The Little Friar

I've been mulling over some theological ideas about singing karaoke for over a week now.  After suffering through a bad case of cluster headaches for nearly 24 hours -- a round that has included some new, not cool symptoms -- I wanted to record where I'm going with this.  So ... At our wedding, we had karaoke, and I noticed a few things.  Karaoke is a practice of vulnerability and community.  You take a risk when you get up in front of strangers to sing a song.  And yet, the quality of your singing doesn't matter.  What matters is jumping in and taking a risk.  Being exposed and vulnerable is what is welcomed.  That's what gets you the embrace, just getting up there and participating.  Being an exposed and vulnerable human being.  That's what I'm calling "the gospel of karaoke".  Karaoke is a model of the Kingdom of God.  Church, I think, should look more like a Karaoke night at a bar.  We should be willing to be exposed a...

Over past weeks, I've been thinking a great deal about evil -- how it's perpetrated in our daily relationships, specifically.  How is it that we come to be some violent to one another?  And why does this violence take a myriad of forms (from outright abuse to more subtle passive-aggressive pot-shots)? In the process of these reflections, I've come to notice how prevalent the language of evil  is in our dealing with the violence.  And how we often couch that language in religious terms.  So what I want to offer here is a two-fold reflection. (1) I want to explore why the myth of "pure evil" just won't work and how the reality of evil's source is even more violent than we often recognize.  And (2) what all this talk about "evil" says, theologically.  To the Myth of Pure Evil, then.  When we think of evil , we tend to use a schema with three parts.  These are: 1.  Evil is intentional harm. 2.  The perpetrators of the harm are sadistic;...

As a minister and college prof, I've often been asked advice on drinking.   And I sometimes am put in a tough position in responding.  For example, A few  years ago I was on a panel discussing "good decisions" out in front of Spring Break.  Alcohol was a major topic.  At the time, according to the Student Handbook, no student, even those of legal drinking age, was allowed to drink alcohol, on or off campus.  Obviously, there was no way to enforce this policy.  Yet we knew that plenty of students would be drinking over Spring Break.  Hence the need for the panel.  But how were we to address this reality?  Because if we openly admitted the reality of students' drinking this admission would seem to condone violating the code of conduct in the Student Handbook.  That is, if you said, "Hey, we know many of you are going to drink, so if you do here's some advice ..." you would be seen as encouraging rule-breaking, or at least going easy o...

This time of year, one of the more interesting ideas that captivates my theological imagination is the presence of all those monsters in our culture -- zombies and werewolves and such -- alongside people like witches.  I've been thinking lately about all these monsters.  And today I want to round out this under appreciated triduum -- Dia de Los Muertos, All Saints and All Souls -- with a theological meditation of monsters, hospitality and "the wicked", in which I hope to engage in a more sustained argument in favor of Halloween for Christians.  First, what exactly is a monster ?   The word "monster" has its origins in the Latin  monstrum , meaning "omen" or "warning".  The question really is, then, as a sign and omen, what are monsters warning us about? When it comes to traits of our monsters -- traits shared across time and cultures -- the list becomes rather telling: Aggressive Gigantic Man-eating Malevolent Hybrids Gruesome Atavistic Power...

I often lament the role scientism -- that belief that science alone provides clear and guiding answers to all reality -- plays in our society.  And since I went in defense of Halloween this year, some have challenged me that calling for a re-enchantment of death is denying the devotion to good science (as opposed to scientism) that I also often do.  So let me offer a bit of cultural criticism here I order to set out -- yet again -- how I think reading the Bible (or more broadly re-enchanting the world's mysteries) and engaging in good science are tensions  to one another, not contradictions.  And let me begin at the movies.  I'm not a big horror movie guy.  But Kendra loves them and I love her so I watch them occasionally.  And here's something I've been noticing:  science offers all the explanations, the metanarratives, for our movies these days.  Take vampire and zombie movies, for example.  The classic vampire genre cast vampires as e...

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 physica...

Sometimes there are passages in the Bible that come to dominate our imaginations that we return to them again and again for fodder in thinking about being Christian.  1 Corithians 12.21-25 is one of those passages for me.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!"  And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!"  On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.  And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment.  But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.  I want to focus on that last phrase "that there should be no division in the body".  The Greek word for division is  schisma , where we get...

