The Little Friar

Today, I stopped watching the news.  It's too easy to remain distracted -- which is what the advertisers want! -- from the real work of Christians in the world.  Therefore I will no longer watch the news. It has been a heavy burden and has stripped me of my ability to think theologically, to love Christianly ... I keep getting messages from people who care deeply about how we organize our life together.  Some are certain I have more I can say (preferably, to their mind, in a new book).  Others who are certain I already say too much (most likely, the wrong things) about the nature of that common life in America.  All of these folks are, deep down in the souls, good folks who so desperately want us to be better than we are now.  They're despondent. I really don't have a lot of wisdom about what to say these days.  It's difficult enough for me to love within the confines of our local community -- for all sorts of reasons.  I'm harboring enough...

Joel Fitzpatrick's Between Us Guys: Life Changing Conversations for Dads & Sons is an amazing little book (just around 110 pages) that makes those difficult conversations with your sons possible.  Fitzpatrick helps those conversations along by fostering relationships -- each chapter encourages conversations in the midst of some related activity -- that center on Jesus. For Christians, then, Fitzpatrick has given sons and dads a great pastoral gift:  The Gospel that transforms not only lives but relationships.  It's a quite good book -- and funny! -- that walks readers through a range of topics (e.g., friendship, generosity, disappointment, to money, sex, and play).  You explore how each us good, how we mess each up, and the difference Jesus makes in transforming the mess into something more beautiful than we might ever imagine. I cannot recommend this book too highly! _____________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchang...

Shelby Abbott's Pressure Points:  A Guide to Navigating Student Stress brings some solid wisdom for those graduating seniors who are about to embark on the next journey of their lives -- into college. Pressure Points is written with that age group in mind, with practical advice, humor, and the best guide of all, Jesus, to navigate that journey through some of the toughest terrain faced by first year students:  Relationships, anxiety and college life.  Each chapter closes with questions for reflection to help students probe a little deeper in the jungle.  Which makes Pressure Points best read in groups, not just by isolated individuals. College life is hard to transition, but Abbott has given a great gift for students.  ____________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Nathan Finochio's Hearing God:  Eliminate Myths, Encounter Meaning begins with a question to which nearly every Christian can relate:  "Have you ever felt like you're just not as 'spiritual' as everyone else?" (page 1). It's a book filled with the kinds of honesty that is necessary to actually hearing God.  Things like:  "God isn't the problem when it comes to hearing Him; we are" (page 12).  Humility is necessary -- learning the practices that put us in the right place to listen and grow. And I appreciate Finochio's honesty.  God is interested in speaking to us because he wants to transform us into the image of Jesus -- not because he wants us to get the best parking spot.  When we learn to identify the various distractions in our world, we can learn what silence and humility can produce. And Finochio ends the way he begins:  "God speaks to us in ways we would never expect. Only humility lets us hear Him when He does" (...

Recently, someone asked my wife what I was like as a kid. As some of you know and others may well have surmised, I have autism.  I was diagnosed in 1995 -- the first year the diagnosis was recognized by the APA -- with asperger's syndrome.  To meet me, you probably wouldn't know immediately that I live my life on the autism spectrum.  But spend maybe 20 minutes with me and chances are you'll see little clues:  The difficulty in making and maintaining eye contact in conversation, the overwhelming need to sound professorial when it's uncalled for, my stimming with my hands, etc.  I set out some years ago to write a memoir about growing up as an undiagnosed high functioning autistic child in the late 1970s and early 80s.  But that memoir never got very far off the ground.  So I thought I'd take some of that material and turn it into a very brief blog series -- a bit more personal, I'll grant -- than a lot of my other writing here.  But I promis...

