Once upon a time there was a house...

Anything that begins with such words as that usually carries with it the implicit promise that a tale is about to be told. "Once upon a time" rarely is a vehicle for conveying factual or objective truth. Rather, we have learned to read it as the set piece that introduces a bit of folk entertainment which, in the end, will leave us with a bit of folk wisdom forever wrapped in a memorable tale. All well and good and as it should be.

On the other hand, when a professional religionist begins something by saying, "Once upon a time," there is the hesitant assumption that the forthcoming insight or wisdom will be less folk or common wisdom and more geared toward making some kind of moral point. And when a professional religionist begins something by saying, "Once upon a time, there was a house...," there is every reason to assume -- especially if the religionist is a Christian -- that we are about to re-visit, whether we wish to or not, the parable of the two houses. One was built on a solid foundation of rock so that, when the storms came, it withstood their onslaught and remained standing. The other was built upon a foundation of sand and, when the storms came, crumbled under their onslaught and fell down. It is one of the better known of Jesus' parables and contains something very close to folk wisdom or common sense in addition to its theological ramifications.

Actually, a number of New Testament parables are common sense or folk wisdom tales, requiring not much depth of perception to understand and yet still wrapped in the skin of story and entertainment ... a fact which is, I suspect, a good deal of the reason for our having a certain kind of laziness about extending them into our own time instead of leaving them as quaint, but still honored, artifacts of an earlier one. All of this came to mind for me three or four Sundays ago when the parable of the two houses was the New Testament reading for the congregation with whom I was worshipping at the time. I've been chewing on the matter ever since. So...

Once upon a time, there was a house, whether on sand or rock, I can not say; but let us assume that this house was securely positioned, at least for our purposes here. Now this house of ours had an occupant. Who, we don't know, but an occupant. That occupant has a family ... a mate, children, a few pets, and an occasional relative or friend who comes for a visit. Now the children are all worrisome and gratifying and demanding, as children are supposed to be. The mate is the beloved whom the occupant can hardly bear at times, though it is clear that each of them is really in the business of sculpting the other into something that more resembles half of a new whole than it does anything else. The pets all bounce around ... or the dogs do, anyway. The cats prefer to sit back, tails curled under them, and wait to be asked about what should be done next. The pets are quite dear at times and not so dear at others, but all of them are fed and housed with an affection which, unlike that extended to the children and the mate, is largely untainted by any sense of obligation or duty.

The house has all the appointments that one would expect. There are windows, well-positioned not only to let in the light, but also to admit of good cross-ventilation. There is an adequate electric system that also keeps the house well-lit, warm enough and cool enough, and very functional. Likewise, the plumbing is in good balance with the needs of the house, though like all plumbing, it will occasionally suffer from overload and back up or will be the dumping place for more than it can handle and overflow. These are ongoing nuisances that cause the occupant only passing inconvenience, but rarely extended difficulty. There is the usual division of the house's rooms into those that are more or less public and those that are private and also, of course, those that are distinctly personal ... or at least, from time to time and on a routine basis, their use is. There is, as we would expect, a lovely, warm, cheerful kitchen which transcends the categories and simply is communal space at all times. The occupant, being a good person, sees to the house and its maintenance responsibly, consulting experts from time to time, when that is necessary, and spending time and money, as well as energy, in seeing to the house's ongoing good health.

In all of this, it is very clear to all concerned that the occupant is not the electrical system, though neither the house not the occupant would scarcely be able to function without it. It is equally clear that the inviting, communal kitchen is not the occupant, nor are the attractively dressed windows nor the front porch and flowers beds that complement the house. The furnishings, all of them adequate and suited to their purposes, are not the occupant, even though they are used constantly for the comfort, sustenance, and betterment of the occupant. And certainly no one would ever think that the occupant was the stairways which went up and down, from basement to first floor to second floor to attic, or even from doorways to driveway and sidewalk and patio. The occupant is none of these things, in part, of course, because the occupant isn't a "thing" and therefore can never be one. It is true, however, that the occupant could not long survive without a house of some sort, be it this one we are speaking of, or some other shelter.

But the house and the occupant do share one commonality: they both will someday cease to be. Both will pass away. The occupant, who was not the house, will die; and the house, who was not the occupant, will burn down or molder down or be torn down or undergo some other such ending. All will be gone. All the pieces and parts of our lovely story gone into dust and ashes. All of them gone as pieces, anyway. What is and always will be is what neither the house nor the occupant, as separate entities, ever was. What is and is ever to be is home ... the joy-giving, rest-filled, and light-bearing presence within experience of the reality of "home." What is, is the translation of passing tangibles into the eternal. What is, is the fusing of occupant and house into one that is neither, but both together. What is, is a story about an occupant and a house that, in truth, is really a story resurrection bodies and the kingdom of God, as in "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as in Heaven." Or so it seems to me anyway.

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

There's a great deal of conversation these days about the nature of human consciousness and, as a related issue, about the true definition of "human" and how it can be best described. There's so much such conversation, in fact, that it is essentially impossible (especially in my business, Lord knows) to avoid getting sucked into it, whether as an active participant or simply as a passive, and sometimes unwilling, hearer.

The question -- or questions, though I don't think the two can be separated -- of human consciousness and of the actual structure of the human as a being lies at the base of  religion as surely and deftly as the soil embraces and sustains a living tree. As a result, ours is hardly the first time in human history that the question(s) has been asked and, temporarily at least, answered. Descartes's famous "Cogito ergo sum" stands as a prime example of an earlier, albeit transitory, solution. The difference between our asking and the asking of five centuries ago is that we in the 21st century now have a body of physical science far in excess of anything earlier periods of history could have ever even dreamed of, much less enjoyed.

Everything from cognitive science to artificial intelligence to nanotechnology, from human physiology to neurobiology to neurosurgery, from quantum theories of consciousness to mechanistic psychology ... each of them, along with the disciplines related to, or descended from them, contributes on an almost hourly basis to our bank of sheer physical information. We know "how" mentation works ... or we are well on our way to knowing with considerable precision the first steps toward mapping how a great deal of it works; and there is every reason to assume we will be closer tomorrow than we are today to fathoming the mechanics of human thought. The question, in other words, increasingly is not how the human animal thinks and/or develops an autobiographical self, but rather the question is what is that "self" and how is it related to, or identical with, the human being.

The presence of the question and the myriad of theories swarming around it like bees to the flower pot have led to an increasing, and a certainly invigorated, atheism that is itself by way of becoming a serious religion, having all the hallmarks by which a religion can objectively be delineated. That development is ironic enough to amuse me at times and passingly, but it also has a popular appeal that deeply troubles me.

There is a distinct difference between the skin or peel of the peach and the germ of the peach resting interior to its pit and being the life that will make another tree after the peach itself is destroyed. Science, child of religion and gift of God to our lives, can tell us grand things about the peach's exterior, about the chemicals used by it and needed by it, about its proper care, about the adjustments possible in enhancing its flavor or appeal, about increasing its longevity after picking and its resistance to the bruises of being shipped. Science can tell us all of these things; and if we're smart, we'll accept and employ every one of them. Science cannot tell us what it is that the peach's germ contains. Science cannot show us the life there. It never will be able to, nor should we ever expect it to do so.

What we should be smart enough to understand, however, is that the peach itself has to die to get at the pit and the kernel it contains. The peach we know and the peach we can describe and the peach we can more or less understand, but the peach we will either toss out or eat and then evacuate into the sewer line. It was never about the peach. It was always about the germ.

Confusing the two can lead to a lot of foggy thinking and, as a result, to a lot of bombast and hot air, but all the rhetorical gymnastics in the world can neither make the peach eternal nor define the vita et spiritus in its germ.

And that's my greeting from The Farm In Lucy on this bright Sabbath morning, where the peaches are plump and juicy and where my heart, as well as my tongue, delights in them. 

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

One of the great recent joys of my life has been a thing called "Beer and Bible," which happens every other Tuesday night at a small neighborhood pub in Memphis called, appropriately enough, Kudzu's. Kudzu, our bar's namesake, is the South's most ubiquitous form of plant life. It vines its way over almost everything else in sight, giving a vitality and lushness to landscapes that by this time of year would otherwise be sere and faded in our extreme southern heat. Kudzu's, the pub, is a lot like kudzu the plant. It gives vitality and cool to a lot of landscapes that might otherwise have wilted from the heat or just from life in general.

I had heard of Kudzu's over the years, but because it is in Memphis and Sam and I are not, we had never frequented it. But then last May, a call came. There was a group of regulars at Kudzu's who had been kicking around some God-talk for a while.  They'd begun to call the thing "Beer and Bible," though most of them were drinking whiskey or wine, but would I be at all interested in just stopping by one late afternoon during happy hour to let us all talk together about some things that interested them?

You've got to be kidding. Would I be interested? Interested doesn't even begin to touch what I would be and was and, these three months later, still am. We've kicked around everything from hell to salvation, Christianity to Zoroastrianism, the relative validity of experiential truth to that of empirical truth, etc., etc.

There are usually eight or nine of us regulars around the table at Kudzu's on Beer and Bible Tuesdays. Sometimes there are more of us than that, of course, and sometimes we are joined by an in-house "visitor" or two who hear our racket, leave their barstools to eavesdrop, and -- inevitably -- join us. We've had a preacher or two come by to try to figure out what we're up to, and even a trained theologian or two. But by and large, we are just finding our way toward a form of being together that has no pre-existing aims and certainly no set pattern to follow or expectations to fulfill. I can say, however, that in all my years as a professional religionist, I have never heard theology more earnestly or more intelligently talked than it is at Kudzu's.

I spend a lot of my professional time studying and lecturing about 21st century Christianity -- how it got where it is, what in fact it is, where it's going. And one of the things that people are most troubled about as I go around the country speaking is the patent decline in church membership per se as well as in church attendance. It would irreparably offend most of those distressed people if I were to say to them, face-to-face, that the church is not necessarily in churches anymore. In fact, church is increasingly more active and fully present in places other than sacred buildings than it is in them. But I can say so here.

