Faith Improvised

I am thoroughly enjoying John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift. He has developed a unique vocabulary and grammar to articulate the shape of Paul’s theology. It’s simply beautiful to read and I find myself re-reading and savoring many of his paragraphs. In his discussion of Galatians 6:11-16, he powerfully captures Paul’s argument regarding the power of […]

Commentators make much of the two massive feedings in Mark 6:35-45 and 8:1-10. The narratives are pregnant with significance. From one angle, the two episodes can be read as failures on the disciples’ part. The first comes just after their initial mission as agents of the kingdom’s miraculous power (6:13), yet they fail to imagine […]

“Mark wants to insist on two things: Jesus does not want to be known in his true identity until it will be clear that suffering rather than power lies at the core of that identity, but Jesus’ charismatic accomplishments are so great that they cannot be hidden. There is an inevitable tension between those two […]

Clifton Black on Mark’s subversive presentation of Jesus: The deeper question with which Mark’s readers must come to terms is whether she or he can follow a Christ so offensive as to die by crucifixion (15:22-41). An inescapable dimension of this Evangelist’s Christology is the Messiah’s repulsiveness. Jesus flummoxes everyone who boxes him into conventional […]

While the cross is the freest possible place from which to minister, there are endless reasons to avoid cruciform pastoral ministry. It feels so terrifyingly vulnerable, so threatening and precarious, so foolish and irresponsible, so unproductive and inefficient, so pointless and inconvenient. The cross is not manipulable, it demands death, calls for complete surrender, is immune […]

In American Apocalypse, Matthew Avery Sutton gives an account of the gradual alliance of American evangelical Christians with the Republican Party. An excerpt: As fundamentalists reacted to labor unrest and the communist menace, they evolved from occasional critics of monopolistic corporations into apologists for free market capitalism. For Billy Sunday, securing the nation’s Christian foundations […]

Yesterday’s NY Times carried this very interesting article, “Addicted to Your Phone? There’s Help for That” (“Put Down The Phone” in the print edition) pondering smartphone addiction and attempts to overcome it.   I don’t have a smartphone (and didn’t realize it was one word until yesterday), and my family think it’s because I’m somehow […]

I’m currently finding it difficult to put down Matthew Avery Sutton’s excellent work, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Among other things, he traces the movement’s strong anti-Semitism and racism in the early 20th century. Shockingly, fundamentalists had an ambivalent relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, which Sutton documents through debates and discussions in the […]

I saw U2 twice in Chicago a few weeks back and one of my favorite features was the intermission halfway through the show. They played “The Wanderer,” and on the video screen showed the face of Johnny Cash singing the song. As it progressed, Cash’s face aged, reflecting the tour’s name, “Innocence and Experience.” I’ve […]

Throughout Mark, Jesus behaves in an offensively inclusive manner, pointing to the reality of an offensively inclusive kingdom. His eating with sinners and tax collectors (Mark 2:13-17) shocks the Pharisees, and Mark arrests his readers by noting that Jesus touches just about every ritually unclean character he encounters. This narrative dynamic is made explicit in Mark […]