The Little Friar

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 phys...

  Mark Lloyd Taylor's So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching  is, itself, a creative, artful, and playful account of one year -- from November 2016 to November 2017 -- preaching "fill in" sermons at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Seattle.  A compilation of 12 sermons (one for each month of that period), this selection comes from within the liturgical life of a particular congregation -- usually in the morning or evening Sunday eucharistic liturgy.  Taylor intended those sermons to be experiments in preaching that followed the "Godly Play" curriculum idea -- whereby children's religious education is conducted along the lines of Montessori kinesthetic involvement.   Taylor provides not only the text of the sermon selections but also the biblical text for the chosen day as well as deep theological reflections as a sort of background for the sermon.  Those additions make So Fill Our Imaginations  a wonderful littl...

Warren Carter's Jesus and the Empire of God: Reading the Gospels in the Roman Empire  is a marvelously accessible book that chronicles the various ways in which the Gospel accounts of Jesus -- crucified on a Roman cross by a Roman governor -- critique and expose the structures and practices of the Roman world in the lives of the followers of Jesus.  Here, Carter raises some key questions (in the form of the Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter) for those of us who read these ancient texts as "good news" for our own world.   What difference, for example, does it make to read the accounts of Jesus' life and ministry from the vantage point of an elite in Roman society as opposed to one who suffers under economic (or even military) oppression at the hands of Roman military might?  How might the various social structures of Roman society have impacted the way in which early Christians shared the story of Jesus' life?   And much more:  C...

Plough's most recent book, An Inconvenient Gospel , brings a selection of the most important writings of Clarence Jordan to a new generation.   I first heard of Jordan as an undergraduate in the mid-1990s at a small Baptist liberal arts college.  Jordan is perhaps best known for his founding of the interracial Christian community Koinonia Farm in Georgia in 1942.  A farmer and Baptist minister by vocation, Jordan translated Scripture into the vernacular of the Southern United States, and interpreted them within the context of the racial South.  But Jordan's writings, here compiled in chronological order, demonstrate how significant his message was and remains in 21st century America.   This little book is indeed about "the inconvenient Gospel" of Jesus Christ, one that confronts and challenges our own cultural context in fresh and vital ways.  Jordan, for example, endured threats from the Klu Klux Klan, while continually pointing to the radical na...

I first learned of the Bibliotheca  project in 2014, when the project first appeared on Kickstarter.  The minimalist idea behind the project -- produce the 1901 American Standard Version (updated) as a book, where paragraphs take over where chapter and verse distinctions have been the norm -- is a beautiful idea.  And the product, by the appearance of the New Testament volume (the last in a five volume collection), is meticulously and amazingly made.   This edition's quality is without peer.  Smith-sewn binding, pure-cotton bookcloth and ribbon bookmark, acid-free paper.  Initially, the project's price tag kept me from investing; this volume proves that price tag is well-earned.  It feels great, smells amazing, and easily lays flat. What's more, this edition uses two fonts which Adam Lewis Greene designed specifically for this project.  The text face, Katharos, is tastefully seriffed and easy to read.  And the title face, Katharos A...

J. Webb Mealy's Bad Place:  Or, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Hell, But Were Afraid to Ask  is a book I so wanted to read and enjoy.  The thesis of the book is one with which I agree:  Christians have so misunderstood the New Testament notion of "hell" as "eternal conscious post-mortem punishment", a notion that requires a drastic re-reading from the biblical text in order to sort out.  What I found in this book, though, is a clear thesis -- a correct thesis -- in search of a depth of scholarly treatment.  There just simply isn't much to this book.   The writing is mediocre.  The conclusions are overdrawn from the evidence presented.  Too often the author stacks the deck in favor of his own conclusions without the clear evidence to support those conclusions.  This is sad, because I think the evidence is there in the biblical text.   What this book ultimately needs, then, is a much better editor, to help t...

Sam Hastra and Sam Cocar's Practicing the Monastic Disciplines:  Finding Deep Spirituality in a Shallow World  is not what readers would most likely expect from its title.  This isn't an academic tome on classic monasticism.  Instead, it's a very practical, very pastoral, extremely modest handbook on becoming a follower of Jesus in a world so insistent we follow other leaders.   In this delightful little book, the authors work together to craft short chapters that highlight how the desert mothers and fathers -- those Christians who lived and prayed in the mountains of the Mediterranean East in the fourth century -- "wrestled with many of the same issues we wrestle with today".  These women and men were not attempting to earn their salvation (as, sadly, most Protestants envision them).  Instead, they were working out that salvation in a divisive and distraught world.  These were soldiers of Christ who fought the principalities and powers of th...