I can say here what I know to be true: Christianity has never been more alive and vigorous than it is right here and right now. And Kudzu's is but one of thousands of  vibrant proofs that that is so. The kingdom of God comes in many forms and many places these days, and what I really want to say is, "Thanks be to God!"

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

Next Wednesday is the Feast of the Transfiguration. What that means is that next Wednesday is a major holy day for Christians like me who fall into what is commonly referred to as the "liturgical" category of the faith. That rather ponderous label is a sobriquet of sorts for those of us who are Anglicans or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and like to have history and the ancient traditions of the early church ever-present in, and informing of, our worship in the here and now.

By and large, our penchant for ceremony and antiquity makes for a more colorful form of Christian worship than is observed in non-liturgical services. It also makes for considerably more drama. It's the drama that makes my heart sing ... not only the drama of liturgical services, but also the fact that liturgical congregations are always inclined toward employing drama to enhance worship, deepen commitment, and increase their own experience and perception of the faith, as well as that of others.

For us, the Feast of the Transfiguration is one of the church's 12 Great Feast Days. That is, it's right on up there with the Nativity [Christmas] and the Feast of the Resurrection [Easter,] at least in religious terms, if not popular or cultural ones. It calls us to remember the apex or culminating event of Jesus' public life in which, on a mountaintop and in full view of Peter, James, and John, Jesus was transfigured into a radiance beyond their later description. Moses and Elijah were also present during the Transfiguration itself, one on either side of him; and even as the gathered apostles watched, a bright cloud overshadowed them and a voice, speaking from the cloud, said, "This is my son, the Beloved; and with him I am well pleased. Listen to him." From that moment on, the course of history was set and, in many ways, the church was born.

The Greek word used in the New Testament accounts of the events on the Mount of the Transfiguration is metamorphothe. While the ages have translated that word as transfigured, it actually comes closer to conveying something English can't quite convey. It wants to say something like "changed shape and beingness and allness into some other form thereof," or something equally awkward and wordy. What happened, in other words and in the fullest sense, was a "metamorphosis," which again is Greek and again has no really clear or felicitous analog in English.

That very impossibility of language, its very failure to convey some substances, its fractures and chips as a vessel for meaning have, over the years, come to be for me the central wonder of the Feast of the Transfiguration. Being convicted of something one can neither own nor ingest, articulate nor incarnate, is itself a glory beyond our grasping, whether we be ancient apostles or God's newest converts ... which says to me that the great truth of next Wednesday's Feast of the Transfiguration just may be that experiencing God always lies just beyond the reach of articulated theology, and never within it.

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

Folks in my line of work ... i.e., writers in the field of religion ... do a lot of talking and lecturing during the fall, winter, and spring months when schools are in session and everyone more or less agrees that vacation time is over and done with for another year. Why exactly it is that the school year still determines vacation and play time for the whole of society has never been terribly clear to me, but I do recognize the immutability of the system.

During the summer months, however, when no one wants a lecture-series or special week-ends of emphasis or whatever, the job description for my tribe changes from writer and speaker to homilist ... or it does, if one knows how to make that transition. I, unfortunately, will never make a preacher, much less a homilist. I'll talk to any body of still bodies, and with real pleasure in the doing of it, but preach I can't. Instead, I tell stories, which is a round-about way of saying that I manage still to do something much nearer to a lecture than a homily ever will be.

Last Sunday, pray God, was my last this summer for playing the role of pseudo- or faux-homilist. Most of the clergy folk I know are now settling back into place and gearing up for the year ahead. Now normally, I would be sighing a sigh of relief, wiping my brow dramatically, and settling in to the usual late-July/early August pattern of preparing for September and the lecture trail. For some reason, though, I have not been able to do that this past week, and I think my hang-up has to do with last Sunday's story.

For years, I have said to publishers that someone needs to put out a volume of Bible Stories Your Mother Never Told You, a collection of stories about the grit and the realism and grandeur of the Bible as it is, not as we have sanitized and trimmed it to be. But there is also another book I have only recently begun to say needs badly to be written. That one is a collection of all the Bible Stories Your Mother Should Have Told You To Read.

The most dangerous thing that can happen to a religion, much less to those who follow it, is for that religion to become socially acceptable. Once that initially-welcomed shift in cultural acceptance has occurred, so too has the process of secularization, accommodation, and enculturation begun. Probably the most tragic and complete example of that progression in all of human history is the evolution of Christianity in the West after Constantine. And always, the thing above all others that must be debilitated or deactivated in such a process is the stories that have carried the faith and melded the community of believers into a body of the faithful.

Story is a function of time ... or Time, if that is a clearer naming of the thing. Story requires memory, and memory requires time. Story, not thinking, is the thing that separates us from the other creatures with whom we share the universe. It is not only that we have to retain and readily access the past, but also that we have to be able to access or conceptualize a future, if we are to live in time. And the minute we do those things, we have story. Not fact, but story. Persuade us, though, that facts are real in terms of Now and stories are ephemera of Elsewhere and Whenever, and we fall rudderless into a sea of roiling and disconnected events.

In order to enculturate or assimilate a religion completely, therefore, a social unit must be very sure to accomplish two things: it must suppress the bulk of the religion's not-so-nice stories; and it must somehow manage to domesticate the embedded stories that are too gripping or -- even worse -- are in violation of the society's worldview, common good, and general stability. Bible stories like that of Tamar or Jephthah's daughter fall in the first category, but Daniel in the lions' den or Noah and his ark fall into the second.

It was the story of Noah and his ark that I told last Sunday and that has played in my head all this whole week since. Noah, who was the first vintner ... a very noble acquisition of skills, may I add, and much appreciated, at least at our house.  Noah, who was the first to whom God gave animal flesh to eat, rather than simple grains and vegetables ... not so universally lauded at our place.

Noah, to whom the Noachide Covenant or the Seven Laws of Noah were given and upon which, on March 20, 1991, the Congress of the United States was pleased to proclaim, as signed by President Bush, that this country was founded.

Noah, who rode the waves of shift from pre-history into the general configuration of the earth as we know it. Noah, whose actions opened up the way for the creation of the doctrine of the Righteous Gentile.

Noah, whose name itself means "comfort" or "relief" and at whose birth it was said that he would grant surcease to people in our kind's toils upon a cursed earth. Noah, whose faith through the 40 days of rain and the 40 days of waiting in the water for a dove to return, pre-figured Moses' passage through the waters of the Red Sea and Israel's 40 years in the wilderness, and the baptism of Messiah followed immediately by his own 40 days of torment in the desert. That Noah, whose passage is re-enacted at the baptism of every Christian.

That Noah, who is not a fact or a non-fact or even anywhere in the neighborhood of that  construct of human function. Noah who dwells in story and is therefore. Noah who should never have been reduced to a child's toy or a silly rhyme about a floody-floody for children of the Lord. Noah whose grandeur and drama haunt me this Sabbath morning, for he stretches from then to here and from there to me. I am glad this Lord's Day for his abiding presence; and I am glad beyond all saying for the Story.

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

A Sunday or two ago, I made mention of -- more to the truth, wrote a whole "Summer Sundays" entry more or less about -- the canonical Jesus, thereby raising a small bevy of questions and responses and polite "say-what's?" I could not be more delighted. But delighted or not, I also feel some obligation to make my case.

All of us who were reared in modernity and/or in the afterwash of its ways of conceptualizing, have known the impact of modernism. In few areas of life has that impact been more keenly felt by Christians than in discussions of "Jesus Studies" or, as it is sometimes more popularly known, of "the quest for the historical Jesus." That is to say that many of the intellectual tools and much of the sophisticated technology of modernity, in addition to its conceptual principles, a lot of brilliant thinking, and a world's worth of patient research, have been brought to bear over the last century or so on the study of just who Jesus of Nazareth was.

The bulk of the questions have focused upon what he supposedly did and/or did not say and upon whether or not he was or was not accurately portrayed by those who became the church. Those questions have assumed from the start that the Jesus of the canonical gospels might well be a man-made or human-shaped figure different from the actual or historical creature who at one time lived among us. Working from that assumption, it should be no surprise that the Jesus who has emerged from all of this professional scholarship and lay furor is as multiform and various as the scholars and concerned laity who have engaged the quest. The end result, in fact, of our dozen or so decades of scratching through history is such a multiplicity of Jesuses that one has to say, "Whoa! Let's just hold up here a minute and think this thing through a bit more clearly."

Story, perhaps, is better than intellectual argument in this kind of process. Accordingly, I wrote a small story some months ago, one that I want to re-run here today. I do so, of course, with apologies to those who may have heard it before, but also in the hope that even they will find it to be worth a few minutes this summer Sunday morning.

                                                   *   *   *   *   *

Let us suppose then. Let us suppose that there is a huge, deadly wreck on busy Main Street, USA, in the midst of midday traffic. There are, technically speaking, several hundred witnesses, albeit from very different perspectives. Some of the witnesses are immediate, so immediate in fact that two or three of them are wounded themselves by the flying glass and careening steel. Others are simply immediate enough to have been splattered by blood and dust and specks of oil. Not so immediate, but still close enough, are those who had to jump out of harm's way and, in doing so, dropped possessions or skinned a knee or simply got an adrenalin rush of significant proportions.

Other of those who saw had a less dramatic experience, of course. Some of them really did see, in that they were standing at the curb waiting for the light to change and saw the whole thing as if in slow motion. Others were walking in the direction from which the wreck came and likewise saw the whole thing, also as if in slow motion, albeit from a safer distance. Some witnesses, of course, only "saw" the deadly accident in the loosest sense of saw. That is, the space between the sound of the crash in progress and their turning their heads to look was no more than a nano-second, or so it seemed. For some even, the screeching of tires laying down rubber was so dramatic that they turned and, in point of fact, really did "see" the wreck itself, although they hardly could be said to have "seen" the whole thing, since they witnessed only its final act of culmination.

