The Little Friar

A friend of mine asked me today:  "What is your choice of denominational affiliation and why did you choose it?" Here's my response: I became an Episcopalian in college. Initially, I was drawn to the church for its sacra-mentality -- the complete immersion in an experience of God’s grace that was life-long and thoroughly incarnational. When I began exploring whether to be confirmed in the church, I interviewed the bishop a number of times. One of his most significant comments to me was, "We are a catholic church in love with freedom".  It's hard to pin down our sprawling Anglican identity to a few words, but the bishop's concise phrase comes close. Yes, we are deeply grounded in things ancient and universal, but we also have a propensity to explore fresh expressions and new perspectives, with no overriding authority to tell us no. When my seminary dean handed me my diploma, he did not warn me never to rock the boat as a priest of the chur...

Darla Weaver's Gathering of Sisters:  A Year with My Old Order Mennonite Family is at once heart-warming and challenging. It's a poignant peek into the daily life of Mennonite from one who would return, again and again, to that weekly gathering of "sisters".  On warm days, the children play and fish and build houses of hay in the barn.  In the winter, everyone stays close to the woodstove, with puzzles and games and crocheting.  No matter the weather, the Tuesday get-togethers of this Old Order Mennonite family keep them grounded and centered in their love for God and for each other, even when raising an occasional loving but knowing eyebrow at each other. The rest of the week is full of laundry, and errands, and work that never ends. But Tuesday is about being sisters, daughters, and mothers. Hear straight from Amish and Mennonite people themselves as they write about their daily lives and deeply rooted faith in the Plainspoken series from Herald Pre...

Ryan Kuja's From the Inside Out:  Reimagining Mission, Recreating the World is a passionately critical exploration of much of the accepted wisdom about Christian mission. It's a powerful criticism that shouldn't be overlooked. First, Kuja does a masterful job of providing a concise analysis of colonialistic missions.  In the first three chapters, Kuja explores how history and theology have intertwined to create problematic missional endeavors.  While it is not groundbreaking or new, it's a highly readable and compact survey which should be helpful to readers who are beginning to ask questions about evangelism and missions. Secondly, I found Kuja's exploration of psychology and mission particularly important.  Kuja admits to being a broken person, and he wants readers to recognize their own brokenness.  Part of the issue with the way we do missions, the author contends, is that we in the West use it as a way of correcting issues within our own e...

Andrew Lawler's The Secret Token:  Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke is an exquisitely depressing to read.  It's depressing to see that -- after all this time -- the tensions between popular and academic history remain so abrasive and dismissive.  Conspiracy historians abound and tend to dismiss academic ones.  Academic ones merely roll their eyes at genuine amateur historians (who perform their craft out of the sheer love of history!).  Here, a historian that should be able to bring these groups together merely reduces himself to an argument ad populum , even as he utilizes the work of academic historians.  And all within the pages of a major New York publishing house's massive production! Lawler came to his interest in Roanoke the same way so many in the outer reaches of historiography come to their obsessive interests:  Childhood.   Lawler grew up in the area and attended the annual performance of the p...

Order of the Sacred Earth:  An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action is a clarion call:   We must preserve the planet's vital beauty and resources.  To convey love for and commitment to our planet and all life upon it, the book was organized by spiritual theologian and activist Matthew Fox, wilderness and meditation guide Skylar Wilson, and writer and publicist Jennifer Berit Listug.  The anthology serves as the titular Order's group treatise, with its unified vow of "I promise to be the best lover and defender of Mother Earth that I can be". Citing how many religions, governments, and social theories have become more divisive than unifying, Order of the Sacred Earth proposes a return to the collective consciousness that we are of one human race and part of a majestic world.  Turning away from the earth and its natural cycles will only harm humanity, it says, and conservation should not just be regarded as a prudent ecological movement b...

David N Moore's Making America Great Again: Making America Great Again: Fairy Tale? Horror Story? Dream Come True? -- A Challenge to the Christian Community is a powerful conversation starter, in a cultural climate where conversations are a dying art. Here, readers will find a compelling prophetic voice from within and to the Christian community,  to better understand the plight of poor, disadvantaged and frustrated Americans. Moore's personal reflections are poignant!  This is a must read for those that truly want to better understand the forces that divide our society.  All too often, we institute changes without understanding the underlying problems.  Rev. Moore offers better understanding of social dynamics that should be a catalyst for Christ-inspired change. I have to admit that I started the book with a little trepidation.  I was expecting a book that would echo so much of an already overwhelmed echo-chamber of one or another variety in Am...

Julie Roberts' Beauty in the Breakdown:  Choosing to Overcome opens with Julie at the peak of her commercial success, performing on stage while promoting her debut album, only to be struck down with what were to prove to be the first signs of multiple sclerosis. After that first chapter, we dart back in time to a dramatic midnight escape by the five year old Julie, her sisters and their mother, from Julie’s drunken, abusive father. Regrettably, the family would return, and the pattern repeated on more than one occasion. Perhaps the most poignant anecdote in the book is Julie’s recollection that her mother viewed Martina McBride’s hit single ‘Independence Day’ as aspirational. The story then moves briskly through Julie’s childhood, a few pageant competitions and community college, before she won the Vince Gill Scholarship to Belmont University in Nashville, where she was able to hone her performing skills. After college Julie encouraged her mother to pluck up the...

