Tag: Christianity
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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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Andy Crouch on Occupying vs Marching
Occupying a park is very different from, say, marching down a street. A march has a destination and a goal, passing through space and time and then disbanding, leaving space before and after for others to flow into. And because marches flow through space and time, they can grow, including more and more people in…
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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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Everything I Know about Racism I Learned in the Church
During college, I volunteered for the youth ministry at a church. Every year at the volunteer Christmas party, the two white guys who worked for the ministry dressed up as “black guys from the hood” and performed an entirely unoriginal and unfunny skit that exploited negative black male stereotypes for laughs. I remember looking around the room…
David W. Swanson 