And then, of course, there are all the window-gawkers ... the office workers who leaned out from the windows of all the surrounding buildings that line Main Street. Or the store personnel who came running out of the street-level shops and commercial businesses. And there's a couple of cops who were cruising in the opposite direction away from the wreck and therefore did not really "see" it at all, except that their deep experience with wrecks let them respond almost instantaneously, just at it allowed them to reconstruct what logically must have happened and include it in their report of the wreck itself.

Assume, then, that we have some several hundred good citizens -- maybe even some not-so-good ones and a few outright liars, thieves, and ne're-do-wells on Main Street. Each of them, from the purest to the most nefarious, now has a wreck in his or her head. Each of them -- it is one of the surest bets in this gossipy world -- each of them is going to tell some other human being about this phenomenal wreck, at some point at some time over the coming hours, days, weeks, and years. Maybe even, he or she will tell several someones, And what they are all telling is true. A wreck happened at midday on Main Street, USA. Yet for every witness, that wreck is distinct, is different, is so nuanced that there are as many wrecks as there are witnesses. Oh, the tales will, in all probability, share a common thread, but they will also contain some inconsistencies and some contradictions amongst them.

Yet the truth in all of this -- the one "fact" in it all -- is that each witness, bearing home his or her story of disaster on Main Street, is reporting the actual wreck. All of them who seek to speak the truth of what they witnessed are indeed speaking the truth. The inconsistencies and contradictions amongst their various stories, were we to collect those tales into some kind of whole, would not be erroneous or deliberated distortions or violations of fact. They would be honest and true reports of what happened, because what happened did happen within the vitality and experience of each tale's teller.

Now good and honest men and women are on the horns of a dilemma. We have the expertise of the police who have brought their training to bear on what will become the more or less official assessment of what happened. In addition, we have all the technology and brilliance of accident-reconstruction specialists who, by studying the lay-down of debris and tracks and the pressure required for such impact and the points of primary as opposed to secondary and tertiary impact can be reasonably certain about what or who hit what or whom first. They can even reconstruct enough to establish with some confidence which actions had to proceed which other actions in order to culminate in the impact in the first place.

All of this is absorbing. It can occupy the news media for weeks and conversation for a lifetime. It can cause consternation among those accused and angst among those deemed to have been not at fault. Reams and reams of paper, billions and billions of pixels, yards and yards of documentation, not to mention several hundred thousand dollars, will be spent in pursuit of the facts about this wreck on Main Street.

And when it is all over, when all is said and done by expert or ordinary citizen, the only absolutely certain thing ... the only "fact" beyond conceivable question ... is that there was a wreck one day on Main Street, USA, and that there was some take-away. We will never know the sum total of all the facts about the wreck nor will be ever know all of its specific details. What we have -- and all we have -- is the actuality of the wreck and the burgeoning largesse of lives changed in some greater or lesser way by their engagement with the wreck itself or with its story.

                                                            *   *   *   *   *

A parable always reveals itself early-on in its telling, as we all know. And as I said in the beginning, I tell you this dangerous tale on a mid-summer Sunday morning for a reason. That is, it was, and still is, the way of modernism to believe that there is some means by which to reconstruct and define, with detail, atemporal constancy, and specificity, the facts and truths about the wreck on Main Street. It is the way of post-modernity to doubt -- almost to disparage, in fact -- the possibility of that absolute position. Rather, what we really have here, despite all our analyses and probing, the post-modernist might well argue, is access to only one truth: There was once a wreck and, from the instant of its occurrence, it existed only in the actuality of hundreds and hundreds of people and in their engagement of it. The wreck, from its moment of impact, is as multiform, and all of its presentations as distinct and different, as are the hundreds and hundreds of individual universes in which the actuality of it now lives. The post-modernist would argue, in other words, that we should be leery of assuming that contradictions and inconsistencies are anything other than the evidence that things really are as they are when observed ... that potentially light is a wave and light is a particle. It just depends on who is watching.

Let us go forth, then, you and I, and enjoy to its fullest this lovely summer morning but may the wreck and its story also bother every one of us this whole day through. Because the operative truth here is that every single one of us, alive in 2008 and claiming Christianity as our belief system, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks about the wreck and all the words said about it. In other words, every single one of us, if we live another decade or so, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks not only about the crash, 2,000 years ago, of Messiah into space/time but also about how we understand and engage the records of that event that have come to us over the centuries. Pray God we do it well.

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis to participate in a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's final post, "The Bible Says Poverty and Morality are Connected"

The problem with using the Bible as the basis for running a society is that it would always be somebody's interpretation of the Bible, and a worst-case scenario is that it might be your interpretation, Mr. Klinghoffer.

I too have read and studied the Bible all of my life, and I just can't recognize the Bible in so much of what you have said in our "dialogue." I really work at finding common ground with people across the political spectrum on moral issues that transcend ideology and politics. But we have been unable to find much common ground in this dialogue. I still find many of the things you have said absolutely astonishing.

I still can't get over your contention that most of what the Bible says about the poor doesn't apply to America because our poor people are so well-off here. I replied that most Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis that I know would find that statement incredulous, but got no direct reply from you. In your latest post you say, in an equally unbelievable way, that wealth is the most consistent test of whether a society is righteous in God's eyes. I read the Hebrew prophets in a totally different way -- that the best test of a nation's righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable. That is always how God judges a society. Read Isaiah, Amos, and Micah.

Then you say that war is just a "tool of statecraft." Really? The Hebrew scriptures warn against militarism -- "not trusting in horses and chariots" -- and Jesus calls we Christians to be peacemakers and love our enemies. In fact, you note in your book Christians who believe that:

Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites, among others, can point to the teachings not only of Jesus himself but of ancient and medieval sages -- Tertullian, Origen, Francis of Assisi, Menno Simons, down to a twentieth-century figure like Thomas Merton.

It's interesting that "Jesus himself" and the earliest church fathers were all opposed to war. So, what happened? You say, quite correctly, "With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (324 C.E.), all that changed." Indeed, it did. And you then cite such esteemed theologians as Oliver Cromwell and Gen. George S. Patton. When you say in your latest post that war is merely the normal tool of statecraft, does that mean all wars? Every time a nation decides to go to war as an expression of its statecraft is justifiable? What about when one nation with Christians and Jews decides to go to war with another nation with Christians and Jews? Are both nations justified? Is there any religious critique or discrimination possible here? Let me guess: You support all the wars America has fought. I could never get you to tell me what you think about the war in Iraq.

I could go on, issue after issue, but I don't think that would be productive. We just disagree, profoundly, on what biblical imperatives suggest about society and politics. I am very glad that America has a separation of church and state and that people who would prefer a more theocratic vision of society (as I interpret you to prefer) don't get to run things they way they would like. We both have to convince our fellow citizens that what we believe is best for the common good. That's a good thing, and I welcome that debate. Thanks for this one.

As a convert to Orthodox Christianity, I have come to appreciate the strong connection in our tradition between spirituality and creation. Many of our great feasts, minor celebrations, and daily prayers involve joining prayer, blessing, and the material world. Unlike Western Christians who remember the three kings on Jan. 6, 13 days after Christmas we celebrate Theophany, the feast of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. Part of this feast includes blessing water in our churches or processing to a nearby pond, sea, or ocean where a priest will toss a cross into the water, transforming the whole body into a holy water font. We annually commemorate our loved ones who have fallen asleep in the Lord by making and blessing koliva -- boiled wheat with fruit, sugar, and spices. The wheat recalls the words of Christ, that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain," while the cinnamon, clove, and pomegranate remind us of the sweetness of the resurrection to come. And each liturgical day begins in the evening with vespers and the chanting of Psalm 102, a hymn of the goodness of the natural world: "The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which he planted, where the birds make their nests ...."

Because of this intertwining of spirituality and sacred materialism, environmental awareness can be easily encouraged by our spiritual leaders. His Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I (whom The Guardian has named "The 'pope' of hope" and elsewhere has been called the "green patriarch") in particular has become a leader among clergy who are dedicated to rallying people of faith to care for the environment. He has organized environmentally responsible cruises for political leaders, journalists, and scientists on the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the Amazon river in an effort to use his ecclesial rank to change attitudes and policies related to the environment. The patriarch also gave new significance to Sept. 1, our church new year, by calling for prayer and supplication for the environment on this day.

In his book Encountering the Mystery, the patriarch writes, "In the Orthodox liturgical perspective, creation is received and conceived as a gift from God. The notion of creation-as-gift defines our Orthodox theological understanding of the environmental question in a concise and clear manner while at the same time determining the human response to that gift through the responsible and proper use of the created world. Each believer is called to celebrate life in a way that reflects the words of the Divine [Eucharistic] Liturgy: 'Thine own from Thine own we offer to Thee, on behalf of all and for all.'"

Abayea Pelt is the office manager and receptionist for Sojourners.

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis to participate in a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's latest post, "What Are God's Real Politics?"

You asked for specific issues from a Biblical perspective.

Let's start with idolatry. I agree with your definition that it is "setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation, of God." But you then turn it into a partisan polemic against the Democratic Party, and what you call its "aggressive secularism" and "classic pagan hallmarks." I do not agree that the "chief crisis that any would-be political leader today needs to address" is the idolatry of secularism. The far greater crisis is those who call themselves Christians (or Jews), but put other loyalties ahead of their loyalty to God

The reality is that the idolatries that rule in the U.S. include nationalism, materialism, racism - ideologies that compete with the rule of God and for the loyalties of people of faith.

I've told the story many times about when I was in seminary, and our group of students did a thorough study to find every verse in the Bible that dealt with the poor. We looked for every reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and oppression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God We found several thousand verses in the Bible on the poor and God's response to injustice. We found it to be the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures--the first was idolatry, and the two often were related.

On Bush's "idolatries." I recount in God's Politics how often George W. Bush has confused the American nation with the people and the purposes of God in his use of Scripture, hymns, and his calls to arms in his war against terrorism. I do believe that Bush's theology has led to disastrous consequences and has embarrassed American Christianity and damaged our image around the world.

