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...

In a violent world, violence seems to be the most logical response.  So when guys like me insist violence actually isn't a logical response, we're often challenged with a typical rejoinder question:  "What would you do if, say, someone broke into your home with a gun to kill Kendra and your three fur babies?" The challenger often uses this question as a way of demonstrating that my (the pacifist's) conviction about violence is inconsistent, and that the existence of violence is necessary.  It's often posed in such a way that if the pacifist cannot give a satisfactory answer then violence is apparently vindicated, even in terms of warfare, despite the fact that the analogy between personal and collective violence is flawed.  I think the question suffers from a number of debilitating assumptions that are almost always unconscious to the challenger.  There's no such thing as a self-interpreting situation so let's get at the assumptions of the question ...

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...

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.)  ...

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 ...

Saturday is October 18th, the Feast of St Luke the Physician.  It is the Feast Day on which members of my religious order (the Order of St Luke) annually reaffirm our vows.  Among those vows, is one I'm constantly challenged into which I might live -- namely, that "I will live for the Church of Jesus Christ". That's a difficult vow to live into.   It's difficult because I live in America.   America , of course, names that historical nation-state of practices born in blood.  Human  life was sacrificed -- blood was spilt -- for it.  The blood of the solider consecrates and baptizes the flag and the nation.  And because blood trumps everything, because there is no holier and more sacred thing than human life, the flag and the nation is the most sacred thing in the world to an American.  I experience this viscerally whenever I'm asked to stand at an athletic event for the national anthem.  All around me there are grey haired men, many w...

I'm a pacifist.  No surprise there to my regular readers.  But I'm a pacifist only because I'm a Christian.  Following Jesus makes all the difference in the world.  It is the difference of my life.  That said, I'm never all that shocked when being a pacifist is seen as being ungrateful.  The line usually goes like this:  "You've received so much freedom at the hands of the American defense of those freedoms by violence.  How dare you question it?" I'm not surprised because such is the way the world works.   My undergraduate thesis was Christians as the Romans Saw Them:  Textual and Epigraphical Evidences .  In it, I advanced a thesis that's easily enough demonstrated:  The early Christian practice of "holy ingratitude" was the primary reason the Romans hated the Christians.  And it explains the escalating social Roman pressures exerted upon Christians that exploded in persecution.   What is the practice of "holy ingra...

Yesterday, someone challenged me to articulate how I, personally, contribute to healing the festering wounds in Ferguson.  Either I contribute to the healing, or stop the "posturing" of hastag theology.   I think his challenge, though, misunderstands the nature of violence against African Americans (particularly men).  This isn't just a Ferguson issue.  It could happen here; it does  happen here. The ministry of reconciliation given to the church is given to the whole  church.  Lower income (predominately black) communities often find police brutality in stronger numbers.  Particularly where, like Ferguson, there's a predominately white police force.  Police misconduct names those communities.  I've seen it here, where I live.  And when you see it long enough, rage  at injustice  names what you see.  My interlocutor yesterday said it all comes down to personal choice and personal responsibility.  But as Kent Gree...

"There is neither Jew nor Greek ... for we are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3.28). Tonight, this image popped up in my Facebook feed.  Nearly every day over the past month, something of this sort pops up.  And each time it does, my heart grieves.  So many of my sisters and brothers have been taken in by a bad theology, that informs an even worse international policy.  They're duped into supporting terrorism and oppression under the worst "biblical" guise possible -- under the name of God.  I grew up hearing that Israel was "God's chosen people" (code for "God's favorite country").  That Israel was the center of all God's activity with humanity.  Not only were they "God's chosen people", but failing to support them would find us "cursed".  This mentality has led so much of American Christianity into a blind love affair with the modern nation-state called Israel , because they see this land and its peo...

The idea pervades our nation mythos  about Memorial Day:  These "sainted dead" soldiers "gave their lives" as a sacrifice for "our freedom".  And we often hear this in connection to Jesus' sacrifice.  "Greater love has no one than that they lay down a life for a friend."  Or, in the more blatant bumper sticker that I see on occasion:   Thing is, at least from the perspective of the New Testament, that's a false analogy .  Or, to put the terms more starkly:  It's a lie .   Jesus made the final sacrifice for all.  No other "sacrifice" -- even that of an American solider -- can come close to offering the freedom of the cross.  "For by the death of Christ we are set free ..." (Ephesians 1.7).   At issue here is what we mean by freedom. Stopping folks on the street, if I asked, "What is freedom ?", I'm pretty sure of get a standard answer:  "It's the ability to do anything you want without anyone ...

Several years ago now, I was asked to pray a prayer as part of a community service for Memorial Day.  Standing on the county courthouse steps, in front of that county's war memorial, I mourned the dead and prayed for peace.  I confessed the sins that lead to the deaths of so many.  Once I'd finished praying, someone read the line from John's Gospel (15.13):  "Greater love has no man than this".  I'm always moved when I stand at war memorials.  And yet the awe I feel when I stand at any  war memorial is just as quickly disturbed by another realization:   The brilliant Great War poet Wilfred Owen, in "Dulce Et Decorum Est",  bitterly called it "the old lie" (the translation is "It is sweet and right / To die for your country").  Nor should it be overlooked that Owen took his famous line from an ode by Horace, the Latin poet, the Laureate of Rome -- Rome, the great pagan empire and war machine, one of whose procurators, known as Pont...