The Little Friar

I never set out to be me.  If I were to be honest about the course of my life, I would have to admit that it's only been in the living of it that I can look back now, and begin to articulate that the things that have mattered (and matter now) aren't nearly the things I would have thought at 18 would  matter.  Who I am now isn't who I set out to be.  Because of Jesus.  Who I am, I am, not because I set out and made choices that landed me in this time and place.  I can't say, with Ben Franklin or Fredrick Douglass, that I'm a "self made man".  Because, who I am, I am, only because of Jesus.  Last night Kendra and I were talking about a few things that matter to us.  We were talking about our future, and the thought of a possible job application that makes me do less, with less of the financial gain.  "Would you really be okay with that?" And without hesitation I responded, "As long as we're eating, housed, comfortable, and contributing to ...

I had planned a really long blog today on the Bible and homosexuality.  I am, after all, thinking quite a bit lately about sexuality as a Christian theologian in light of a possible upcoming dialogue on homosexuality.   I had planned to point out all the ways in which the Bible has nothing  to say about modern homosexuality as a sin.  I had planned to talk about why "sin" isn't even a good biblical category for dealing with human sexuality.  I had planned to develop my notion of a "tragic" theology of sin, instead.  But all that will have to wait for another day.  Instead, this morning, I've been thinking about what consequences Jesus has for thinking about sex.  I don't mean what Jesus says  about sex (shocking as what he actually  says may be).  No, I mean thinking about who Jesus is , what he reveals  about being human, may mean for thinking Christianly about sex.  First, let's be honest.  Sex -- whether homosexual...

I lost a friendship last week.   Self-esteem -- or something like it -- killed that friendship.  Now, I spend a lot  of time in ministry reaching out to my sisters who suffer psychologically because they think they're not "enough".  Lots of women suffer from poor self-esteem.  And that grieves my heart.  I think it's a genuine spiritual  problem that there's so much psychological  dysfunction.  But let me quickly add, that's not  the kind of self-esteem that killed my friendship.  The kind of self-esteem I'm talking about -- the kind that has the power to destroy friendships -- is the violent  self-esteem that gets touted as healthy in our culture.  The kinds of self-esteem I'm talking about are those that create a  rush of pride or envy or resentment, depending on how we work them out.  None of those are particularly healthy, perhaps especially the pride.   Most of us create, build up, and maintai...

I wrote recently that the psalms are the most significant part of my prayer life.  Which brings me to explore why Psalm 62.9 is why I still go to church (" The children of Adam are emptiness, /  the children of men are a fake; /  they are set on the scales together, /  and emptiness is their weight"). There are people who say that religion is a crutch, and I've never taken offence at that description.  There have been times when I've gone to church feeling the need for personal forgiveness or comfort or strength or whatever.  But the older I get -- I'm not very old of course, but I'm not quite as young as I used to be either -- the more I feel that my faith is not primarily a personal thing but a way of sharing the common lot with everybody else. I go to church sometimes not needing comfort for my own private griefs but seeking consolation for the slow unfolding trainwreck that is called human history.  I go to church sometimes hoping to find forgivene...

One of the most insidious spiritual temptations is authenticity.  In our culture, we prize "being yourself" over everything else.  Thing is, such authenticity often fails to recognize all the ways in which self-deception  actually work.  I know myself well enough to know I don't trust myself to be as authentic as I'd like to believe I can be.  In fact, the Bible warns quite often how pervasive a problem such self-deception can be:  Quite probably the clearest in 1 John 1.8 ("If  we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us").  But there's also things like Psalm 36.1-4, Jeremiah 2.34-35, 17.9-10, Luke 11.42-52.  Make no doubt about it, when it comes to sin, there are a variety of insidious ways it can take hold.  So I don't trust authenticity  language.  It's too thin and brittle.  It breaks when you give it much use.  When I hear others attempt to defend their sin with the language...

Time and time again, I hear folks resorting to the notion of free will  as part of their account of Christian faith.  And my problems with this are myriad.  So let me attempt to lay them out here in as clear a way as I can.  First, there's the deeply theological  issue.  I don't think anthropology (what it means to be human, in this case with a free will) is all that fine a place to begin when talking about God.   It may have worked well for Feuerbach and Freud (not really, but we'll at least pretend), but it won't do biblically.   Why would you build any account of Christian faith upon a non-biblical, philosophically contested, scientifically disputed, and perennially controversial anthropocentric abstraction?   A theological reliance upon free will seems sketchy to me, like building on quicksand.  Personally, I'd like to see theology come out right because we are getting  God  right rather than getting humans  right. ...

I've spent a good deal of my life dealing with the notion of "mental illness".  It's not a secret that I'm on the Autism Spectrum.  That diagnosis alone comes with a host of attendant diagnoses of various additional disorders.  So I'm not one to downplay any particular diagnosis.  I know the suffering involved. That said, I'm struck by how often a diagnosis becomes a socially controlling thing in our lives. Enter Thomas Szasz . For those of you unfamiliar with Szasz's work, Thomas Szasz was the radical and iconoclastic psychiatrist who spent most of his life attacking the profession of psychiatry by arguing that "mental illness" didn't exist.  Rather, Szasz argued, "mental illness" was a social construct created so that society could use it as a form of social control via the medical and legal professions.  According to Szasz, mental illness was a myth as he wrote in his famous book The Myth of Mental Illness , pub...

With the election of Francis I, there's been a good deal of talk about "humility" in the news.  That word -- humility -- conjures up notions of self-esteem (or, rather, lack thereof) as the principal definition.  For lots of folks, humility is short-hand for thinking less of one's self.  This is a problem, especially for women in our culture.  It's yet another way of controlling and manipulating folks into submission (often assumed to be a negative thing).  So is there a way to define humility in such a way so as to remove the power-plays and manipulation while promoting something (what the Bible calls "edification")?  I think there is.  First, I want to call attention to a little known work that is going to inform how I proceed here.  Tex Sample's White Soul is one of those books that has received less attention from serious theology types.  And that's an impoverishment of our work.  I grew up listening to country music.  E...

I wrote the other day about how our lack of "good enough" is destructive in our society -- destructive, particularly, of our humanity.  Our drive for excellence actually betrays a delusion anthropology, a false conception of who we are.  Specifically, I argued that our success ethos presumes that we are gods rather than finite creatures.  The success ethos -- believing we are gods -- presumes that we have inexhaustible resources of time, energy and talent that can be leveraged into greater and greater success, improvement, betterment and excellence. But we aren't gods and we don't have inexhaustible resources.  We are finite.  We have limits.  Only so much energy.  Only so many hours in the day. That is one of the lessons of Lent. Today, I want to expand on that idea, and explore how our culture of shame and lack of vulnerability lead us to feelings of worthlessness.  To feeling that we aren't enough. Ours is what Brown calls in...

I'd written earlier as part of a post:  "So it doesn't take a genius to see that God doesn't like empires".  Enshrined quite early in the biblical narrative, we read this (Genesis 1.26-27): Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. There's been a great deal of ink spilt in theological literature over what this "image of God" might be.  I want to offer a political theological reading. Also enshrined within the biblical narrative is a Christological definition of "the image of God".  The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created:  things in heav...