On same-sex marriage. I believe in equal protection under the law in a democratic, pluralistic society for gay people and everybody else. Some would debate whether civil unions are necessary for that, or whether other legal protections are adequate. And that's a fair discussion. But, I have consistently said that I don't think the sacrament of marriage between a man and a woman should be changed.

On abortion. I have repeatedly said that I believe abortion is wrong and always a moral tragedy. The number of unborn lives that are lost every year is alarming. But I also do not believe that the best way to change that is to criminalize abortions and just force them underground. The question is how can we actually prevent unwanted pregnancies, protect unborn lives, support low-income women, offer compassionate alternatives to abortion, make adoption much more accessible and affordable, carefully fashion reasonable restrictions, and thus dramatically reduce the shamefully high abortion rate in America? You say you want to respect the will of the people. Well, every opinion poll shows the same thing - substantial majorities think that there are too many abortions and that we should pursue measures to reduce and restrict the number, but they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade.

Finally, on poverty. You say that we can agree that some needs should be addressed by government. But in your book, you say that "I can find nowhere in the Scripture where the state is commanded to extend generosity to the impoverished." I suppose it depends on how you define "the state." It was very different in ancient Israel before the monarchy, but the Bible is full of laws that govern leaving the corners of fields unharvested, not shaking olive trees and grapevines a second time, the Jubilee year of redistribution - all aimed at compelling those who "had" to hand over some of their plenty to those who did not. And there are laws governing fair wages (think minimum wage), unfair interest rates (think outlawing payday lending), and other ways of ensuring some degree of economic justice. It's the gap between the rich and the poor which seems to most concern the prophets and reducing the economic chasm is a priority for them.

Then, in perhaps the most outrageous statement in your book, you say that "It is debatable whether the Bible's many admonitions to care for the poor really apply today, in the United States, other than to a relatively small group of people." Do you really believe that trying to support a family of four on $20,000 a year (the official poverty measure) isn't really poverty? Thirty-seven million people living below the poverty line is not a small group. I couldn't believe your statement when I read it this week. And it tells me that you have never lived in a poor neighborhood or had any poor people as your friends. Do you see the news these days, with stories of families having to choose between paying the rent or buying food, between keeping the electricity on or buying needed medications? And what about all the children who are poor, and even hungry, in America. Do you think that it is all just their fault? Do I need to tell you the heartbreaking stories of what happens to families in the poorest neighborhoods in Washington DC where I have lived for three decades? There is real and painful poverty in the U.S. today, David, and the Bible's admonitions certainly do apply. And frankly, most all the rabbis that I have been blessed to know over many years would completely disagree with you on this. Your incredible statement about the biblical imperatives not applying to the poor in your country makes me think that we will never agree on very much about what the Bible says about politics.

Finally, who I personally vote for is not the issue. In our work, we have successfully worked across the aisle on a number of issues. On TANF (welfare reform) reauthorization, we convened a group of senior Republican and Democratic staff to work on a bipartisan approach. We worked with former Republican Senator Rick Santorum on the CARE Act, supported the direction of his Republican anti-poverty platform, and several other measures. My closest friend in the U.S. Senate for many years was former Senator Mark Hatfield, Republican from Oregon. Sadly, I have not been very enthusiastic about the voting choices we have had in many recent elections. But what says more about my politics are the causes and movements which have compelled my time and energy. It's not who I may vote for, but who I work with as allies toward common ground and common goals.

One of Jesus' most in-your-face stories, and a personal favorite of mine, is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager in Luke 16. I would loosely paraphrase its central insight as follows: "If you have the sense God gave a dog, you will realize that you can't hold onto money very long anyway, but you can keep the friends you make by giving it to those in need. You do the math." The passage doesn't say anything about burning sulfur, just about priorities and how to take the long view.

An attractive feature of this parable is that it sets a really low bar for divine commendation. The manager doesn't have sense enough to stay out of trouble to begin with. What's more, even after he has his "friends are friends forever" epiphany, he starts backsliding almost at once: He quickly gives his master's first debtor a 50% markdown, but for debtor number two the manager gets pointlessly stingy and only takes off 20%. He still gets praise for knowing what side his bread is buttered on.

And, because the kingdom of God is so often about taking things way over the top, the final verses go on to radically redefine what honesty and faithfulness are. Good stewardship is supposed to be about accurate accounting and careful saving, right? Not here. Money is inherently "dishonest," and impromptu unauthorized debt forgiveness is "faithfulness." (In fact, the master fires the manager before even seeing his accounting - the grounds for dismissal appear to have been less fiscal irresponsibility and more that he made enemies willing to accuse him).

The Protestant Work Ethic is not invited to this party, and you can virtually hear the groans of the prodigal son's responsible brother if he happens to look ahead from his seat in chapter 15.

Despite this parable, other parts of the Bible suggest to me that it's reasonable to save something for retirement. But I want to combine this conventional form of stewardship with long-view social accounting, which is why I'm excited about the special Web extra to our May issue about faith and finances. In it, my colleague Julie has accumulated a heaping helping of Web sites that can help you figure out how and where to invest retirement savings for the common good (and also where to free your mind with Bible study, teach your teenage kids about money, and plan - and pray over - your household budget).

Check it out – and e-mail it to a friend to share the abundance!

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

[Continued from part 1]

I pondered what I might offer to spotlight the significance of such a dialogue and the future it foretells. Then I ran across this exegesis of Luke's account of the evening of Jesus' resurrection. It's by Debbie Blue.

With the wryest of humor, Blue contextualizes the two men walking the road to Emmaus, which may be tantamount to saying they were heading nowhere fast, considering scholars haven't been able to confirm the existence of an actual town named Emmaus. (What an amazing metaphor for our despair in the face of suffering, and the difficulty of being reconciled to each other and God afterwards.) The two men meet a stranger along the way who asks them why they are aggrieved. Their response is to almost reprimand the stranger's cluelessness: "Do you not know what happened this weekend. We lost hope." To which the stranger replies with reciprocal exasperation, "Did you not know that the whole story has been driving toward this irredeemable act of shared suffering—the death of God—so that the unprecedented hope of resurrection might come?"

Blue says it this way:

Jesus is like, 'Fools and slow of hear to believe. Can't you see that this all had to happen: that the mechanisms of the social order that lead to violence had to be undone, the self-deceptive and ferocious need to make ourselves out as innocent, the rat race, the ladder climbing, the fear of a violent God who demands blood and vengeance? Can't you see that all that had to be undone? You're free! Quit holding onto the bars and rattling them. The cage doors are open; walk out.' Jesus comes back from a wholly different place than they've ever been, and he walks right up to them and he reveals a whole new story. [Yet they don't recognize it.]

He walks with them, and they stop just shy of nowhere. And Jesus doesn't lecture them, judge them, condemn them, dislike them. He doesn't express a sense of betrayal and disappointment. He doesn't talk about how hopeless and ugly the whole lot of humanity is. He breaks bread. And he feeds them. And he tells them to go out and preach mercy to the world.

He becomes present to these people, people totally caught up, as we all are, in the reigning social, political and economic structures, in order to help them see or live or feel an alternative—to help them die and live again. He becomes present so that little by little they will be enabled to walk out of the cages… So that they might be able to tell new stories instead of the same old predictable stories…

The bread has been broken and the bread's been blessed. It may not seem like it, but we're free to get off the road and eat.

Ehrman and Wright may have very different ideas of what suffering in life means and address it with different hopes of what is to come. But like Brian McLaren, I too am immensely glad both men have entered into dialogue—giving us a beautiful example of how to jump off the road to Emmaus, share a meal with a stranger and write new, life-giving stories together.

Melvin Bray is a devoted husband, committed father, learner, teacher, writer, storyteller, lover of people, connoisseur of creativity, seeker of justice, purveyor of sustainability and believer in possibilities. As founder of Kid Cultivators, he lives, loves, works and dreams with friends in Atlanta, Georgia.

As did Brian McLaren, I recently read the conversation between N. T. Wright and Bart Ehrman, hosted by Beliefnet. I must admit my incredible bias upfront. I have a deep appreciation for Tom Wright and was embarrassingly quite ignorant of Bart Ehrman. Wright had given me the language and academic credibility for a narrative theology at which I had arrived serendipitously. I had long appreciated Wright for challenging the Christian tradition to reckon with the contextual realities that shape biblical claims. Although my faith may require less now in terms of traditional apologetic constructions to substantiate it, I am grateful for Wright's insistence on intellectual honesty when interpreting scripture.

But I was immediately captivated by Ehrman's story. It was the best thing he could have done for me. While a fan and student of the quality of thinking that Wright epitomizes, I adamantly believe that everyone has the right to tell his/her own story.

Ehrman's concern for the pain of others, sounding very Jesus-like, completely resonated with me over the course of the first three postings. But then Wright's comments took a turn that was seemingly unexpected for Ehrman. Wright introduced resurrection as God's unprecedented response to suffering that, in a linear sense, infuses the pain of suffering with a promise that heretofore had not existed. Wright's insistence on the significance of resurrection is not landmark within the Christianity, but his understanding of resurrection is somewhat different from what has come to be viewed as traditional. From that point on, Wright's conversation took a trajectory that embraced the legitimacy of suffering but asserted that it was not the end of the story. Ehrman, however, continued to make his case against the church's traditional and, for Ehrman, insufficient or contradictory explanations of suffering. It seemed as if he could not hear Wright's disassociation from penal-substitution as the only way to tell the story of God at work in the world.

There is a quite subtle form of intellectual dishonesty that dismisses others concerns and insists on making parallel presentations that are not open to conversational refinement. I did not get the sense that this was what Ehrman was doing. Rather Ehrman seemed so used to hearing the language Wright uses (the basic claims of Christianity) aligned in such a way as to bracket out any possibilities except the party line, that he did not appear to recognize that it was not happening quite that way this time.

My heart ached over the experiences Ehrman must have suffered that make his expectations and response ever so reasonable. I wonder how many others have grown accustomed to having their concerns bracketed out of the Christian conversation.

[to be continued...]

