By: Jason Kennedy on February 23, 2017
This week I ran across a story of a couple that became Christian in a heavily Islamic country. Within two weeks of the man’s conversion, he was arrested, tortured, and starving in a cell. His story is so remarkable to me because he described his pre-Christian world and culture as being closed. Their country controlled…
By: Jennifer Dean-Hill on February 22, 2017
If the Eucharist is an act of defiance and a way to re-member the body of Christ back together, then torture is the antithesis of this, as it is breaks down the person and dismembers the community. When people start to “disappear” from the shameful experiences and choices made, the church threatens to “disappear” if…
By: Katy Drage Lines on February 22, 2017
Appetizers This weekend, I visited the Museum of Man in San Diego, and explored the Cannibal exhibit. Occasionally, cannibalism occurs in dire survival situations; more often though, cannibalism is ritually or medicinally practiced in order for the partaker to consume the power of the partaken. English royalty drank skull powder for health, and Richard the…
By: Rose Anding on February 22, 2017
The conclusion of the Secular Question The Shift… A big part of the shift is that the condition of belief have changed. Therefore. whatever we believe is detestable or contestable. Nature is what has changed…Secularism Taylor’s Book, Secular Age, Plays Out in the British Court Foster parent ban: ‘this is a secular state’, say…
By: Mary Walker on February 21, 2017
The future Kingdom of God is brought into the present to bring the world’s time under the rule of Divine Providence, and thus create spaces of resistance where bodies belong to God, not the state.[1] … Christians themselves are called to create concrete alternative practices that open up a different kind of economic space…
By: Julie Dodge on February 20, 2017
I am not perhaps the typical candidate for a Doctor of Ministry program. While I completed my undergraduate degree in Christian Education, and started a career in ministry, God led me to the field of social work, where I completed my Master’s degree, have worked in the field for 25 years, and now am an…
By: Garfield Harvey on February 19, 2017
In the 1930s, 98% of Jamaica (my birth country) subscribed to a Christian culture because most of those people were descendants of slaves. However, in that same era, the Rastafarian movement arose as this new group started to worship Haile Selassie (born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael), the emperor of Ethiopia. The Rastafarians worshiped him as the…
By: Kevin Norwood on February 18, 2017
To believe or not to believe? Life is full of opportunities to believe or not to believe. We face it every day. If you open social media or if you follow news sources, there is a constant struggle to know where to put your trust for information. James Smith in his book,…
By: Mary Walker on February 18, 2017
“One of the goals of the sensory ethnographer is to seek to know places in other people’s worlds that are similar to how they are known by those people. In doing so we aim to come closer to understanding how other people experience, remember and imagine.”[1]
By: Marc Andresen on February 17, 2017
For over a year we have been traveling Further Up and Further In. Our travels don’t take us deeper into the New Narnia as in The Chronicles, [1] but our further in has taken us deeper into the world of Global Leadership in cross-cultural environs.
By: Pablo Morales on February 17, 2017
In The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Stephen recently interviewed British comedian and TV producer Ricky Gervais to discuss his religious views. As an atheist, Ricky concludes, “You take any holy book or any fiction and destroy it. In a 1000 year time that wouldn’t come back the way it was but if you take…
By: Jason Kennedy on February 17, 2017
James K. A. Smith’s enlightening book, How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor is a fascinating book. Smith’s aim is to synthesize the exhaustive work of Charles Taylors nine-hundred plus manuscript dealing with the secular age. Smith makes Taylor’s deep mind approachable. For Smith, Taylor is a cartographer of this present age or rather…
By: Chip Stapleton on February 17, 2017
In the thoroughly engaging, if very dense, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture Vincent Miller frames consumer culture ‘not as a deformation of belief but as a particular way of engaging religious beliefs that divorces them from practice.’ (Miller, 12) This provides the reader with a lens for engaging our consumer society…
By: Geoff Lee on February 17, 2017
Consumer or consumed? Consuming Religion – Miller “Parish glamorization is ecclesiastical pornography — taking photographs (skilfully airbrushed) or drawing pictures of congregations that are without spot or wrinkle, the shapes that a few parishes have for a few short years. These provocatively posed pictures are devoid of personal relationships. The pictures excite a…
By: Kristin Hamilton on February 16, 2017
The past several weeks I have been thinking quite a bit about privilege, especially those privileges to which I am blind. It’s pretty easy for me to recognize the big privileges. I’m white and well-educated. I was raised in a nuclear family that loved me and protected me. I have always been free to talk…
By: Phil Goldsberry on February 16, 2017
Introduction James Smith has a prophetic voice that captivated me from the first page of the Preface of his book, How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. I was the church planter from Terre Haute, Indiana, small-corn town USA that moved to the New York City Metro area out of a call in 1987. …
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on February 16, 2017
In his book Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture, Catholic Theologian and Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture, Dr. Vincent J. Miller argues that Consumer culture has given way to the how religion and religious practices have become commodities. The commodification of religion enables “people [to] pick and choose from the offerings of…
By: Aaron Cole on February 16, 2017
Summary: How (Not) To Be Secular Reading Charles Taylor by James K.A. Smith is a fascinating “cliff note” version of Charles Taylor’s classic: A Secular Age. In this concise book, Smith interrupts and unpacks Taylor’s ideology from key terms to consolidating Taylor’s concepts. In the preface, Smith defines Taylor’s book as a “different map”; “a…
By: Lynda Gittens on February 16, 2017
CONSUMING RELIGION – CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PRACTICE IN A CONSUMER CULTURE Don’t let the Joneses get you down was a popular song and phrase during the 70’s by the Temptations. It spoke about people trying to possess more assets than the other just to appear to be in a particular status in life. A sample…
By: Stu Cocanougher on February 16, 2017
For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. – 1 Corinthians 13:1 This verse has always intrigued me. As someone who has a desire to know God, this verse is…
