A Sound of Sheer Silence

First off, I want to thank everyone who has written to me in the last couple of weeks and months, wanting to know if everything is OK and wondering if I will be writing again.  When I started this blog six or so years ago, I did so with the expectation that no one would read it, and the fact that people did, and do, read it has been a wonderful surprise.  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read what I have written and engage with it. My reduced output on these pages has been a product of a couple of things, but mostly the fact that in the last six months or so I haven't felt like I have much to say.  I don't want to be flogging the same horses over and over, and so when I don't feel moved to write something in particular, I just don't.  I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings back in the near future, but as long as I don't really feel like I have particular ideas to put out, it is probably going to continue to be quiet. In fact, I...

The former is a recent, largely white, evangelical, American phenomenon with a dose of fundamentalism & a lot of weird cultural stuff & marketing thrown in. — Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019 Of course, you can hate and reject both. That's cool. Just don't conflate them or write about them as the same thing. Or think they are theologically the same phenomena. — Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019 I have seen a couple of people make a variation of Rev. Harrison Warren's argument on the Interwebs in the last couple of days.  It is prompted, in large measure, by the announcement that Joshua Harris, author of the evangelical purity culture ur-text I Kissed Dating Goodbye , is getting a divorce from his wife.  This is seen, not unreasonably, as symbolic of the moral and conceptual failure of the purity culture project, at least in its late 90s/early 00s presentation--the whole point of going through all of this purity cultur...

Having affirmed Nicholas Kristof that there is value in the teachings of Jesus  even in the face of skepticism about the physical resurrection in Part 1, I would like to address Rev. Jones's position on the resurrection.   I should note that Rev. Jones reported yesterday  that she has been subject to online harassment as a result of her interview, which is (unfortunately) unsurprising, surely true, and totally unacceptable. I hope, and don't believe that I am, adding to this harassment with this post, but only to express why I think her answer doesn't really hang together or get to the heart of what is at stake with Christianity.  And, in particular, I don't think it can really answer the most powerful and sophisticated critiques of Christianity. But, first, let's start with what Rev. Jones said: KRISTOF Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that. JONES When you look in...

On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times , continued a series of interviews he has done from time to time with Christian religious leaders and thinkers.  This time, his conversation partner was Serene Jones , the President of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  She said a number of things in this interview, some of which I agree with and many of which I do not, but the one that got the attention was her somewhat dismissive handling of the idea of Jesus's physical resurrection on Eastern Sunday (or, more accurately, Holy Saturday evening).  When I first saw the criticism of Rev. Jones circulating on Twitter, I made the cardinal sin of online takes and fired off some Tweets without reading the article when I got home from Easter Vigil early Sunday morning.  Rev. Jones and Union have said some, in my view, kinda dumb stuff in the past that I have dragged in this space , and I assumed this was more of the same. Having now read the inter...

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and offer a prediction for what the Christian landscape will look like in the year 2100. In the year 2100, there will be loose alliance of Christian bodies and churches that we can call, for purposes of these predictions, Team Blue.  Team Blue consists of somewhere between one and at most a half dozen churches that see themselves as being heirs to the Apostolic, "high church" tradition--complete with bishops, liturgy, high Eucharistic theology, etc.  These entities will have meaningful differences in theology, but will view themselves as being united as part of a broader grouping, and might very well have agreements to share clergy, resources, etc.  Also on Team Blue will be a few, maybe a dozen or two dozen, networks of "low" churches and congregations.  Some of these networks will be more robust, in the sense that are more like what we think of today as "denominations," than others.  The differences between the h...

In the US and UK alone, over 45 million people watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (a Northwestern alum, I am obligated to mention) get married on Saturday.  And the star of the show, or at least the person that seems to be the one most people are talking about, is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry .  He preached the sermon at the wedding, and he did what Bishop Curry almost unfailingly does, which is give a stem-winder that is heavily influenced by the rich and deep African-American Christian preaching tradition.  If you have not read it ( or, better, watched it ), I urge you to do so. If you want to distill Bishop Curry's message down to three core points, I would say they are (1) the foundation of the message of Jesus Christ is love, (2) the love we experience, including the romantic love on display at this or any wedding, ultimately has its source is Christ, and (3) love can change the world, and change ourselves.    If you w...

1. Let's talk about family. I am the oldest of four children.  Both of my parents are alive and still married to each other.  In terms of the nuclear, biological family, I have as close to the ideal as can reasonably be imagined.  My parents love us, and us children love them back.  We are, by most standards, very close.  I saw my sister this weekend in New York City, and I will see her, my other sister, and her husband and children in a couple of weeks. It is customary to describe one's-self as "fortunate" with regard to having a happy family, and there is a way in which that is true.  No individual has control over who the other people are that inhabit your family of origin, and so there is an important sense in which the nature and state of one's original family is outside of your individual control.  But some people describe themselves as "fortunate" to have a happy family in a way which suggests that the state of any family is wholly outside...