Entries Tagged as 'empire'

April 4, 2008

On MLK, politics, and the prophetic…

Martin Luther King, Jr. on War

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  I am amazed at how much he accomplished in his short life.  He was the leader of a movement.  A prophetic voice for civil rights…against the wars of empire.  He was a courageous voice speaking out of the [...]

March 28, 2008

How the World sees America…

I sat down to eat my lunch today and turned the TV on to C-SPAN2.  Amar Bakshi was in the middle of a press conference speaking about his project- How the World sees America.  This fascinating project took him on a 5-month trip to 11 countries around the world.  Bakshi is a reporter for the [...]

March 8, 2008

The Myth of a Christian Nation…

The Myth of a Christian Nation:  How the quest for political power is destroying the church arrived this week.  (Only have read the introduction so far.  Let me lay out why this book is an important read for Christians (HT Karissa).  Here is the thesis of the book:
I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism [...]

February 21, 2008

Creating a missional order…

In a number of settings recently at SMC, I have been asked about vision for church as a missional community (I am particularly thinking of Melissa’s questions).  I feel like I have not yet done justice to answering these questions. It involves a radical re-imagining of church. It doesn’t mean we change the center from historic [...]

January 24, 2008

The Politics of Jesus…

Which side wins—Democrat or Republican, East or West, elite or bourgeois or proletariat, Herodian or Zealot—may be considered news within the system, but until someone brings into the system resources from outside it, unless someone kicks a hole in the wall of the system so we aren’t trapped within it, there is no real good [...]

December 27, 2007

On Setting, deconstruction and narrative theology…

The past is our definition.  We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.      
-Wendell Berry
I am thinking about the powerful influence setting has on character and the way story is framed.  In a series [...]

November 12, 2007

Veterans Day…

I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me.  And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone “like a son of man,”dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest.  His head and hair were white like [...]

November 10, 2007

Everything must change…

Domesticated Jesus

November 9, 2007

Atheist…

Atheist

November 8, 2007

Walter Brueggemann’s 19 Theses…

Okay, I’m trading in my weak kool-aid for the vintage Bordeaux.  Walter Brueggamann’s 19 theses say so much better what I have been trying to wrestle with in recent posts (and in my sermon on Sunday)–the tension between the Empire narrative (script is Brueggemann’s word) and the Gospel narrative (the alternative script).  Here they are:
1.     Everybody [...]