Melvin Bray is a devoted husband, committed father, learner, teacher, writer, storyteller, lover of people, connoisseur of creativity, seeker of justice, and believer in possibilities. As founder of Kid Cultivators, he lives, loves, and dreams with friends in Atlanta, Georgia.

It's true that the blogosphere has created space for some truly unremarkable interchanges to take place. You can't call them conversations or dialogues, both of which imply the occurrence of actual communication. I guess "mutual flaming" would be more descriptive.

But sometimes the blogosphere is used for substantive dialogue, and when that happens, it should be celebrated. A case in point - the recent Beliefnet dialogue between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright on the existence of evil. Both have written books on the subject.

Ehrman, an Evangelical Christian in his younger years, describes how in later adulthood his faith became a casualty of his inability to reconcile the world's heinous suffering with the existence of a gracious and good God. N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop and scholar, responds.

This "blogalogue" isn't a debate: there is no winner, except those who read and gain insight from the dialogue partners - both in the substance of their comments and in their mutually respectful mode of discourse.

My favorite line from N.T. Wright:

... once God decides (with the call of Abraham) to work to address the problem of evil through people who are part of the problem as well as part of the solution, there is going to be an awful lot of messiness, which will reach its climax when God not only gets his feet muddy with the mess of the world but his hands bloody with the nails of the world.

My favorite line from Bart Ehrman:

The issue of human suffering is not a logical problem to be solved or some kind of mathematical equation. It is a human problem that requires empathy, sympathy, emotional involvement, and action.

In the end, Ehrman makes this proposal:

Even if we cannot, in the end, know the reasons for suffering, we can at the least have appropriate responses to it. We ourselves can feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked; we can work to solve problems of poverty; we can give money to agencies finding cures for cancer and AIDS; we can volunteer more often locally; we can give more to international relief efforts. We can, in fact, fulfill the urgent demands implicit in Matthew's account of the judgment between the sheep and the goats, for "as you have done this to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me.

On this a proponent of Christian faith and a former proponent can agree, thanks be to God! And so may we all ...

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) serves as Board Chair for Sojourners. He is an author and speaker (deepshift.org). His most recent books include Everything Must Change (2007) and Finding Our Way Again (2008).

Jim Wallis, in his book The Great Awakening said,

Imagine something called Justice Revivals in the powerful tradition of revivals past, but focusing on the great moral issues of our time. Imagine linking the tradition of Billy Graham with the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Imagine a new generation of young people catching fire and offering their gifts, talents, and lives in a new spiritual movement for social justice. Imagine such revivals taking place in cities’ great convention centers, but resulting in thousands of small groups for ongoing discipleship, training, and action in every neighborhood of those cities. Imagine disillusioned believers coming back to faith after many years of alienation, while other seekers discover the power of faith for the first time. Imagine social movements rising out of spiritual revival and actually changing the wind of both our culture and our politics. Imagine a fulfillment in our time of the words of the prophet Amos: ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ Just imagine.

We plan on three nights of preaching and worship. Tonight, Wednesday, April 16, we will call people to make a commitment to Christ. Matt Redman, the writer of many of our worship songs, and his band will join us for worship. On Thursday night, we will call people to work for justice in the Central Ohio community and we will host the Raymond Wise Gospel Choir as our worship leaders. And on Friday night, we will focus on issues of global justice. Worship we will be led by Vineyard Columbus’ new worship pastor, Clarence Church, together with some worship leaders from other churches in Central Ohio.

Then on Saturday, thousands of members of Central Ohio churches will fan out into our community and to dozens of servant evangelism projects such as fixing up local schools, visiting nursing homes, and working on homes for Habitat for Humanity.

We have several goals that we hope to accomplish through the Justice Revival. First of all, we want to transform the public face of Christianity here in Central Ohio. I want our city to know that we followers of Jesus are not at war with our city. I want Christians to be Jeremiah 29:7 people, who “seek the peace and prosperity of the city [where we live] and pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, [we] too will prosper.”

I want hundreds of people to be saved through this Justice Revival and to come into fellowship with local churches throughout our community. I want to see churches across Central Ohio united in the practical service of our city and in reaching our city for Christ. Many of Columbus’ largest churches are already involved in helping to host this Justice Revival including First Church of God, Grove City Nazarene, Faith Ministries, Reynoldsburg United Methodist Church, First Community Church, Rhema Christian Center, and New Salem Baptist. We also have several other Vineyards involved.

We particularly want to call attention to the condition of children in our city by having local churches adopt local public schools for the purpose of mentoring kids. And we want to call attention to global issues of justice especially the Darfur, the tragedy of global sex trafficking, the 30,000 children a day who die of malnutrition and preventable diseases, and the billion people on our planet who live on less than $1 a day.

Through the Justice Revival we want to help redefine what it means to be a Christian disciple so that thousands of Christians will understand that they can’t be good followers of Jesus without also committing to Jesus’ agenda, which includes feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, giving care to the sick, and visiting the prisoner (Matthew 25:35-36).

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

Following the publication of The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail I received hordes of books critiquing Dawkins & Co. While most of the responses tended to veer off into Kirk Cameron country, I found a few gems such as John F. Haught's God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Following is an interview with Dr. Haught, senior fellow of Science & Religion at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Why do you call Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris softcore atheists?

Because they fail to probe deeply into the logical, ethical, and cultural implications of a consistent atheism. They think of belief in God more as a nuisance to be removed than as a stimulus to radical personal, cultural, and ethical upheaval. I contrast them with "hardcore" atheists—writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The latter all realized that atheism is not easy to pull off without seismic implications. As Sartre said, the road to atheism is "a cruel and long-range affair." The true atheist must be willing to risk madness (Nietzsche) and embrace the absurd (Camus). In my view, the hardcore atheists were not consistently atheistic either, but at least they attempted to think out what atheism would really mean if it were true.

How do you respond to the new atheists' claims that all faith is irrational?

They define faith very narrowly as "belief without evidence." To be rational, they claim, we must empty our minds of any ideas for which scientifically accessible "evidence" is in principle unavailable. Since religions can claim no such evidence, they must be irrational. However, the claim that science is the most authoritative way to truth is itself a belief without evidence. If all faith is irrational, then so is the new atheism, by definition.

How is intolerance of tolerance a truly novel feature to the new atheists' solution to the problems of human misery?

According to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, as soon as people embrace even the most innocent beliefs they are opening up a space in their minds for the eventual invasion of the most monstrous forms of religious lunacy (such as the ideas behind suicide bombings). So, to eliminate much human misery, let's get rid of faith altogether! Such intolerance of faith is by no means new. What is new is the new atheists' intolerance of the modern liberal principle that the faith of others should be respected. By respecting faith, they claim, we are all accomplices in evil. The irony here is that the new atheists seem to forget that the freedom to advance their own uncritical belief in scientism and scientific naturalism is also due to the modern liberal tolerance of "faith."

Why do you diagnose the new atheists as suffering from a bad case of explanatory monism?

Explanatory monism is the reductionist postulate that there is only one valid explanatory slot available to make sense of things. For example, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins assume that since we can now understand morality and religion in terms of evolutionary biology, theological explanation is superfluous. I argue instead that both theology and evolutionary science can contribute to our understanding.

Elaborate what you mean by this statement: "deepening of theology that has occurred in previous conceptions between serious atheists and Christians has little chance of happening in the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris?"

In God and the New Atheism I show that that the new atheists are as literalist in their understanding of scriptures and theology as are the anti-Darwinian religious fundamentalists they oppose. The level of challenge they pose to contemporary theology is glaringly low in comparison with serious atheists such as Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche who at least knew enough about religious thought to engage theologians of the stature of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, or Karl Rahner.

What are some ways we can create spaces for this serious dialogue to begin?

The new atheist phenomenon emerges from and appeals to a culture shaped in great measure by a noxious blend of poor science education with and equally undeveloped religious and theological education. There is greater need than ever today to improve both. Current interest in the science and religion dialogue is a hopeful development, but it needs to take place at every level of education, not least in seminaries and schools of theology.

Publishers Weekly cited Becky Garrison as one of "four evangelicals with fresh views" alongside Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne, and Ron Sider.

My dear friend, Ken Wilson, who pastors the Ann Arbor Vineyard, showed me a chart that I found very helpful:

What has happened in the last generation is that there has been border-blending among the four great movements in the church. So we find many evangelicals who feel very comfortable praying for the sick and casting out demons; and there are many evangelicals who engage in liturgical practices such as using the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in their devotional lives, etc.

But while there has been a huge move of border-blending, there are still many corner-dwellers, people who believe that it is entirely wrong for someone in their camp to engage in practices associated with one of the other three camps. Corner-dwellers get really mean and mad when we step out of our traditional boxes.

So, for example, some conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists get mean and mad when we claim to be evangelical, but we engage in border-blending with one of the other wings of the church. Like the Pharisees of Jesus'’ day, some angry corner-dwellers may set themselves up as the judge of what is biblical - like the Pharisees, they get really mad when we associate with “the wrong sort of people,” and, like the Pharisees, they are constantly looking for reasons to accuse border-blenders for our supposed theological errors.

I look forward to a day when an evangelical church that does a Justice Revival not only doesn’t create any controversy, but hardly raises an eyebrow. I look forward to a day when Christians who hear about a Justice Revival say: “So, what else is new? Of course, evangelical churches are involved in social justice. That is what Christian churches are supposed to do. We are supposed to follow Jesus, who is both the God of justification and the God of justice!”

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

In church one day, my pastor asked us to raise our hands if we believed in what the Bible said. The right answer seemed pretty obvious, and the whole congregation and I raised our hands. Then he asked us to raise our hand if we had read the Bible in its entirety. Touché, Pastor Sean. Touché.

