The Little Friar

Jason Porterfield's Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace throughout Holy Week  focuses on peace issues of Holy Week in a way that most books about that highly significant week do not.  He takes the lament of Jesus, recorded in Luke 19.41-44 as "the interpretative key to Holy Week" (page 21).  Thus, Porterfield asserts, "We desperately need to recover the radical vision of peacemaking that Jesus embodied throughout Holy Week" (page 23). In chapters two through seven, Porterfield describes what happened on each day from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and also lists "lessons in peacemaking" from Jesus' actions and words on each of those days.  The final chapter deals with Saturday and Easter Sunday under the title "Peace Be with You".  Porterfield concludes the chapter, and the book, by addressing his readers directly.  He encourages us to consider how we may implement any insight we've gained through reading Fight Like Jesus .  Since the...

James Calvin Davis' American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture offers some reflections -- most in the form of sermons -- on one of the most vexing questions that has plagued my own ministry:  Do we want the parish to celebrate secular holidays as part of our liturgy?   It's never been a simple question, precisely because American culture is so pervasive.  We live and breathe it for seven days a week -- and we don't leave that air when we walk into a worship service on Sundays.  So not acknowledging secular holidays (holy-days) is a difficult task, and one likely to be met with lots of resistance in the parish.  Trust me, I know.  I've lived that resistance for decades.  Like most other pastors, I've insisted that the Christian liturgy is reserved for Christian holy days.  We have a Christian calendar that follows the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (including Jesus' continued life in his Church), thus i...

I'm hearing a lot of talk about "thoughts and prayers".  And then I see push back in a variety of ways -- heck, I'm among those pushing back. I also think most of the criticism directed at "thoughts and prayers" isn't religious but political.  And as political criticism, you can be sure I sympathize with the objections -- I've even posted a few.  I hate American civil religion as much as my atheist and agnostic friends.  Specifically, those, like me, objecting to the uselessness of "thoughts and prayers" are directing those criticisms toward political leaders who send statements of concern, condolences and solidarity out on social media and who are perceived as taking no material, political action to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.  For example, politicians send out "thoughts and prayers" to the families of Uvalde but take no meaningful action on gun control.  Yeah -- they make my blood boil. The problem here,...

Pam Urfer's Candlelight Revolution  provides a view to daily life in the Cold War.  When the Soviet Union began to crumble -- with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 -- the effects of the suffocation and extermination of human thriving that had named the period came into a clearer view for those in the West.  But for those in Germany and the Soviet Union, life had been named mean and hard for a long time.  Urfer captures the struggles of that daily life in a compelling narrative. ___________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this brief review.