The Little Friar

I've been thinking lately about the Church's call in the context of modern policing.  With the increased visibility and attention being paid to issues like militarization , systemic racism , and deadly force , how can Christians speak and act faithfully? My first instinct is to look towards those doing work on what is called "just policing", with scholars like Gerald Schlabach and Tobias Winright .  While I appreciate the contributions of these scholars, I have often wondered whether the questions being asked -- how we reform the criminal justice system, or create a just system -- are not built on assumptions which should be interrogated much further.  I think those are essentially Constantinian questions.  They also require an account of justice that must be (at least in part) abstracted from the work of Christ.  How much meaning does the word "just" lose when it's applied to a system that requires some degree of violence and domination...

So apparently we need " a return to the spirit of 9/12 ".  I'm glad Hillary Clinton -- who made that observation in the days following the attack in Orlando -- has given us enough time to pause, pray and reflect .  Because, as I remember 9/11, what Americans were in the days following that tragic Tuesday, was awkwardly confused.  I was standing in an airport, waiting to get on a plane, that morning.  I remember watching the flight boards change from "on time" to "delayed".  I remember hearing someone cry out, "They just bombed the World Trade Center!"  And I immediately flashed back to 1993.  As we all stood there, trying to come to terms with the scenes playing out in horror on screens in front of us, we were all left asking, "Should we actually be watching this?  Should we be doing this?  I guess we already are?"  We like to make fun of President Bush, now, in hindsight, for reading My Pet Goat while the attack was occurring, bu...

Memorial Day in America is Monday, May 30th -- the day we remember those who have died in our wars.  And as you expect on days like Memorial Day there's lots on social media expressing gratitude for those who gave their lives in service to America, making the "ultimate sacrifice" as we say.  Many of these expressions of gratitude are very personal, people sharing pictures of parents or grandparents.  On days like Memorial Day I think of all my ancestors who fought in various and sundry wars -- from Korea all the way back to the English Civil War. One of the things I wonder about every year is why the Church doesn't make more of its "memorial day" -- also known as "All Saints' Day". Thing is, I'd love something more interdenominational.  Because, let's be honest, Protestants are lack here.  (Catholic friends will be quick to jump in and shout, "Of course you're lacking.  You've cut off yourself and schismed the...

John 18.10-11 will inevitably make people like me -- that is, Christian pacifists -- face a question that gets asked:  What are we to do with "put your sword away" in a world where groups like ISIS exist.  Are we, or is a nation like the US, to put the sword away when people are being beheaded, woman raped and girls taken as sex slaves? I don't have answers to those questions.  Because I think any answer I give to those questions will avoid the conversation that Christian pacifists have to have when we talk about violence. We are -- all of us are, whether Christian, pacifist, or none of the above -- people who live within history and we have to appreciate the tragic nature of history. If, for example, we bomb ISIS that's not something to cheer about.  It's horribly tragic.  Plus, that bombing will simply create more violence as those affected by the bombing will most likely become radicalized and come to hate the US.  Bombing, even if you think i...

1. Because there was nothing else to do, I said to myself, I will read Hemingway and drink wine and think only of Paris.  So I sat that afternoon and read A Moveable Feast , Hemingway's memoir of life in Paris, and drank wine and thought of Paris.  It was 7th of July, 2005. 2.   I remember my few days in Paris as a student.  I stayed in a really bad motel and it was a disappointment.  The more irritable my host became, the more mad I responded.  But that's how it was.  Still, puny moods and attitudes were no match for Paris.  I walked along the Seine.  I roamed the boulevards.  I looked at paintings and old buildings, loafed in cafés.  I went in and out of shops along the rue St-Dominique, buying nothing.  I ate fruit and croissants and dipped them in my coffee -- I only drink coffee in Paris.  A gypsy girl begged me to let her draw my portrait. 3.   The city, of course, is older than Christianity...

I can't recall the first time I ever confessed the Apostles' Creed. But I can't imagine not confessing the Apostles' Creed. The Apostles' Creed first appeared around 140 AD. It's old -- and it's bold, bolder than we often give it credit for.  In fact, the audaciousness of its historic claims easily get obscured by our familiarity with the ancient lines. When early Christians confessed these lines, it was perhaps one of the greatest acts of political rebellion.  Because in these words, when spoken, were spoken by people who had less than the political comforts of Constitutional protection.  In these words, they were rejecting the narrative given to them by virtue of their Roman-ness:  That Caesar was both dominus et deus -- lord and god.  The narrative in these words from the Apostles' Creed are a direct political rebellion against the narratives of a surrounding culture that embraced political power and its violent underpinnings. The Apostles...