In his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs lives as a biblical fundamentalist so you don't have to. Jacobs describes himself as "Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant" and seeks advice from rabbis, pastors, church members, historians, and textbooks on his quest to live the "ultimate Biblical life." The book chronicles his attempt to conform to the myriad rules found in the Bible (Don't wear mixed fibers! Be fruitful and multiply! Stone adulterers! Forgive!), and the results are often pretty funny. Yes, Jacobs sets out to lampoon Biblical fundamentalists, but by the end of his experiment he finds himself changed - he reveres life more, he is a better father, and he has more respect for people of faith. I picked up this book for laughs, but was surprised when I ended up quite touched by it. A.J. Jacobs writes with the tone of a friend, and when I finished the book I felt I had found a fellow believer (he now calls himself a "reverent agnostic") walking by my side.

By day 264, you warm up to Christian literalists as embodied by Dr. Tony Campolo and the Red Letter Christians. How did your year-long experiment affect your perception of Christian "fundamentalists", especially in contrast to how they are portrayed in mainstream media?

It changed it drastically. Like many Americans, I used to have an embarrassingly simplistic view of evangelical Christianity. I thought it was this monolithic movement where everyone walked in lock step with Pat Robertson. I figured almost all evangelical Christians were focused on the issues of homosexuality and abortion. I hadn't heard of the Red Letter Christians and their focus on poverty and the environment. I missed the complexity of evangelical Christianity, as does much of the media. It's sort of the equivalent of saying, 'Oh, James Taylor and Kid Rock are both rock musicians, so they're pretty much the same.'

You call your book a "(gentle) attack" on fundamentalism, as you set out to show how absurd and impossible it is to live a literally Biblical lifestyle without dropping out of general society. Is there anything that especially surprised or delighted you about following the rules? How about anything that really scared you?

So much surprised and delighted me. I fell in love with the Sabbath. I enjoyed the ban on gossiping (not that I was totally successful; I live in New York and I work in the media, so gossip is about as omnipresent as air). And here's an odd one: I liked following the second commandment literally: No making images. I took this to the limit. No turning on the TV, no watching DVDs, no photos, no doodles. And it turned out to be really helpful. I think our culture is too much in love with images. Everything is image-driven, and we're forgetting how to read. And there's something sacred about reading.

What scared me? I guess how easy it is to become self-righteous. I had to fight it every day.

On day 14, you crib a line from "Chariots of Fire" about feeling God's pleasure as you tithe to charities. Have you managed to maintain any of the Biblical practices from your experiment so that you can continue feeling "the warm ember that starts at the back of [your] neck?"

I do still try to do good works. I don't do as much as I should. And I don't tithe as strictly as I should - I'm down from 10 percent to maybe seven or eight percent. But I try. Because my Bible year taught me something that I wish I had known for the first 38 years of my life.

If you want to be happy, you should pursue OTHER people's happiness. You should do good things for others. It's a paradox, but it works. Being unselfish leads to selfish fulfillment.

Who would OT God vote for? Who would NT Jesus endorse?

Wasn't it a wise man named Jim Wallis who said that God was not a Republican or Democrat?

I do remember that part of the Old Testament where God is choosing whom to anoint as the next king of Israel. And a man named Jesse parades all his sons before the prophet Samuel. And Samuel sees the tallest son, Eliab and figured he will be the new leader.

"But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."

Which is good news for Dennis Kucinich. Too bad he dropped out.

But it does remind us: Look beyond the superficial.

You've given a lot of interviews for this book, most of which are on the web somewhere. Tell me something about you that I can't google.

I'll tell you all the answers to my four-year-old son's favorite questions. My favorite color is green. My favorite animal is a zebra. My favorite candy is caramel. And my favorite Dora character is probably Boots the Monkey. You won't find that on the Internet!

Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners. For more information on the book, click here.

Let me give you an illustration of the difference between the narrow focus of contemporary American evangelicalism and the big focus of the Bible.

D.L. Moody, the great 19th-century evangelist, described his calling and said that he essentially understood the world as being like an ocean liner that hit an iceberg. God had said to him, "Moody, it is your job to pull as many drowning people out of the water into lifeboats as you can."

Now, that may have been Moody's calling. I don't fault him at all for his understanding of his particular calling. But his "lifeboat theology," which claims that really the only thing that matters is evangelism -- pulling as many folks into lifeboats as you can -- has been both a blessing and a great curse for contemporary evangelicalism. On the one hand, it has created an evangelistic urgency. And it is evangelical churches that are growing because of this passion. On the other hand, by narrowing the focus simply upon getting people to say the Sinner's Prayer, we have had almost nothing to say about whole slices of life.

Let me suggest an alterative theology: "Ark Theology." Noah's Ark not only saved people, it preserved God's other creatures as well. The covenant that God made with Noah and his descendents was not only with humanity, but we read in Genesis 9:10 these words:

and with every living creature that was with you -- the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you -- every living creature on earth.

The rainbow was not just a sign between God and people, but we read in Genesis 9:12, 15 and 17 these words:

And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come. (v. 12)

I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. (v. 15)

So God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth." (v. 17)

The Ark Theology -- that God intends to restore all of creation, every realm, every creature, every part. Or as Abraham Kuypur, the great Dutch theologian and politician said nearly 100 years ago, "There is not a square inch of the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"

Lifeboat Theology: Jesus wants to be Lord of your life.

Ark Theology: Jesus is Lord over the universe.

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

Social justice is not a distraction from our commitment; it is part and parcel of the gospel of the kingdom. We read in Mark 1:15:

"The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"

What is the message of the kingdom? Certainly the center of the message is the proclamation that through one's faith in Jesus Christ (the King), a person can be eternally saved. Thus my church regularly calls people to put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be born again and enter God's kingdom.

But that is not the circumference or totality of the message of the kingdom. The ultimate goal of the kingdom goes beyond the salvation of us as individuals (wonderful as that is) and involves the restoration and renovation of the entire universe. The message of the kingdom is a fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah's vision in Isaiah 65:17, 20-25:

"See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. ...

"Never again will there be infants who live but a few days, or older people who do not live out their years; those who die at a hundred will be thought mere youths; those who fail to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain," says the Lord.

This message was echoed by all the prophets. So the prophet Micah says this in 4:1-4:

In the last days the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

The apostle Paul speaks about the cosmic sweep of this message of the kingdom. He tells us that not only we, but the entire creation, will be freed from the curse of the fall (Romans 8:19-21). In Ephesians, the apostle Paul again enlarges the scope of the message beyond our individual salvation when he says in Ephesians 1:9-10:

[H]e made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment; to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.

This enormous plan, involving the renovation and restoration of the entire universe, is what we pray for when we pray the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

So when we Christians feed the hungry in the name of Jesus, or heal a sick person in the power of Christ, or work for peace in this war-torn world, or help reconcile a marriage, or extend help to immigrants, or work for the responsible care of the environment, these actions are not a distraction from our commission to preach the gospel of the kingdom. Rather, we are living out our calling as kingdom people to partner with God in bringing about the healing of the entire universe.

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

I've always wanted to be part of a church that seeks to be and to do everything the New Testament calls the church to be and to do. I've described this kind of church in the past as a holistic church, or a church that works on all eight cylinders. In other words, it is not enough if my church is known as a great worship center, or a great preaching church. The New Testament demands more.

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright gets us right to the heart of the matter when he says:

For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery. The longer I've gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were originally talking about, the more it's borne in on me that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding it in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transformed the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally call evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God and Christ for themselves, with working for God's Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and how we've managed for years to say the Lord's Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious. Our Western culture since the 18th century has made a virtue of separating our religion from real life, or faith from politics. When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, "Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world." And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, "My kingdom is not from this world." That's ek tou kosmoutoutou. It is quite clear in the text that Jesus' kingdom doesn't start with this world. It isn't a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It is from somewhere else, but it is for this world.

Social justice is simply a commitment on the part of Christians to improve the lot of human beings in this world, particularly the lot of the most marginalized to whom God shows particular concern. The God of the Bible is both a God of justification (declaring us right with God) and justice (putting the world to rights).

Social justice was the historic practice of the evangelical church before the 20th century. It would have been unthinkable for leaders like John Wesley or William Wilberforce to consider someone to be a good follower of Jesus Christ who was not actively involved in improving the social conditions of people in this world.

Doing justice is one of the major themes throughout scripture. God hates religion without an accompanying commitment to social justice:

I hate, I despise your religious festivals; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! ( Amos 5:21-24)

I have several hopes for my church regarding social justice. I hope that we become a church that breaks out of the boxes that church tradition tries to impose upon the evangelical church -- namely, that evangelical churches are not supposed to be involved with improving the social conditions of people in this world. My hope is that members of Vineyard Columbus would seek to walk in the shoes of those whose perspectives are shaped by poverty, racial oppression, and personal suffering. My hope is that the tilt of the hearts of Vineyard Columbus members would be toward the poor (and not just the rich), toward the sick (and not just the well), and toward peacemaking. I have a hope that Vineyard Columbus would not exist for itself, but for Christ and for the world.

Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.

Yesterday NPR ran a story about the on going Senate investigation of the so-called Grassley Six; Crefflo and Taffi Dollar, Paula and Randy White, Eddie Long, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Joyce Meyer – prosperity gospel preachers whose 501(c)(3) status is being questioned in light of the Bentleys and Leer jets being purchased with "non-profit" funds from their respective churches.

As a Lutheran, I fully reject the gospel of prosperity, primarily on the grounds that I'm pretty sure it makes Jesus throw up in his mouth a little bit every time he thinks of it.

The NRP story opens with an audio clip of a Kenneth Copeland sermon, "This is the word become flesh, the word become health and healing, the word become massive wealth." How one goes form the word become flesh - God entering fully into the muck of our existence in the scandal of an illegitimate child born in the filth of a barn, the Almighty slipping into skin in the most vulnerable and beautiful way possible - to word become massive wealth is beyond me. Unless one ignores the entirety of all four gospels, except a poor reading of John 10:10, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." (NRSV) In a Joel Osteen sermon I've recently written about, he actually quotes that verse thusly: "Jesus came so that you can have an abundant life" - he equates life with financial prosperity. None of us truly know the mind of Christ, but my best guess is that he'd have something to say about this. We are left with precious little teachings from Jesus on many, many topics - wealth is not one of them. When Jesus spoke of wealth it was cautionary at best, and at worst, it was nearly condemning.