It's no secret, I think, that Kendra is the braver of the two in this marriage.  She has the courage and fortitude to endure in an occupation and career that would more commonly be called "male":  Law enforcement.  That's why we make the annual trek to CrimeCon:  That annual convention dedicated to learning skills and hearing reports of various aspects of "catching the criminal".  This year, CrimeCon has been in New Orleans.  I'm probably the last person you'd expect at CrimeCon in New Orleans.  Upon our arrival, we visited the Museum of Death (not nearly as overwhelming as its name suggests), visited the Bourbon Street and the French Quarter and found our way to one of the local restaurants for my obligatory tastes of seafood (a Po'Boy's sandwich of fried gator).  That was an experience the 17 year old me would have loved, but the forty-something in me is glad it was a one-off. Then CrimeCon began.  On the first day, I've heard...

In the novel Gilead , a grandfather writes long letters to his grandson.  He is a very old pastor, and has learned stuff that it's important to know, and important for his grandson to learn.  Here's one of the bottom line lessons of a good life: This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me and which his father told him.  When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you.  So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation. Jesus taught some astonishing things.  Like this:  "Forasmuch as you did it for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it for me".  Whether food for the hungry, company for the lonely, clothes and dignity for the poor, care and protection for the vulnerable -- in each encounter with others, "What is the Lord asking of me, here, now?"  Answer:  Treat this stran...

There is an overwhelming and pervasive sense of anxiety in our society.  Of course, it hasn't merely trickled into the Church; the waters have rushed through our doors.  There are lots of reasons for the anxiety.  A great resource for reading about some of those reasons for anxiety in our culture is Walter Brueggemann's Reality, Grief, Hope:  Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks.   As I've reflected on my cultural context and the intersection with the Church in America, there's a strand woven through the very fabric of our lives which compounds our anxiety:  The myth of perpetual progress.  (Incidentally, though not insignificantly, this myth leads to violent practices, like "evangelistic" movements called Crusades which utilize manipulation and coercive techniques.) There are lots of reasons for the propagation of this myth, especially because it appeared to be true for so many years in our borders.  The proliferation of technology and medical science ...

I was asked to provide a list of resources I've found helpful in thinking and shaping issues concerning racism and privilege.  I've added resources that also deal with contextual theology because we all read from a place, a position, a framework.  Privilege is often assumed and is typically hidden from our eyes, especially when we benefit from those systems.  As such, it's helpful to be made aware of our position and its underlying assumptions. Many of these titles have been very formative for me.  Some of the ones I will list have been good to read just to hear dissenting voices from my own.  I don't necessarily agree with every position taken in every book, but I've learned something from each one and therefore offer them as helpful starting points to further conversation and learning.  I will also try to categorize each book so that they can be held together with other books that approach privilege, racism, and contextual theology through a particular ...

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about preaching -- particularly as I've worked through sections of Willimon's commentary on Acts and Oden's commentary on the Pastorals .  Here are some notes I've made in those reflections. Preaching is an audacious act.  It is strange that a person might claim to speak about God.  It is exponentially presumptuous to proclaim, "Thus saith the Lord".  It is an audacious act.  Yet, when we speak under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it is a faithful act.  And, it says far more about God's character and nature than it does about the character and nature of the human mouthpiece -- after all, God spoke to Balaam through an ass.  God speaks, which is to say, God acts and interacts directly with and in this world.  But, God always empowers and acts through agents.  That God entrusts us with such a great gift suggests that God is less concerned about getting something accomplished but is concerned ...

Nearly 25 years ago, the late Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz wrote a book for evangelicals that defends egalitarianism and that all aspects of church leadership and all Church offices and ordinations should be open to women.  Grenz's book, Women in the Church:  A Biblical Theology of Women in Ministry , is most helpful for evangelicals that would normally convinced by complimentarian books including John Piper and Wayne Grudem's Biblical Manhood and Womanhood because Grenz speaks "evangelical".  Grenz approaches the Bible with the same presuppositions about the Bible as Piper and Grudem but comes to the opposite position as they do.  Grenz is willing to don the term "egalitarian" but qualifies it as not an abolition of gender but instead affirm that men and women are reciprocals and to prohibit women from the church only results in an unintended limitation on men in the church as well. Grenz summarizes his position well at the end of the introduction t...

Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua had a very dramatic effect on my life when I was a seminary student.  If there were any one individual who might have been used by the Holy Spirit to make me a Roman Catholic, it would have been the Blessed Newman.  So I seem to always come around again and again to the things he said and find him still a wonderful conversation partner about the kinds of things I think. In reading through his sermon, " Christ Upon the Waters--Part 2 ", I find the following: Most men in this country like opinions to be brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for them.  They like to be waited on, they like to be consulted, for they like to be their own centre.  As great men have their slaves or their body-servants for every need of the day, so, in an age like this, when every one reads and has a voice in public matters, it is indispensable that they should have persons to provide them with their ideas, the cl...

Jeremy Armstrong's Impolite Questions for a Generous God is an edgy, sometimes surprising, quest for answers by a guide who has learned to ask the often-unasked questions of faith.  This book is surprising in all that ways that a good journey into new territory is surprising.  Readers will be left asking their own questions and searching for fresh answers after learning from Armstrong which are the fruitful quests and which ones aren't. What you find here is a beautiful way of asking tough questions of a very gracious God.  And that way takes you through  art, film, literature and (especially) music.  All of which make Impolite Questions a refreshing book.  And when you come to the end of the book, you'll rediscover the joy in relishing questions over answers.  Because by the end of this book you'll find that God has been with you all the time, whispering just over your shoulder, that the questions you have are made better by learning from Armstro...

Eberhard Arnold's God's Revolution:  Justice, Community, and the Coming Kingdom is a collection of brief essays on nearly every aspect of Christian discipleship for a countercultural church.  Eberhard Arnold, pastor of the Christian community of the Bruderhof (at the Rhon Mountains in Germany), wrote these essays between 1917 to 1933.  During the period when Nazism began to take shape in Germany, Arnold's vision of a practical faith committed to non-violence and peacemaking, full community of goods, the proclamation of the gospel and lifelong faithfulness in marriage. What you find in God's Revolution is a pastoral vision of the Kingdom of God in the world where real disciples live. _______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write.  Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt.  Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe. The list grows, as does the debt.  Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, ...

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing.  I learned it from my grandmother.  She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind. Into my heart, into my heart, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus; Come in today, come in to stay, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again. A Sinner's Prayer.  At Sunday School they were always warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts.  In another song I remember from those days, the human heart was compared to a castle where Jesus lives: Joy is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart, For the King is in residence there. It seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart.  And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned.  Our most fervent wish was tha...

I learned that love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting. Our beginning was when we were made, but the love in which he made us never had beginning. In it we have our beginning. All this we shall see in God forever. May Jesus grant this. --Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love Julian's Revelations of Divine Love is among the half dozen or so classic texts of Christian Spirituality that I've read and pondered regularly for years ( this is the edition I most recommend).  I first discovered this beautiful text in 1992.  Since then, I've probably read it at least once a year.  As with the other five or six texts -- call them my devotional canon.  Such reading isn't informational but formational...

There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God's reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world ...  It is a denial of God's revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be 'Christian' without being 'worldly', or [to] wish to be worldly without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ. -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics , p. 58 This quote raises for me, as so often in my reading of Bonhoeffer, troubling questions about approaches to mission that tend to see Christ as present in the church, absent from the world, and therefore the Church's mission to take Christ to a needy world.  Actually, Christ is already there and the Church needs to catch up with him, and discover ways of incarnating, embodying and offering the love of the living God in Christ through practices that are themselves Christlike -- such as peacemaking, brokering reconciliations, expressing imaginative gestures of redemptive love, acts of mercy and compassion as contr...

Words are performative deeds.  What these words perform is our character. The letter of James has some wise warnings about teaching and the qualities needed in a good teacher.  The Jewish Wisdom background of James becomes obvious when, more than once, he urges the importance of wisdom, maturity and responsibility in the ways we use words. Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.  We all stumble in many ways.  Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check ... Who is wise and understanding among you?  Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.  But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.  Such "wisdom" does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.  For where you have envy and s...