David Ritchie's Why do the nations rage?  The demonic origin of nationalism  gives us a timely account of the biblical connections between "the nations", "the powers and principalities" and "idolatry".  With a pastoral heart and a keen theological mind, Ritchie writes a book that every Christian in America needs to read.  He explores what is perhaps the problem of life in America for faithful followers of Jesus Christ:  The idolatry of Nationalism. The biblical realism of Ritchie's account is one that theological conservatives will find speaks a language they can understand.  And the crisp theological critique of what St Paul calls "the principalities and powers of this world" echoes the biblical drama of salvation that centers on Jesus Christ -- in a way that modern theological liberals will find engaging.  In short, the religious fervor that betrays so much modern American nationalism will find in this book a deep and abiding critique t...

Jason Porterfield's Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace throughout Holy Week  focuses on peace issues of Holy Week in a way that most books about that highly significant week do not.  He takes the lament of Jesus, recorded in Luke 19.41-44 as "the interpretative key to Holy Week" (page 21).  Thus, Porterfield asserts, "We desperately need to recover the radical vision of peacemaking that Jesus embodied throughout Holy Week" (page 23). In chapters two through seven, Porterfield describes what happened on each day from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and also lists "lessons in peacemaking" from Jesus' actions and words on each of those days.  The final chapter deals with Saturday and Easter Sunday under the title "Peace Be with You".  Porterfield concludes the chapter, and the book, by addressing his readers directly.  He encourages us to consider how we may implement any insight we've gained through reading Fight Like Jesus .  Since the...

James Calvin Davis' American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture offers some reflections -- most in the form of sermons -- on one of the most vexing questions that has plagued my own ministry:  Do we want the parish to celebrate secular holidays as part of our liturgy?   It's never been a simple question, precisely because American culture is so pervasive.  We live and breathe it for seven days a week -- and we don't leave that air when we walk into a worship service on Sundays.  So not acknowledging secular holidays (holy-days) is a difficult task, and one likely to be met with lots of resistance in the parish.  Trust me, I know.  I've lived that resistance for decades.  Like most other pastors, I've insisted that the Christian liturgy is reserved for Christian holy days.  We have a Christian calendar that follows the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (including Jesus' continued life in his Church), thus i...

I'm hearing a lot of talk about "thoughts and prayers".  And then I see push back in a variety of ways -- heck, I'm among those pushing back. I also think most of the criticism directed at "thoughts and prayers" isn't religious but political.  And as political criticism, you can be sure I sympathize with the objections -- I've even posted a few.  I hate American civil religion as much as my atheist and agnostic friends.  Specifically, those, like me, objecting to the uselessness of "thoughts and prayers" are directing those criticisms toward political leaders who send statements of concern, condolences and solidarity out on social media and who are perceived as taking no material, political action to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.  For example, politicians send out "thoughts and prayers" to the families of Uvalde but take no meaningful action on gun control.  Yeah -- they make my blood boil. The problem here,...

Pam Urfer's Candlelight Revolution  provides a view to daily life in the Cold War.  When the Soviet Union began to crumble -- with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 -- the effects of the suffocation and extermination of human thriving that had named the period came into a clearer view for those in the West.  But for those in Germany and the Soviet Union, life had been named mean and hard for a long time.  Urfer captures the struggles of that daily life in a compelling narrative. ___________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this brief review.

Some years ago, I attended the funeral mass for a child of a family I barely knew-- a child who had died as the result of parental neglect.  Most of my readers know that I barely suffer from the urge to appear "religious", and hardly ever utter empty words.  So sometimes I'm inevitably tempted to slightly modify the written prayers of the BCP.   Such was this occasion.  When we reached that point in the mass when the congregation prays the Lord's Prayer:  ... and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those against us. I added the words, "The bastards". I didn't realize at the time that I'd said it aloud, but the lady sitting next to me tugged my sleeve and firmly instructed me to be quiet and not to be disrespectful. But actually ... isn't that exactly  what our Lord is asking us to pray, and to do?  To forgive the bastards who did the injury.  To forgive those we think of in such terms? I've been thinking of that recently, because the Spirit ha...

 The following article was written for a Christian publication for May 2022.

