The Little Friar

It's October 31st.  That means three things.  (1) It's my birthday; I'm old.  (2) It's All Saints Day -- my second favorite day of the Church Year.  (3) It's Halloween.  Halloween is always an interesting day for Christians.  We're never quite sure whether to celebrate it or not.  I usually field a few questions every year.  So in an effort to take my response to that questions public, I want to say here that I'm a Christian and I support Halloween.   I support Halloween for two reasons.  Spiritually and psychologically, I think Halloween accomplishes two things on a particular day that our culture otherwise glosses over.   Firstly, I support Halloween because it brings us face-to-face with human frailty and mortality.  Halloween allows us to collectively process our eventual death and mortality.  The graveyards, corpses, blood, skeletons, and coffins of Halloween allow us, on a yearly basis, to confront our phys...

  Mark Lloyd Taylor's So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching  is, itself, a creative, artful, and playful account of one year -- from November 2016 to November 2017 -- preaching "fill in" sermons at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Seattle.  A compilation of 12 sermons (one for each month of that period), this selection comes from within the liturgical life of a particular congregation -- usually in the morning or evening Sunday eucharistic liturgy.  Taylor intended those sermons to be experiments in preaching that followed the "Godly Play" curriculum idea -- whereby children's religious education is conducted along the lines of Montessori kinesthetic involvement.   Taylor provides not only the text of the sermon selections but also the biblical text for the chosen day as well as deep theological reflections as a sort of background for the sermon.  Those additions make So Fill Our Imaginations  a wonderful littl...

Warren Carter's Jesus and the Empire of God: Reading the Gospels in the Roman Empire  is a marvelously accessible book that chronicles the various ways in which the Gospel accounts of Jesus -- crucified on a Roman cross by a Roman governor -- critique and expose the structures and practices of the Roman world in the lives of the followers of Jesus.  Here, Carter raises some key questions (in the form of the Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter) for those of us who read these ancient texts as "good news" for our own world.   What difference, for example, does it make to read the accounts of Jesus' life and ministry from the vantage point of an elite in Roman society as opposed to one who suffers under economic (or even military) oppression at the hands of Roman military might?  How might the various social structures of Roman society have impacted the way in which early Christians shared the story of Jesus' life?   And much more:  C...

Plough's most recent book, An Inconvenient Gospel , brings a selection of the most important writings of Clarence Jordan to a new generation.   I first heard of Jordan as an undergraduate in the mid-1990s at a small Baptist liberal arts college.  Jordan is perhaps best known for his founding of the interracial Christian community Koinonia Farm in Georgia in 1942.  A farmer and Baptist minister by vocation, Jordan translated Scripture into the vernacular of the Southern United States, and interpreted them within the context of the racial South.  But Jordan's writings, here compiled in chronological order, demonstrate how significant his message was and remains in 21st century America.   This little book is indeed about "the inconvenient Gospel" of Jesus Christ, one that confronts and challenges our own cultural context in fresh and vital ways.  Jordan, for example, endured threats from the Klu Klux Klan, while continually pointing to the radical na...