Readers will know that I'm a week late in getting this selection up, but I've been plagued by an infection that turned out to be far more painful than I had initially anticipated.  So I had to take a break from writing.  Hopefully I can get back on track now. That said ... Practicing Theology is an important little volume of essays that explores how systematic theology can assist people of faith in negotiating the world as Christians.  Here, this collection of theologians puts theology to the service of the Church, and these "critical realists" (among whom I would count myself) make some robust claims about God's reality and God's relationship to the world.  And in the process, help us articulate the difference God makes in how we articulate culture and world. In what is perhaps the most important essay in the entire collection, Amy Plantinga Pauw turns the "gaps" that emerge from faith and practice in our culture into a rich theological spa...

It's no secret that I went to Duke Divinity School for the sole purpose of studying with Fred Herzog.  Lesser known, however, is that in the spring prior to my arrival on campus (1995), Fred and I had begun a correspondence.  In that exchange, I had asked Fred for a recommendation of books that he thought I should read in preparation for studying at Duke.  In that list of around 20 books, Fred had put Jon Segundo's The Liberation of Theology . Liberation theology is perhaps one of the most important prophetic movements in the Church these days.  They represent the ways of life and struggle of Christians around the world who have convinced remnants of the Church to open its eyes to human misery and oppose socioeconomic systems and political structures that perpetuate such misery.  Like all serious modes of inquiry, liberation theologies are predicated on crisis -- on human situations of tremendous danger and incipient possibility.  Such concrete crises inv...

Manana:  Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective is a rich theological account of Christian faith from a Hispanic perspective by one of the most articulate Hispanic theologians, Justo Gonzalez.  It weaves the doctrinal formulations of the early church on creation, the Trinity, and Christology into contemporary theological reflection on the Hispanic struggle for liberation.  Gonzalez is probably most known for his work in theological history, but this book is also richly insightful and unique among theological accounts. The Jesus that emerges from this account will look a lot more like the Jesus of Scripture and history precisely because he is seen through the eyes of the peasant, oppressed and marginalized.

Edward Farley's Ecclesial Reflection:  An Anatomy of Theological Method deals with the crisis of authority in all the traditional "houses of authority" -- Scripture, dogma, experience.  As heirs of the European Enlightenment, Farley insists, we have inherited a persistent and consistent allergy to the notion of authority in general.  So how are Christians, then, to make theological judgments at all? That's the question Farley answers in this book.  The basic question here:  What do we mean by Scripture and what sort of authority is it? When separated from the life of the Church, Scripture becomes, itself, yet another domineering power that Jesus refused.  Jesus refused to apply ultimacy to religious doctrines or traditions (Matthew 5.21ff).  And he refused the same authority for claims of the state (Mark 12.13ff).  This is precisely the point that modern liberals and modern conservatives both miss.  And miss in precisely the same way,...

In Growing in the Life of Faith , Craig Dykstra examines the traditions and methods that help Christians explore their relationship with God and strengthen their faith.  Dykstra grabs the reader’s attention with the first chapter 'The Hunger for Daily Bread," recognizing America's "cultural moral ambiguity" (p. 1) and how unsure we are of not only our faith practices during difficult times, but how our society grapples with the concept of right and wrong.  In addition, Dykstra admits that we are no longer "scripturally literate" (p. 6), meaning that people who claim to be Christians are less religious now than in the past.  By addressing America'S struggles with religiosity, Dykstra gains immediate credibility with an audience of clergy, Catholic educators, and Christians attempting to establish a personal connection to God. Throughout, Dykstra explores all of the ways in which we are a society of those personally self-obsessed, making a faith-f...

I first read Hauerwas' The Peaceable Kingdom:  A Primer in Christian Ethics as a college student.  What struck me then -- and still punches me in the gut each time I re-read it -- is that ethics, not to mention every part of Christian life and discipleship, can only fruitfully be understood through the narrative of our history as a people of God.  He begins with the claim that every ethic must include a qualifier, including and perhaps especially, "Christian ethics".  He raises the contention against the backdrop of a systemic view that there is somehow a "universal ethic" from which we can derive our complete moral code (one which so much of the modern political world seems to assume).  Apart from the problems with this latter view, it quickly becomes clear that as Hauerwas sees it, there is no clearer way to develop an ethical standpoint but through narrative -- through the history that is tied up in the qualifier "Christian". Thus the que...

Stanley Grenz's The Moral Quest:  Foundations of Christian Ethics  builds upon his rich theological account of the Christian faith found in Theology for the Community of God that is at once one of the best, my accessible, introductions to the practice of Christian ethics that I've read.  This is one of those reference books that deserves to be read by every Christian leader, and serves as a reminder for what the stakes are in this great "moral quest".