Rupa Marya & Raj Patel's Inflamed:  Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice is an important book for beginning to think critically about the way in which modern medicine is practiced in places like the United States.   Colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required to understand illness, and its intrinsic relationship to our contexts, histories, cultures and environments.  Colonial capitalism, which dominates the 'other' by delineating 'otherness', is the unquestioned worldview of modern medicine because the latter was forged at a time of colonization.  It has replaced indigenous cosmologies that were cultivated over centuries, reciprocal relationships between human and the natural world, passed down through oral histories.  They argue that it is only through a return to an enlightened partnership with our exposome, the natural world, that the healing of our inflamed bodies, and inflamed planet, can ...

Joshua Lawson's Face of Addiction:  Stories of Loss and Recovery is perhaps the most difficult book I've ever read in order to provide an honest review.  The message Lawson offers is one so deeply in need of being embraced by the many communities of which I am a part.  Living as I do in Appalachia, the opioid epidemic has touched nearly every family I know -- including my own.  Two of my sisters have died from addictions that began with opioids.  They're numbers in the statistics we see on the nightly news.  They're also but drops in the larger sea of humanity touched by the epidemic.  Substance addictions are all too human.  So it's difficult to read these "stories of loss and recovery" as anything more than tragic.  That's what makes writing a review for this book so difficult.  But this book is also a beautiful account of a collection of beautiful lives. Lawson's own interest in the subject, and advocacy for those with substance a...

A Contemporary Handbook for Weddings and Funerals (by Aubrey Malphurs and Keith Willhite) has been updated by Dennis Hillman for a new generation of use.  It brings together a wealth of resources for pastors and other leaders charged with the duties to lead the worship of the people of God in a variety of contexts (weddings, funerals, Lord's Supper, baptism, Mother's Day, Christmas, child dedication, etc.).  As I mentioned, this is a revised and updated edition of a text that has stood the test of time and usefulness of pastors for years.  Here, pastors will find the best of scholarship about weddings, funerals and other events in the life of the church, mixed with a sensitivity for preaching and pastoral care in those very important moments.   Pastors never know when a crisis will hit, so having a resource such as this can alleviate some of the daily struggles pastors encounter.  This is a resource you can pull from the shelf and take with you, to use in ...

Every year, I see memes making their rounds on how Christians stole Christmas from the pagans.  These memes recur around the Christmas season, and tend to reinforce ideas that question the very historicity of Jesus himself . So let me lay it out plain:  No, Christmas did not begin as a pagan holiday.  In fact, to claim as much is to deny the very history folks want to lay claim to.  In some ways, the following is going to be a rant.  But rants are quite probably the only (and certainly the best) response to such silliness. The Christmas tree is pagan. What if I told you that most Christians throughout history did not celebrate Christmas with trees?  Christmas trees have started to spread all over the world, but that is a recent development and not something most Christmas-celebrating Christians would have even heard of for most of history.  Christmas trees were a purely localized phenomenon for a long time. And it's not like pagans invented trees...

J Chase Davis' Trinitarian Formation:  A Theology of Discipleship in Light of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit develops one of the strongest theologies of discipleship I've read in recent years.  He offers readers a " Triperspectivalism" that balances doctrinal, devotional and dutiful perspectives about discipleship into a clear view of all the ways in which the theology of the Trinity informs and forms the church's ministry to make disciples.  Far from a deep theology that is disconnected from the practical concerns of disciple-making ministry, Trinitarian Formation highlights things like racial justice and the struggles of addiction as deeply theological and devotional issues. This is clearly one of the most important ministry texts for 2021. _______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Gregg R. Allison's 40 Questions about Roman Catholicism is another volume in Kregel's "40 questions" series that explores historical and foundational questions (questions 1-10), theological questions (questions 11-34), and contemporary and personal questions (questions 35-40).  It's a balanced, serious engagement from an evangelical (specifically Southern Baptist) who has spent decades researching and dialoguing with Roman Catholics. Allison is clear that one of the fundamental differences between Roman Catholics and evangelicals generally is the approach of the relationship between nature and grace.  For Roman Catholics (cf. Question 3), nature and grace are intertwined.  Put simply, for Roman Catholics, nature transmits grace.  This is particularly true in the sacramental theology that infuses the Roman tradition.  While the sin of Adam may have corrupted nature, it did not obliterate the divine grace infused into it.   Questions 11-13 will quite...