The UmBlog

After reading this long article by David Roberts at Vox I've been thinking about the possible solution to his detailed analysis of the problem, tribal epistemology . Roberts has little to offer for soultions except the self-acknowledged trope "listen to each other." It may be a trope, but it is half right. I believe the answer is deeper than that, it calls for a level of communication that does not rely on statistics, but on anecdotes. Personal stories can change people's minds. The stories I heard today on the latest Liturgists podcast, Advocacy , from Christina Cleveland and Mickey Scottbey Jones confirmed what I've been thinking. As one of them said, and the hosts confirmed, those of us with a bleeding heart perspective might be the only one in the social circle of our more conservative relatives or friends. To turn away from the opportunity to win someone close to us to a open handed posture with our personal stories is to miss the impact of a heart cha...

Even Jesus explicitly refutes a flat reading of the bible, where every verse in one part of the Bible, say Joshua's genocidal passages, have the same weight in understanding God as the passages where Jesus himself, claiming to be equal to God, describes God. This method of interpretation, a hermeneutic in college words, is applied with varying degrees by fundamentalist Christianity across its multiple branches. For example, in my own life, I've argued for young earth creationism and patriarchal church leadership and even abstinence during menstruation among other literal readings. The fundagelical branch of the church where I've spent the majority of my faith life advocates for some purity laws but not others, almost as varied as the personalities of the white male pastors who are making the proclamations. But Jesus himself keeps pushing against this hermeneutic, as I've tried to show nearly two dozen times in this series. As I read today's Daily Office reading...