This is where things get uncomfortable. As I write snarky commentary about prosperity gospel preachers and how their lavish lifestyles are paid for primarily through the Social Security checks of the disempowered, I do so from the comfort of my 1948 brick ranch. My husband and I are a clergy couple, so everything we have is paid for by the tithes of others; our two cars (old but paid for), my expensive jeans, his garage full of back country gear, the $3 a dozen organic eggs in the fridge. All of it. I too live a lavish lifestyle funded by giving of the faithful and this realization is discomforting. It is undoubtedly the plank in my own eye.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran vicar living in Denver, Colorado where she is developing a new emerging church, House for all Sinners and Saints.  She blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com and has a book for Seabury Press coming out this Fall; a theological and cultural commentary based on having watched 24 consecutive hours of Trinity Broadcasting Network and survived.

When I interviewed Phyllis Tickle for Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, she reflected on the seismic changes she sees occurring in contemporary Christianity. "Evangelicalism has lost much of its credibility and much of its spiritual energy as of late, in much the same way that mainline Protestantism has." Lest anyone find this news so depressing they want to run for cover, Phyllis offers some much needed historical and hopeful perspective. "About every 500 years, the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale." During the last such upheaval, the Great Reformation of 500 years ago, Protestantism took over hegemony. But Roman Catholicism did not die. It just had to drop back and reconfigure. Each time a rummage sale has happened, in other words, whatever held pride of place simply gets broken apart into smaller pieces, and then it picks itself up and to use Diana Butler Bass's term, "re-tradition.

As I ride along the religious superhighway, I find I need some new tools to help me navigate this process. For starters, Andrew Jones' blog provides excellent ongoing reflections of the changing Christian landscape from a global perspective, as Proost UK offers worship resources that help refuel me and recharge my batteries. Recently, I caught wind of Tickle's radical yet totally orthodox retelling of the gospel. In The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections Tickle categorizes the sayings of Jesus into five categories: Public Teachings, Private Instructions, Healing Dialogues, Intimate Conversations, and the Post-Resurrection Encounters.

"Psychologists have demonstrated many times over that what we say is tailored to and informed by the audience to whom we say it. In a sense, in other words, while each of us may be an integer, we have various configurations or arrangements of our "self" that we modify, exchange, and employ according to our perception of those whom we are at any given moment engaging. Jesus of Nazareth, being fully human, followed that same pattern, though once again I had never perceived or even entertained such a possibility until I began listening to Him shift emphases, adapt rhetoric, and fashion varying modes of analogy to fit those with whom He was speaking."

Thanks to Lacey's latest and, unfortunately, last book, The Liberator (a revolutionary retelling of the New Testament), the Inspired by the Bible Experience: New Testament audio CD (nothing says "Oh my God" like Samuel L. Jackson channeling the voice of the Almighty), and Tickle's commentary, I've been immersed in scripture from some rather unique vantage points. Over the past year, instead of trying to memorize scripture and verse, I'm allowing these sweet holy words to fall on my ears and into my mouth. It's like I'm falling in love all over again with this radical love-making, rule-breaking, life-taking Christ.

Becky Garrison is senior contributing writer for The Wittenburg Door. Portions of this posting are excerpted from The New Atheists Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail.  Reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc.

On a Sunday when Americans flooded houses of worship seeking words of comfort, hope, and healing, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago dared to forgo the singing of "God Bless America." Instead, Senator Barack Obama's pastor claimed the prophetic biblical message of the hour ought to call us to proclaim, "God Damn America."

The words remain jarring and infuriating. Wright's comments seem at best incomplete and untimely. At worst, they imply that God is vindictive, vengeful, and bloodthirsty, even during a time of tragedy--that the judgment of God is appropriately meted out through the tragic deaths of innocent people through terrorist acts of hatred and evil.

On Sept. 15, 2001, Rev. Wright was wrong. His words failed to connect with the pastoral needs of a nation in mourning.

Throughout his career, however, Rev. Wright has been "right" more often than not. He has followed in the traditions of Hebrew Testament prophets, challenging his nation to live up to its own creeds of justice and opportunity for all - including African Americans, other minorities, and the poor.

Wright is in good company. When his provocative language is read alongside the vitriolic words of many Hebrew Testament prophets, Wright's words ring true. The prophets connected their nation's injustice and neglect of the poor with the destruction of Israel, often using vitriolic language. The prophet Amos once described the wealthy women of Samaria as "fat cows." Isaiah referred to once faithful Israel as a prostitute.

Not only are most of Rev. Wright's words biblically correct; they are also historically accurate. The U.S. has participated in many acts of evil. From slavery to Jim Crow segregation, from sexism to the internment of Japanese during World War II, from environmental disasters to the neglect of the poor, America has a record on par with that of Hebrew Testament Israel.

When it comes to foreign policy, the U.S. did financially invest in South Africa during the days of apartheid, used the CIA to enact coups against democratically elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and remains the only nation to use nuclear weapons. Perhaps these domestic and foreign policy actions prove that Rev. Wright was right.

But this is only a part of the picture. While the U.S. is far from perfect, the nation has made significant progress regarding rights for minorities and women. The U.S. has often been a force for good in the world, from helping to rebuild Japan and Western Europe after World War II to the vast amounts of private and government funds offered to deal with global crises like the HIV-AIDS and malaria crises in Africa. Rev. Wright was not entirely right.

On March 18, Barack Obama used his speech about race to appropriately distance himself from the most vitriolic of his pastor's rhetoric. He has also removed Rev. Wright from a position on his campaign's spiritual advisory committee.

In the Hebrew Testament, prophets were as a rule not insiders in the royal palace. Jeremiah's words of prophetic judgment became so disruptive to the King threw the prophet into jail. Just over 40 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave up his access to President Lyndon Baines Johnson to prophetically speak out against the war in Vietnam. Put simply, prophets and presidents don't mix.

Thankfully, Senator Obama was careful not to condemn the entire prophetic ministry of Rev. Wright. Our nation desperately needs the prophetic voice he has embodied over decades of public ministry. And no matter who our next president is, he or she would be well served to consider the words of Rev. Wright, for he has been more right than wrong.

Troy Jackson is senior pastor of University Christian Church in Cincinnati, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and earned his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Kentucky. His book Becoming King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of a National Leader (The University Press of Kentucky, 2008) will be available in the fall. Troy is a participant in Sojourners' "Windchangers" grassroots organizing pilot project in Ohio to work on the Vote Out Poverty Campaign.

When I got an invite to attend a screening of the documentary, Purple State of Mind, I went in expecting to see a blue state v. red state dialogue/debate with some quest to find political common ground.

Wrong.

Instead, I was treated to an honest and humorous dialogue between Craig Detweiler and John Marks, two former college roommates. The year 1984 wasn't only the name of a famous Orwellian book, but this year also signified Craig's first year in the faith, John's last. After this fateful year, the two men went on their separate faith paths. The film picks upon their conversation some 25 years later.

At first I struggled with the depiction of Christianity portrayed by these dudes. As a budding writer, I was far too geeky to be an Uber-high-school-athlete-turned-Christian-missionary like Craig. Nor did I have that Barbie-beautiful-Christian lifestyle that John eventually left behind. Simply put, my dogs ate my Barbies. My childhood was more Felliniesque than fairytale. Even though I was a pre-natal Episcopalian (my late father was a priest so do the ecclesiology and the science and it sort of makes sense), my relationship with the institutional church remains akin to an outsider lurking around the crevices. Except for a brief period in my mid-twenties when I experimented with a variety of religious experiences - including an adult Campus Crusade for Christ bible study, Cursillo, and the Young Republicans - my spiritual life has been anything but certain.

But as the documentary progressed, I began to see how these men's stories paralleled many of my own struggles. I too often wondered where God was in the midst of global conflicts and my own personal pain. Also, I've encountered more than my fair share of faith fakers. So I understand why someone would just give up on the God game. But I have encountered enough spiritual buds in my life that convince me to keep walking forward on this admittedly crooked spiritual path.

While neither Craig nor John compromise their beliefs, these former college buddies are able to maintain a conversation of the heart. Despite their glaring differences on matters of faith, their friendship enables them to move beyond the white noise of the Dawkins vs. Dobson extremists debates and explore where they have common ground in their shared humanity.

Unfortunately, such genuine dialogues are few and far between. Martin Marty, a church historian at the University of Chicago Divinity School, offers some sage counsel as he explores why we're in such an ideological quagmire these days:

"Fundamentalism is an expected reaction to the anomie that comes with social disorganization. When the social institutions become shaky, and uncertainty about the future becomes widespread, people look to religion to provide absolutes and a sense of security in the midst of their changing world."

Looks like both New Atheists and their Christian counterparts are grabbing onto their belief systems like Linus Van Pelt hanging onto his security blanket for dear life. With all that's going on in the world, I get the need to hold onto something safe. But who ever said the Christian journey was safe and comfy? Ever since the late, great Mike Yaconelli edited my first article, "Beavis and Butthead Are Saved," and got me started on this whole weird world of serving God through my writing, "safe" is never a word I've used to describe my faith journey. Scary, sweet, strange, sacrilegious, spiritual - yes. But safe? No way, no how. Never.

Becky Garrison is Senior Contributing Writer for The Wittenburg Door. Portions of this posting are excerpted from The New Atheists Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail, reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc.

While working on my upcoming book for Seabury Press - Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television, a theological and cultural commentary based on my experience watching 24 consecutive hours of the Trinity Broadcasting Network - I faced the issue of sanctification, sin, and leadership in the church. TBN preacher Paula White said the following on her show: "Sanctification is a progressive process you go from glory to glory to glory." (And by "progressive," I don't think she means Jim Wallis.)

