The Little Friar

Every time I teach preaching and worship, I require students to read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business .  Preachers who have never engaged with Postman are woefully underprepared to preach and lead the church at worship.  At one point, Postman makes a profound claim:  "I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion.  When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether."  Whether or not you preach online or on the television -- or even in the congregation's worship space -- every preacher, at one point or another, will regularly  fight against the temptation to amuse and entertain.  We'll exercise extremely poor pastoral insight and use a gimmick to gain attention.  Performing for the approval of attendees may attract crowds.  You may fill more seats on your high attendance Sunday.  But at what cost? Her...

It is impossible that any one, with a human heart in him, can fully believe this doctrine [of hell and eternal punishment], with all the horrors it involves, with all the accusations it brings against the divine wisdom and goodness, and not feel that it is a terrible weight on his soul, and one from which he would gladly be relieved.  There are many shallow minds, many flippant talkers, who find no difficulty whatever in believing, who are prompt to denounce the slightest doubt on the subject as impiety or infidelity.  There are many small ministers, who are ready at a moment's notice to clear up all the difficulties of the moral and scriptural arguments; who are never embarrassed, never troubled at all in regard to the matter.  But I know that the best and strongest among its believers never treat the subject in this way.  Those who have looked into it most deeply and patiently, who are distinguished equally for their learning and piety, confess that, seen from any ...

  As a student, I lived through the crisis in Southern Baptist life around the ordination of women for pastoral ministry.  It was that time as a student at Carson-Newman that I came face-to-face with the reality that the SBC wasn't the ecclesial home to which God had called me.  (If you're not aware of those days and that struggle, I recommend  this documentary  as well as Bill Leonard's book,  God's Last and Best Hope .)  At that time, one of the driving questions -- though it was more a symptom of the cancer of biblical literalism as the only theological authority in the Church and that horrible idea of biblical innerancy -- this issue was one of the big ones ripping apart the fellowship of Christians as well as tearing at the souls of very gifted, called women  I happened to know  as a student.  So I never took the question lightly:   Does the Bible really affirm women's full ordination to the role of pastor-teacher-pri...

This is a piece I've written for my forthcoming book on Cosby, Tennessee, ancestors.  I share it in observance of Dedication Day (more commonly called Memorial Day), in memory of one of my ancestors who served the US Army during the Civil War:  Asbury (sometimes spelled "Asberry") Fowler.

I am a μυστήριον, a mystery -- I am shadow. I am wind. I am fireflies that from the skies descend. I have rested, wandered through a dream, fought dark sorrows beside a lonely stream. yet here I am, and I am here with you; shadows blow around me, quiet and ever new.

 I recently came across this tweet and it has spurred some reflections. Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) is an endemic scourge in our society.  It should be widely known that men are the main perpetrators and women and children are the main victims.  It's bad, it's terrible, it's demonic.  It happens in churches too, even in ministry families. It is -- not to put too fine a point on the issue -- evil! But if there is one side to DFV that people don't like to talk about, even DFV advocates seem very reluctant to bring this up.  That is, women as perpetrators of violence against their own children. As a child and teenager, my family life was dysfunctional and spasmodically abusive. My "father" was a right abusive bastard.  He was an alcoholic who managed to beat me more times than I dare to remember or recount.   But my mother was equally bad.  She was a real Jekyll and Hyde character.  She could be the kindest and most affectionate...

  I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they could only express by something indelicate.... And in the first case it is surely obvious that it is not merely at the fact of something being hurt that we laugh (as I trust we do) when a Prime Minister sits down on his hat. If that were so we should laugh whenever we saw a funeral. We do not laugh at the mere fact of something falling down; there is nothing humorous about leaves falling or the sun going down. When our house falls down we do not laugh. All the birds of the air might drop around us in a perpetual shower like a hailstorm without arousing a smile. If you really ask yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly i...