The most important thing to being Christian -- which also makes it the strangest to most folks -- is living the gospel as if it were true.  I try to live my life in such a way that the story of Jesus becomes my own story.  If you want to talk about my life's successes, you should -- in the end -- be unable to tell it without telling the good news of God's reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ.  Thing is, that story isn't a success story. It's a story of failures.   In the end, Jesus' story -- and therefore my story -- is about  one who loses in a way that is eloquent and beautiful because it has a consistent integrity with the sublime vision of scripture.  It is called  grace . Living this story is about becoming a beautiful failure. 

Kendra and I celebrated our Christian marriage yesterday.  It is but the first celebration of daily celebrations hereafter, but I want to offer some reflections of lessons I've learnt along the way to that celebration yesterday.  Christian marriage not only creates a new family -- it unites already existing ones.  Sometimes those families come with burdens that push up against the very boundaries of being Christian  in ways we -- or at least I  -- never appreciated until the past few weeks.  First, I must say I'm a Christian.  That confession shapes and molds -- is shaped and molded by -- a number of practices, not just intellectual affirmations.  Among those practices is the practice of reconciliation .  "God was in Christ, reconciling  the world to himself" (2 Corithians 5.17).  The practice of reconciliation is extending the graceful forgiveness, respect of an for the Other, kindness and humility toward those who despise and abus...

I hear quite a bit of talk about karma  these days, from all different sorts of Christians.  Karma , of course, is the notion that the Universe (or God, or Satan, or someone cosmic) keeps score.  That for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.  It's a kind of "eye for an eye" logic writ rather large.  In karma, we think folks get what they have coming to them.  Somehow -- eventually -- so the logic goes -- folks who've been cruel or mean or unloving will find their cruelty coming back to roost.  In karma, atonement is written into the universe as a spiritual law of investment and return.  It's a moral calculus of accounting that says pain is reaped by those, ultimately, who inflict it.  Thing is, my moral and theological imagination is honed by Jesus and the Scriptures.  So I'm not so sure  karma  really is the law of the universe.  The word I hear isn't karma but  grace.  Grace  turns karma o...

Yesterday, another school shooting.  Over the weekend, a 2-year-old girl shot herself.  Both of these break my heart.  They also call for a little prophetic truth-telling.  Of course, folks will say, "That's just the way the world is".  But I'm not so sure.  For starters, even if "that's the way the world is" today, I'm not willing to resign myself to tomorrow, too.  Other than car accidents, more children are killed by guns than anything else.  One child/teen dies every three hours.  7 die every day.  That's 50 in a week.  From gun violence. Over the past 50 years, we've lost three times more children to gun deaths (160,000) than those who've died in war (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq:  52,820).   It doesn't have to be this way.  Actually, "the world"  doesn't work this way.  In one year, gun violence accounted for 27 deaths in Australia, 59 in England, 60 in Spain, 160 in Canada, and ... 10,177 in the US....

Yesterday, with news that an agreement between Congressional leaders and the President had been reached to end the partial government shutdown and raise the debt limit, someone asked me a question:  "Who do you think was/is the greatest American president and why?" My gut response was quick:  "That all depends on what you call great ". That's my gut response because I'm a Christian.  I believe in telling the truth.  And in my tradition -- the tradition of Old Testament prophets and Jesus, the tradition of Christian prophets like John and Paul -- there's a very different definition of great  when it comes to politics.  Prophets challenge the economic and political powers-that-be, particularly those that bring oppression and destruction.  How often our culture wants to pervert the book of Revelation and ignore its connection of economic power with idolatry.  A connection that includes a specific political challenge:  Jesus is lord, not Rome. ...

Bonhoeffer's sermon on marriage is a particularly beautiful selection that requires folks to think theologically  about Christian  marriage.  This morning -- as I head into two marriages in as many weeks (and one of them, my own!) -- I begin reflecting on what it means to talk about Christian marriage. Of course, it's easy to respond with trite, romantic concepts that reflect the culture more than they do my faith.  That's the one thing I want to avoid.  Instead, I want to offer a fresh reading of the NT that refocuses marriage away from the "order of creation" theme that Bonhoeffer used in his Ethics  and toward the biblical notion of grace.  In other words, I want to ground marriage in Jesus, not in nature.  Covenant, not in procreation.   And I want to begin in an odd place:  We  Christians need to recover our identity as  Gentiles.   This is important for a few different reasons.  First, this recovery ...