Worth Your Time

I try to note what I’m reading or listening to personally, so I will try, from time to time, to share links to what is inspiring/challenging me.

I keep coming back to Tish Harrison Warren and David French because week after week they write things that are continually worth reading to me. I subscribe to several weekly emails, but generally their work gets read the most.

“How Hypocrisy Drives Unbelief” gets at our national Christian hypocrisy. It’s not a “comfortable” read.

We have a serious disconnect between what we SAY we believe and how things actually turn out. For instance, we call ourselves “conservative Christians” but we don’t have truly orthodox Christian beliefs on things like… well… the divinity of Christ (and he dives into that little tidbit). Then there is the case of many homeschoolers and those kids put in private Christian schools who had that education to insulate them “from the world.” (That is not EVERY homeschool or private school family, mind you.) Turns out the insulating idea wasn’t so great.

He ties up the ideas with this paragraph:

This all leads me to the complex relationship between theology, morality, and hypocrisy—and to how hypocrisy is particularly damaging when Christians are clearer about their moral stands than they are about even the identity of Jesus. When religion is primarily experienced as a moral code, moral failure undermines the faith itself.

And then he goes on to make his case.

Well worth your time.

Tish Harrison Warren goes after our need for a new working out of “Sabbath rest.” The digital access we have now causes to be “on” far too much and we are desperately in need of new disciplines that will preserve Sabbath in our lives.

When a careerist culture meets a digital revolution that allows unlimited access to work, something’s got to give. And in America, that something tends not to be work demands but is instead the human soul. The rise of digital technology requires us, as a culture, to re-examine what it means for work to be humane. As we do so, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us in the labor movement. They offer us a model for how to begin this re-examination.

This is a challenging piece as well. It is refreshing in its own way.

I found an older podcast recently that is fun for me as a history buff. It is called “Presidential” and is an ambitious podcast series to examine each of our presidents in each episode. George Washington gets an episode. William Henry Harrison gets an episode. It’s not drilling down on “just the facts” but a fun take on history and culture and how things shifted and changed in our culture. It’s ambitious and fun and I enjoy listening to an episode while I try to get through a mind-numbing session at the gym on the elliptical machine.