Yesterday was Memorial Day in America, the day we remember those who have died in our wars.  And as you expect on days like Memorial Day there's lots on social media expressing gratitude for those who gave their lives in service to America, making the "ultimate sacrifice" as we say.  Many of these expressions of gratitude are very personal, people sharing pictures of parents or grandparents.  On days like Memorial Day I think of all my ancestors who fought in various and sundry wars -- from Korea all the way back to the English Civil War. One of the things I wonder about every year is why the Church doesn't make more of its "memorial day" -- also known as "All Saints' Day". Thing is, I'd love something more interdenominational.  Because, let's be honest, Protestants are lack here.  (Catholic friend will be quick to jump in and shout, "Of course you're lacking.  You've cut off yourself and schismed the Church.)  ...

In the debates about pacifism within the Christian tradition, many Christians have justified the use of violence and killing by making an appeal to Jesus' temple action, the time when Jesus flipped the tables of the moneychangers and dove sellers and drove people from the temple courts with a whip. I agree with the many other Christians who think that this is a horrible argument.  It's quite a stretch to go from Jesus' temple action to killing people.  Of course if Jesus, say, stabbed somebody to death in the temple then we might have something to talk about.  But that's not what happened.  To be sure, the word "violence" could be used to describe Jesus' actions, but that's a far cry from giving us a warrant to kill. And yet, there is something much less talked about and debated regarding Jesus' temple action. One of those activist communities must be left to ask, after the recent riots in Baltimore, is if it's ever okay to bre...

Reading Scripture is such a startling thing for me. Every year -- you'd think I'd be used to this by now -- I encounter the stories of Easter morning, startled awake by what these stories proclaim. You'd imagine Easter to be the one morning on which everyone is fearless. But Mark -- the oldest Gospel we have -- ends this way in the earliest manuscripts: When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body.  Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?" But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.  As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are...

If the people I encounter on a daily basis are any indication -- and I think they're at least some indicator of this -- we Americans are fairly sure we've figured out who "the monsters" in the world might be. Take Mohammed Emwazi, for example. You may know him better as "Jihadi John", the guy who beheads innocent civilians and aid workers in the cause of a global Caliphate.  But I could just as easily name the "bad guy of the day" -- the one who's made headlines because of his barbarity toward children as a pedophile or the most recent drug-dealer who's moved in on the local neighborhood. This is a tired, old label, but it still persists.  Any person who commit some atrocity that seems out-of-bounds for what "civil" society might tolerate is the next "monster". It's tired because the label doesn't really say much, other than we're looking for a way of getting ourselves off the hook.  We need a way t...

Recently, someone shared this on Facebook: There are several things that bother me about this picture. What it's meant to do, mostly, is to undermine the logical consistency of nonviolence.  It's meant to underwrite the idea that violence, by its very essence, is logically necessary.  We simply can't live without it.  To be human is to be violent.  So the picture poses a scenario in which a person like me -- that is to say a nonviolent pacifist -- can only vindicate violence when it hits close to home.  That we can't logically defend the idea of nonviolence in the face of a knife or gun. But, like I said, the picture bothers me for several reasons. First, it assumes that there are only two principal actors in any scenario.  This is a fault of modern Enlightenment thinking:  It's too individualistic.  Because it assumes that relationships between parties -- in this case, me and the guy with the knife -- play out in mechanistic ways....

As I sit this morning, gazing out the office window, I realize how significant the confession of our faith:  "I believe in God:  The Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth".  That confession was perhaps the first as a child to explode my theological imagination.  I mean, think about it, that's perhaps the most radical of theological claims to emerge out of the Old Testament and find its confirmation in Jesus' own teaching. I realized this yesterday when preaching the graciousness of God.  I'll spare you the details of the sermon, but in looking yet again at Jonah, I realized just how big a confession it is to claim that God is the "maker of all that is, seen and unseen". Once Israel began to see YHWH as the Covenant God who creates everything, there's a destabilization of various theological arrangements and settlements.  God is not simply some tribal god, and hence a god who works against the attempts to capture and tame God. At the ...