This is my very, very, very, very rough translation of Luke 2.1-20.   Katalyma -- perhaps the most interesting word in this passage (often translated as 'inn' but which I have translated as 'guest room', is found in another place in Luke -- Luke 22:11, describing where His last passover would be held).  The praise of the heavenly host is very hard to translate, but it is more structured than most translations make it.  We start with doxa , glory or fame or splendor, and we end with eudokias , an unusual adjective from the same verb; there is also the parallel with glory being in the highest (the Highest or Most High, Hypsistos , is very often a name for God, translating the Hebrew Elyon , so the first part may well have the meaning, 'Glory in God to God') and peace being in men.  I also think it's noteworthy that the shepherds simply assume that what the angels proclaimed has come to pass; they don't go to see whether it's true, they go to see the fa...

It is Christmas Eve.  A silence falls across the land.  All the shops are shut, and the sound of the traffic falls silent at last.  Those rushing to and fro' are at home around the hearth and tree. Some have gone to sing carols at the village church.  Others are with them in spirit, if not in body. Tomorrow is Christmas Day.  Let us remember it, and honor it. Happy Christmas to all my readers.  May you find blessing.

My very, very, very rough translation: For the word of the cross is, to the annihilated, stupidity; to us, being saved, it is God's power. It is written: For I will annihilate the wise man's wisdom, and the intelligent man's intelligence I will set aside. Where is the wise one? Where is the literate one? Where is the debater of this era? Has not God made stupid the universe's wisdom? For as in God's wisdom, the universe through wisdom did not know God, so God was pleased through the stupidity of the proclamation to save the faithful. Now Jews request signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, to the Jewish very much a stumblingblock but to the nations stupidity -- but to the invited, Jew and also Greek, Christ, God's power and God's wisdom. For God's stupidity is wiser than humanity and God's weakness stronger than humanity. For examine your invitation, brothers, how not many fleshly-wise, not many powerful, not many well-born, b...

My very, very, very rough translation of Luke 1.46-55, commonly referred to as "The Magnificat".  The Greek word megalynei is an interesting word; it literally means to increase or make great .  The word can figuratively mean 'extol', i.e., 'expound the greatness of', as it certainly does here, but the repeated play on 'great', 'lowly', and 'mighty' through the song shows that the word was very deliberately chosen as a figure of speech due to its literal meaning:  The Virgin makes the Lord great in her soul because He has done great things in her.  My goal here is to help readers see the radical nature of the song itself. And as Elisabet heard Mary's greeting, the infant leaped in her womb and Elisabet was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a great shout and said, "You are to be praised among women, and the fruit of your belly is to be praised. And why should the mother of my Lord come to me? See! For as the ...

What follows is my very, very, very rough translation of 1 John 1.1-2.4.  Note that I translate logos as Reason throughout; it is usually translated, due to the influence of Latin translations, as Word. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have stared at with eyes, what we have observed and our hands have handled, about the Reason of life -- and the life was manifested, and we have stared at and witness and announce to you the perpetual life which was with the Father and manifested to us -- what we have stared at and what we have heard, we also announce to you so that you also may have communion with us. And our communion is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. And we write these things so that our joy might be fulfilled. And this is the message we have heard from Him and we announce to you: that God is light and there is no darkness at all in Him. If we should say that we have communion with Him and should walk in darkness, we deceive, and do no...

This is my very, very, very rough translation of 1 Corinthians 13.  It is an immensely difficult passage to translate, for reasons I'll lay out in a minute. If I talk in human and angelic languages, but do not possess devotedness, I have become a reverberating gong or clanging cymbal; and if I possess prophecy and recall all of the secret things and all knowledge, and if I possess complete confidence so as to remove mountains, but do not possess devotedness, I am nothing; and if I dole out all my belongings and if I surrender my body in such a way that I might be proud, but do not possess devotedness, I have benefited not at all. Devotedness is bold, serviceable; devotedness is not jealous; devotedness is not boastful, not inflated, not formless; it does not seek its own, it is not exasperated, it does not keep track of injuries, it does not take joy in injustice but rejoices with the truth. It covers all, confides all, anticipates all, endures all. Devotedness never at all collaps...

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...