Debt and the Good News

In Luke 4, Jesus begins his public ministry by going to synagogue and reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the...

Abandoning Left/Right Thinking

Everybody should know their place and keep their place. Including God. Right? One of the unfortunate effects of the Enlightenment worldview is that God was kicked upstairs (to borrow N.T. Wright’s wonderful phrase) and we don’t know how to handle it when he comes down and tries to enter into the...

Bugs, Boys, and the Wrath of God

My father grew up on a farm in south Mississippi, which means that he grew up growing what he ate, and that he ate things like turnip greens. Ugh. I grew up on Southern cooking, but it was my mother’s Southern cooking, not my father’s, and while she also grew up in south Mississippi, she grew up in the...

Jesus, Zacchaeus & Christian Cake-Bakers

Apparently there are some Christians who believe that if they bake a cake for a gay marriage that this constitutes an endorsement of the event, and that being forced to do so is a violation of their religious freedom. People of all backgrounds and persuasions have been weighing in, with Christians in...

Easter & Passover: A History of Bigotry

Sometimes when I start to write something it takes a life of its own and sends me in directions I didn’t intend to go. This is one such blog. It started out as an article for Easter morning, but my research led me to some things that fundamentally altered where I was being taken—dark things that needed to...

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