The UmBlog

I read stories of talking animals. I talked to my stuffed animals. I hoped for them to talk back to me. I slowly learned the difference between fantasy and reality. I started to learn facts, statements about reality. When my elementary school was closing at the end of my first grade I told my grandmother I had to repeat my grade at the new school. I was wrong, but I didn't know how school and summer break worked together back then as a six year old. I was earnest, but I was ignorant. I'm still earnest and ignorant. I earnestly believe I'm more aware of my ignorance in my middle age. I can understand why fundamentalist Christianity appealed to my earnest desire to proclaim facts, distinguishing them from fantasy in my budding scientific mind. Four spiritual laws. Ten commandments. The Fundamentals. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. Creation science. For every question or doubt, a verse, a proof text will answer. Nuance, mystery, and heart knowledge, all childlike was...

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...

Jesus talks about generosity in terms on not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing. The metaphor works on his teaching to not trumpet our charity but rather to keep it quiet, so that our Father who sees in secret will reward us. However, there are some things the church does in disconnect that should not be. Take the story of the African American christian man Richard Allen. Richard Allen was born into slavery in pre-revolutionary America. However, he was allowed to work side jobs by his owner in Delaware to purchase his freedom. He became a free man in 1786, in the newly independent United States. Before his freedom he became a Methodist. He became a preacher and attracted a growing congregation of black men and women to a small white church, whose white elders grew uncomfortable with their diminishing racial ratio. Allen asked the church to let him have a place for his swelling black congregation. They refused him, but offered to let he and other black church...

Before he passed away from brain cancer, David Kuo , a Republican speech writer and political activist wrote his memoir about the clash between his earnest faith and the politics that kept prevailing over it, Tempting Faith, and inside story of political seduction . Kuo's last job in the White House was in George W. Bush's office of faith based and community initiatives. This office was formed from Bush's campaign promises of compassionate conservatism, which promised to unleash public funds to faith based groups in order that they may serve the needy alongside secular or non-religious aid programs. A promise of $8 billion dollars for this program was never followed up on and only 1-3% of that amount ever trickled down from the Bush White House and Republican controlled Congress. Kuo fought hard for that funding, his faith in Jesus Christ, aligned with his desire to see more people aided not only materially but also spiritually. His credentials include a long list of ...

source In John 14 Jesus tells his disciples "Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." This is the gospel section of today's lectionary reading . As someone who was part of the Vineyard movement for years and still have affection for it and it's founder, John Wimber , I had long read the "greater works" as greater than the miraculous stuff Jesus did. But now, as I am certainly pre-disposed to look for the love of God on every page, I wonder if Jesus is referring to greater acts of mercy than what he could do as a single human. Paul refers to the church with a metap...

I have been taking The Jesus Driven Life slowly over the past month because Michael Hardin has many important things to say and I can only hold a few of them at a time in my cluttered mind. My 22 part ongoing series, Not everything Biblical is Christian , tries to do in part what Hardin is able to do more substantially. I started the series because I shared the issue Hardin raises, The ‘standard’ Protestant view of the inerrancy or infallibility of Scripture is unacceptable. It is not simply a question of ‘historical errors’ (was Jesus crucified before or after the Passover meal) but the deeper theological ones (why is God as reflected in Jesus so substantively different than God is portrayed in many Old Testament texts) that have caused me to rethink the nature of the Bible. loc. 4375 Kindle Like Hardin, I was raised dispensational fundamentalist with an adoration of the Bible instead of the person who is the living, embodied, incarnate word of God. My blog series has tried to e...