Pro Tip: Christians Don't Get to Check out of Politics
All of which is to say, there can never be any state of affairs in which it is acceptable for those who wear the name of Jesus to ignore politics. For us to ignore politics, to “check out” because it’s too loud and doesn’t really affect us anyway, is to say to those whose lives are being trampled that, Jesus to the contrary notwithstanding, you’re just not someone we have to care about … and so we won’t.
Why Does Good Friday Feel Like Such Crappy Parenting?
Good Friday and Easter don’t mean that now God can finally love us unqualifiedly because God’s tricked Godself into thinking we’re pure; it means that God loves us too much to let the power of subjugation and oppression be the final word—that in fact, God was determined through Jesus to shine a spotlight on a new world in which peace, justice, and love inevitably and irresistibly overcome violence, injustice, and hatred.
On Being a Smartass for Jesus
I mean, how else are you going to get through to people who’ve inoculated themselves against the encroachment of the reign of God’s peace and justice—especially since the way Jesus asks people to live stands as a rebuke to the very comfort and stability so many people cling to?
Who Wants a Spiritualized Jesus Anyway?
A spiritualized messiah—apart from doing violence to Jesus’ understanding of himself as a prophetic voice announcing a new reign to rival the claims of existing reigns—makes possible the kind of otherwise decent people who, when faced with injustice and tyranny, don’t have the strength and courage to say “no” and “wrong.” However, Jesus the lousy messiah is the perfect model for producing people … able to resist any authority that threatens those who cannot help themselves.
Jesus: Forever Mixing Morality and Politics
All I’m claiming is that people who follow Jesus—a man killed by plutocrats for challenging a similar system—don’t have any real stake in propping up a plutocracy. Indeed, they have every incentive to undermine such a system.
A Christmas Welcome: The Outlandish Jesus the Powerful Wanted to Kill
Because, you see, the baby who got the authorities worked into such a murderous lather is the same outlandish Jesus whom those same authorities eventually executed as a political revolutionary. The manger and the cross are linked as symbols of God’s cosmic upheaval of the present world and its systems of domination.
The Unjust Judge and the Persistent Widow: The Curious Case of the Brett Kavanaugh Nomination
How is it that after all these years so many who claim to follow Jesus still find themselves propping up a system in which the vulnerable have to cry out to powerful, self-protecting men for a little justice?
The Jesus Gap
I’ve struggled for some time with the realization that when the church fails—as it often does—it fails most egregiously in giving people the resources necessary for the outrageously radical act of following Jesus.