The people behind HeGetsUs don’t get him. But that doesn’t prevent us from using their campaign to help folks get who Jesus really was – and making his compassionate personality the welcoming face of our progressive faith communities.
In his speech, Bishop Curry twice emphasized the need to find a voice that is non-partisan (“this is not partisan,” “not a partisan voice”). We all know why he needed to say this.
There are certain dynamics taking place today that may remind us of dynamics that took place early in the last century. I suggest that pondering such similarities is not only warranted – but needed.
Many of us who grew up in fundamental spaces were taught to live in dualities: black and white, in and out, saved and unsaved. In those spaces, there isn’t liminality. There aren’t many safe spaces to ask really hard questions, to show anger toward injustice, or even to grieve when we need to grieve. We are taught to brush it off, smile, move on, trust God, and believe.
I recently experienced something that is the stuff of many people’s nightmares.
Science and Spirituality need each other. This has always been the case—from Aristotle (who concludes his classic work on Physics with positing an Unmoved Mover) to Aquinas (who fought the fundamentalists of his day about the value of bringing science, namely Aristotle, and the scientific method of his day, namely scholasticism, into the world of faith).
Right after Easter in 2015, I arrived at church as a fellow staff member was going out the door saying, “I’m going to get a picture of one of the banners.” “What banners?!” I’d come in the back way to town and hadn’t seen that down the main street of Fountain Hills, eight churches had posted large identical banners overnight: “Progressive” Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”
It was Charles Darwin, who was the primary voice sounding the death knell on Atonement theology. Darwin’s work did not just attack the literal details of the Bible’ …
“The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings have fallen into “original sin” is pre-Darwinian mythology and pre-Darwinian non-sense.”
If one were …
“Resurrection-Denying Preacher to Return to Scotland.” That was the headline of a story published in the Glasgow Herald about a week before I was scheduled to lecture in the …