Roland Bainton's Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace is perhaps one of the most important and well-documented accounts of the various Christian "positions" toward participation in war, and offers a candid, even if dated (1961) account of the stakes of Christian peace-making. Here, you'll find a critical appraisal of the three fundamental Christian perspectives:  Pacifism, just war, and the crusade.  And as a church historian, Bainton carefully connects those positions to early Christian faith. Earliest Christians had an essential aversion toward taking life.  And thus were committed to a pacifism that was Christologically grounded.  Discipleship to Jesus, to their mind, made participation in war absolutely verboten.  "From the end of the New Testament period to the decade A.D. 160-170 there is no evidence whatever of Christians in the army" (pp 67-68). But with the rise of the just war position, theologians like Ambrose and later Augustine, connec...

Can the State be capable of true charity towards the needy among us? What unintended consequences tend to arise as a State interjects itself more and more into the private dealings of citizens? What is the responsibility of the wealthy in society? What about the responsibility of the working class? Is an unequal landscape of wealth and position in a country just…let alone good? These are some questions Pope Leo XIII helps us answer in his powerful 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum .  You can read the full text online here . I first read this encyclical in seminary and it had a dramatic impact on the way I began to think about the theology of political economies.  In particular, it's quite prominent to hear talk about "socialism" in the modern collapse of political dialogue.  It's used more as a threat and a bomb to discourse than a real descriptor.  So I'd say it's about time Christians really look into the Church's stance on socialism. This is a ...

Michael Walzer makes a historical sweep of various cultures to identify how groups of people with different histories, cultures and identities can coexist peacefully together.   On Toleration is an important work for an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society.   Walzer maintains that the virtue of tolerance, in its multivarious forms, is the key virtue for peaceful coexistence and a necessary condition for human flourishing.  Walzer is unique in that he takes great pains to avoid abstract formulations of the virtue of tolerance.  He states that, "the alternative I mean to defend is a historical and contextual account of toleration and coexistence, on that examines the different forms that these have actually taken and the norms of everyday life appropriate to each" (p 3).  But, he also remains a non-relativist -- he wants to gather historical examples that demonstrate a common principle that he can extrapolate to avoid radical relativism (For a fuller ...

Authentic Transformation (AT), Stassen, Yeager and Yoder offer a critique and an affirmation of H. Richard Niebuhr's influential book, Christ and Culture (C&C).  The authors argue that C&C needs to be looked at more carefully because of its widespread influence over our understanding of the "enduring problem" of the relationship between Christ and Culture.  This influence is demonstrated in the overwhelming use of C&C's five-type language and the fact that after reading the book everyone wants to be a transformationist (Niebuhr's fifth type).   Stassen, Yeager and Yoder want to affirm the need for a faith that is authentically transformational in society, but they question whether Niebuhr's work is adequate or ample enough to provide the framework for that kind of faith. In Yoder states that, "what H. Richard Niebuhr meant by 'transformation' is so inadequately defined that its popularity with the readers seems to cor...

Christ and Culture was the most influential book that H. Richard Niebuhr wrote.  He sets out to solve a problem:  "How are we supposed to think about the relationship of Christ and culture?"  After defining "Christ" as a Son in relationship to a Father and "culture" as the social heritage we receive and transmit (ch. 1), Niebuhr articulates the inherent tension between the two:   First, God leads people away from the temporality and pluralism of culture.  Second, culture rejects Christ; who bids people to rely on grace.  Thus, a tension occurs between Christ and culture that results in affirmations, denials, reconstructions and compromises on both sides.   Niebuhr argues that history demonstrates five "types" (later he calls them "motifs") of responses between Christ and culture.  He sets out to articulate each type and argue for Christ as the transformer of culture. An important trait of Niebuhr's work in Christ...

In Ethics After Babel Stout argues for a melding of Augustinian theology and epistemological pragmatism to recover a rich language for moral discourse in a pluralistic society.   He resists the temptation toward radical relativism in ethics, but recognizes the diversity in contemporary moral language. In part one of Ethics after Babel , Stout defines the problem -- As a consequence of the diversity of moral language, should we abandon the traditional notion of objective and rational moral judgments? (p 13).  In part two, Stout considers the fate of religious contributions to moral discourse in a diverse culture.  Finally, in part three, Stout argues for the recovery of Augustinian theology and the utilization of a modest philosophical pragmatism as a way forward in moral discourse. Stout makes a careful epistemological distinction between “truth” and "justification" in moral discourse.  He argues that while "truth" is objective, "justification" re...

Many ethicists are addressing the problem that the Enlightenment brand of universals has created.  The notion that there is a universal, objective truth or morality, or way of reasoning, that all people in all places at all times can access.  Many good ethicists today recognize that this is not true.  The architects of that way of reasoning generally start with a thin description of "things we can all agree on".  This is the universal, and political philosopher Michael Walzer calls this way of thinking "proceduralism" in his Thick and Thin:  Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (p 11) -- and in philosophical terms this line of thinking it is called foundationalism .  It is the notion that a thin morality of discourse or decision governs every particular creation of a substantive, thick morality (p 11).  Walzer argues that this does not accord with our actual lived experience.  We in fact come to know morality thickly, interpreted within our partic...