The End Of Authenticity
For the ten years I’ve been a pastor there’s been one priority most everyone I’ve worked with (pastors, lay people, and ministry authors alike) has agreed with: authenticity. This is interesting. For one thing, church folks don’t often agree on priorities yet this one has gone unopposed. For another, how is authenticity a thing that can be…
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“…the human animal lives by friendship…”
We do not live by building ever more secure fences of possessions around ourselves, but by giving to others space to live. This is to give life to others. The human animal, human society, flourishes, not to the extent that it possesses riches, but to the extent that we give life to each other, to…
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Are Christians Escapists? Aliens? Crazy?
Before heading out of town for our family vacation I picked up the most recent issue of The Believer which happened to be the yearly music issue. I’d forgotten how odd (to me, at least) this magazine is but I enjoyed the interviews and essays, especially the one about Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father and…
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Violence 6: People Have Been Raiding It
It’s been a month since my last meditation on violence but a final item keeps turning over in my mind. Its a short passage from the Gospel of Matthew, a saying of Jesus remarkable for its surprising imagery and – for me, at least – inscrutability. John the Baptist’s disciples have come to double-check with…
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Ellul on Jesus and Mammon
In preparation for an upcoming sermon on money I’ve been dipping into Money and Power by Jacques Ellul. In a section titled “What Money Really Is” Ellul makes a theological point I’d not previously considered. (Others have surely made it, but Ellul does so forcefully and provocatively, as anyone familiar with his writing would expect.) Reflecting…
David W. Swanson 