I need the Church

I need the Church. While I struggle with the conservative American church expressions, I still love the Body of Christ and the holy catholic Church, as I profess every week in worship.

This podcast is very special and worth your time. It’s James Bryan Smith remembering his friend Rich Mullins 25 years after Mullins’s death. Rich Mullins was a voice we needed in the American church and in Christian music. Smith goes over Rich’s love for the Church and plays some of Rich’s music. It washed over me again… my love for Jesus and love for his Church. How I need them!

From George Floyd to white comfort

It’s been a little over three years since the murder of George Floyd. During COVID we came face to face with lynching and racism and couldn’t just pass on by because we were all stuck inside. So, what did we do? We turned phrases we didn’t understand (as White people) like “critical race theory” and “woke” into pejorative turns so we could return to our white comfort. It worked.

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Our love affair with nostalgia

“Nostalgia is rarely antiquarian, a mere interest in history qua history. It is more commonly a sentimental pining for “the way it was.” Such nostalgia is always a form of arrested development. For example, there are sorts of nostalgia that are not-so-subtle longings for adolescence and thus resent adulthood. Many forms of collective nostalgia demonize the present while luxuriating in a fabled past. (As Tony Soprano once put it, “‘ Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”) But in most cases, and in our collective life, nostalgia usually serves a social and political agenda that wants to reprise a configuration of society that secured a way of life that is being romanticized. All too often, that way of life benefited some—who now remember it fondly—at the expense of others who were ground underfoot by the so-called golden age. In the United States, for example, only white people, most likely men, could recall the 1950s with a rosy glow.”

— How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now by James K. A. Smith
https://a.co/i3Wb376

The heartache and beauty of the last few years

There are few books I take the time to re-read. My most re-read book is probably Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. Spiritual memoirs that truly speak to the soul are truly rare. There may be two more I’d add. (I have them on Audible read by the authors so I’d say to “re-listen”.)

Continue reading “The heartache and beauty of the last few years”