On this sad day commemorating 45 years since MLK’s death, a reminder that his message of nonviolence and the beloved community lives on in the work of one of his closest friends and confidants, Congressman John Lewis.
Krista Tippett interviews civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis in Montgomery, Alabama during the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage. Amazing man!
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
With the abundance of coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican, here’s our show about a Jesuit priest who’s living a life of Christian service that flies under the radar. Father Greg Boyle’s gang intervention programs in Los Angeles are becoming more well-known, but his ideas behind them often get short shrift.
He makes winsome connections between service and delight, and compassion and awe. He heads Homeboy Industries, which employs former gang members in a constellation of businesses. This is not work of helping, he says, but of finding kinship. The point of Christian service, as he lives it, is about “our common calling to delight in one another.”
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
~C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays in Literature
Photo by Lucinda Lovering/Flickr, cc by-nd 2.0
Is Black Theology Finding New Roots in Christian Orthodoxy?
Jonathan Tran has written a thought-provoking article for The Christian Century titled “The New Black Theology.” For those of us not theologically trained or current in the art, this piece may seem too heavy-duty and inaccessible. But, there are some fresh ideas in her that are so thoroughly intriguing that you should read just to be aware.In the past five years, three seminal works have been published that, according to Tran, “represent a major theological shift that will — if taken as seriously as it deserves — change the face not only of black theology but theology as a whole.”I can see why too. These new theologians argue that “the sources of racism (and the resources for its repudiation) lie in Christianity’s failure to live into its Jewishness:”“Key to both Carter’s and Jennings’s work is their deep concern with the Jewish identity of Jesus. In The Christian Imagination, Jennings insists that only by affirming Jesus’ Jewish body can one comprehend the meaning of salvation. Gentiles were baptized into Jesus’ Jewish body, which continues and fulfills (and never denies) God’s covenant with Israel. Engrafted into God’s salvation of the Jews, the gentiles were saved insofar as the Jews were saved. It was Christ’s unique human-divine personage that integrated gentiles into Israel’s covenant life with God.”Or take the idea that “black theology” is finding its own theological roots not in sources outside of the Christian tradition but in orthodoxy itself:“By rethinking the Enlightenment’s promises of enlightenment and rearticulating racial existence in the language of the church’s most sacred doctrines, black theology is now (or once again) making a case that cannot be denied. The debate is no longer fixed on racial identity politics (a quagmire from which none can escape); rather, it takes place on the level playing field of orthodoxy.The new theology reminds us that it was a mistake to call black theology “black theology” in the first place. Consistency at least would have required that European theology equally bear the burden of qualifications (“colonizing theology”). To be sure, patronizing name-calling allowed black theology to develop its own voice in its own time, just as the segregated black church developed its own styles, saints and stories. But because the margins were managed by white theologians, those voices were heard by whites, and when heard they were regarded as less than equal and so were not allowed to challenge white hegemony and help white theology be anything other than white theology.Accordingly, the new black theology is best described as the new theology, no (dis)qualifying adjective necessary. In it we see Christian theology at long last incarnating the material conditions whereby the good news becomes good news.I’d love to produce a show on the subject and the evolution of “black” theology as it is traced from James Cone to these contemporary theologians. The embodiment of Jesus’ Jewishness as a way past, or into, race for Christians is one of those ideas that our contemporary culture and politics could stand to hear about.I’d dig hearing how you read this. Perhaps you have some voices you’d recommend I look into for possible interviews with Krista Tippett. Drop me a line in the comments section or at tgilliss@onbeing.org.
Tuesday, Election Day. New York City, The Rockaways.
Gilles Peress
Whoa. Powerful shot.
Standing in the lowly place with the easily despised, and the readily left out, and with the demonized — so that the demonizing will stop — and with the disposable — so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. That gives me life, that’s where I want to be. I think that’s where Jesus insists on standing.
Serpent handlers, like other Christians, have chosen something to emphasize. Over the course of two thousand years, others have chosen the precise nature and identity of Christ, the proper understanding and practice of the Eucharist, the correct way to baptize, the proper way to organize a church, which day of the week to call the Sabbath, and any number of other things as the sine qua non of being a true Christian, and in each case some other Christians have regarded that defining center of faith as ‘adiaphora’ — something indifferent.
—Seth Perry, excerpted from his commentary “Adiaphora and the Dark Extremes of an Eccentric Faith”
How do we respect the depth of a Christian snake handler’s faith — and talk about it without caricaturing or lauding his life?
A smug atheist reading of [Richard] Florida’s number-crunching would be that people who go to church a lot are less likely than people who don’t to move up the economic ladder. But a more accurate reading, I think, would be that people who who go to church a lot are more likely to move up. It’s the people who bend your ear about how much they love Jesus who are less likely to move up (and who are also less likely to attend church regularly). The irony is that it’s these zealots who want to claim an exclusive right to call themselves Christian.
—Timothy Noah, from his post “Religion and Mobility” on The New Republic site.
You might want to read Richard Florida’s piece on The Atlantic Cities first and then follow it up with Noah’s reaction. Both are well worth reading and may lead you down all types of paths depending on your experiences and where you live, or have lived.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