I have no idea what she means when she says we go "from glory to glory to glory." I think I need an English-to-evangelical parallel dictionary, but I do know how I feel about progressive sanctification -- namely that it's hooey. And here's why: I believe we are all (watch me get all fancy on the Latin here) simul iustus et peccator – simultaneously saint and sinner. (As a matter of fact, I have this tattooed in Latin around my right wrist because I'm just that much of a theological fancy-pants.) While perhaps not perfect, this doctrine is one of the most useful things about my Lutheran theological camp. We hold that we are all 100% sinner and 100% saint. "But wait, Nadia," you say, "that's 200% percent." Well, yes and no; you see, the two are simultaneous. There is no process of sanctification, good works, prayer, yoga, recycling, Bible study, or holy living that makes us even 99% sinner and 101% saint, much less like 10/190.

The really liberating thing about this is that when we all come to the table fully aware that we are sinners, that we are broken on some level and never perfect, then the temptation to pretend otherwise is greatly diminished. To embrace your sinfulness and saintliness is not the same as being intentionally immoral. It is to be realistic that no one can possibly be 100% honest all the time, to always think of the neighbor before the self, to always honor God in everything you do, to at all times decrease in self so that others may increase. Even if our actions come close to this (they never do but if they did), we still are stuck with the reality of our minds and the thoughts of our hearts. You see, the spiritual poison of our own righteousness, of saying here are the rules we must follow to please God and to be sanctified, and I follow those rules so I have good reason to be prideful about my sanctification because I earned it is problematic. The moment we try and maintain our holiness, the moment we try to appear to be without sin, that junk just comes out sideways.

These televangelists and mega church personalities fall hard when they fall. When I fall, which is pretty much every day (including this moment as I write unkind things about these folks), I don't fall too far. Is this because of some sort of reverse righteousness? That could be a fair critique. I just know that as a Christian leader people are drawn to me not because I'm some sort of spiritually arrived person, but because I'm a pretty transparent one. Don't get me wrong: there are some icky parts I keep to myself, but for the most part I don't make too much of an effort to appear a whole lot better that I am. There's not a sin pressure valve that's building up ready to blow into a national crack-smoking, sex-for-money scandal. (Note to self: Avoid national crack-smoking, sex-for-money scandals.)

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran vicar living in Denver, Colorado, where she is developing a new emerging church, House for all Sinners and Saints. She blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com.

Last Friday I was in Santa Barbara, California, to speak at Westmont College - where even on a Friday evening, the gymnasium was packed with students. Before that event I did an interview with The Santa Barbara Independent, a local weekly newspaper, which they titled The Next Great Awakening? One of the questions the reporter asked was, "Do you think Jesus was a politician?" Here is my answer:

Of course not. But he had a vision of the Kingdom of God which was spiritual, personal, relational, social, economic, and yes, political - because it talked about allegiances and loyalties and authority, and if Jesus was Lord, Caesar was not. His confrontation that he provoked in Jerusalem was with the religious and the political leaders. They saw him as a political threat. If they saw him just as a private pietist, why would they worry? [If he was] helping people get their lives together, helping their marriages, making them better parents and make them go to less Roman orgies and drunken parties, why would that have been a threat to the ruling powers? They regarded him as a threat. I remember I was at Wheaton College once and I asked this class, "Why was Jesus killed?" and they had no idea. They just couldn't comprehend the question. And then one young student said, "Well, to save us from our sins." And I said, "So you think Pontius Pilate was sitting there thinking, 'How am I going to save these American evangelicals from their sins? I'm gonna kill this guy and that will do it.'" Albeit that our theological understanding of the cross and our redemption — I'm orthodox on all those questions, but he was killed because he was seen as a threat to the rulers both religious and political. In the book I talk about how Jesus confronted the major political options of his day. All four of them were there, they're always there: One was collaborationist, one was pietist, one was withdrawn — you know, the kind of counter culture — and one was political insurrection, or revolutionary violence. He confronted them all, he rejected them all. There was a fifth option called the Kingdom of God, and that's our option.

Last week I shared a snapshot of the new monastics. This week I will look at the mosaics. God is doing something new through a new generation of multicultural church planters.

Efrem Smith, who coauthored The Hip-Hop Church, will be keynoting our conference on the theme of Dr. Martin King's vision of "The Beloved Community." By 2060 the United States will become the first Western country in which Europeans will no longer be the dominant demographic group. We will become a richly multicultural society, and Smith will explain how the church can help us welcome this future.

Smith has planted Sanctuary Covenant Church, compelling evidence that God is doing something new through young people from different races and cultures. They are experiencing something of the richness of God's kingdom not only in their worship but in their life together across race and class.

The emerging church movement tends to be very white and male. But Tommy Kyllonen, a multicultural church planter in Florida, states in Un.orthodox: Church. Hip-Hop. Culture that the emerging church is also the young black male in the hood. It is the second-generation Mexican in L.A. and the child of the Chinese immigrant in Houston. The emerging church is the Puerto Rican female on Wall Street.

Smith tells me that urban hip-hop culture isn't just postmodern but also post-institutional, post-soul, and post-civil rights too. I find that multicultural churches, like the best of emerging and missional churches, tend to be more outwardly focused in mission. For example, Smith's church invests more than 50% of their giving in local and global mission.

As we race into an increasingly multicultural future, all of our largely monocultural churches are going to need to build bridges to the growing numbers of multicultural immigrant and ethnic congregations sharing life and mission. Read more at www.thenewconspirators.com

Tom Sine founded Mustard Seed Associates in 1989. He has worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for numerous nonprofit organizations and speaks at gatherings all over the world with his wife, Christine. His newest book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, comes out next month. Discover what God is doing through a new generation of risk takers, innovators, and prophets February 28-March 1 in Seattle. Visit: www.thenewconspirators.wordpress.com

A comment thread from Jim's "Moral State of the Union" post frustrated me a bit until I was encouraged later in the week by a sermon mp3 by N.T. Wright. (I like to listen to sermon podcasts during my morning hikes in the park.) Here's an initial comment on Monday's post:

"Together, we can end the moral scandal of poverty, the degradation of God's creation, the cultural assault on our families and children, and seeing war as the only way to confront evil." --This statement sums up well the problem with contemporary liberalism, which refuses to acknowledge the fallenness of man and creation. You can no more "end" these things than you can eradicate sin.

Here's a representative response:

You know, just because you don't think you can eradicate war, poverty, or environmental degradation, it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And it certainly doesn't mean you should decry other people who make an effort. If you live your life with a foundation of hopelessness and inevitability, your time on this earth will be complacent. Why discourage people who live with a sense of purpose and redemption for the here and now?

These two general perspectives (though not necessarily these two commenters) then proceed to nuance, clarify, and occasionally insult each other as usual. (BTW, comment moderators have been making a list and checking it twice, and the first round of warnings before blocking abusive commenters is nigh—REPENT! BE NICE!)

But even if the original commenter didn't mean that because sin is inevitable we shouldn't even try to fight social injustice, I agree with the comment that such objections to messages of hope and challenge is counterproductive. It reminds me of when I mentioned Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger to one of my college Christian fellowship leaders and he asked if I'd heard of a counterpoint book: Prosperous Christians in an Age of Guilt-Mongering. (I kid you not.) As if there was such an epidemic of guilt-ridden Christians giving so much of their money away to the poor in sacrificial generosity that a book-length response was imperative. As opposed to a real epidemic of global hunger and starvation in the face of which much of the church was indifferent (especially Evangelicals in 1978 when Rich Christians first came out and was accused of being communist—ah, remember Cold War fundamentalism?)

Much has changed to awaken the church's conscience since then, but back to that N.T. Wright sermon that puts this debate in some helpful perspective (really, you should click here for an audio excerpt with additional context, and here for the full talk):

If somebody came to you and said, "Look, I have real difficulty with battling with sin. I find that I'm tripped up with temptation and I sin a whole lot. And I don't seem to be able to help it. But the good news is that after all, God is going to redeem me one day and I'm going to be with him in heaven or in the new earth or whatever, and so I really don't need to bother about it now, do I?"

Now, if somebody said that to you, I hope you would hit them with a fairly strong dose of inaugurated eschatology. You mightn't call it that. You would want to say: Precisely because God's going to do that for you in the future, you need to get to work on that now in the power of the Spirit. Now, supposing we were to run the same about the way the world is right now. ...

We won't build the Kingdom of God by our own efforts in the present. It remains God's gift, by his grace and by his power. But we can produce signs of the kingdom: In love and justice and beauty and healing and fresh community work of all sorts—internationally, locally, all over the place.

That last point, which some of the detractors on the blog claimed was their original point, is precisely the core of The Great Awakening as I read it. Here's a direct quote from the book:

It may be that only a revival of faith can spark the necessary changes in public opinion and political will on the really big issues, and that a spiritual transformation is necessary for social change. It's about changing hearts and minds on many of the biggest moral issues of public life that fundamentally challenge who we are and what we believe. Revival is always about what God can do through us, and is now doing afresh. ...

Far from advancing a "politics only" solution, because evil and sin are real, and because they are manifest in our worst social problems, it takes a work of the Spirit to really change things. So is the thread that sparked this post an argument merely about emphasis? If both sides affirm the basic Christian concepts that: a) creation—including humanity—can only be fully restored by God at the eschaton, and b) the church is called to promote that restoration in every sphere of influence in the meantime? If so, then get over it—and get to work!

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.

Discover what God is doing through a new generation of risk-takers, innovators, and prophets at The New Conspirators. We have asked these young conspirators, who comprise at least four new streams, to share their stories, dreams, and struggles on Feb. 28-March 1, 2008, in Seattle. These four streams include: the new monasticism, the mosaic (multicultural), the missional, and the emergent. I want to share snapshots of these four streams, starting with the new monastics.

Shane Claiborne will be at our gathering sharing about the new monasticism movement and from his new book, Jesus For President. Over the past two decades, a new Protestant movement very much like the Franciscan order has emerged. Like many in the traditional Franciscan order, they have moved into the poorest urban communities in our world, live in community as families and singles, and care for the poor, often living at the same lifestyle level of the poor around them. A number of them have even developed a rule of life. These include groups like Word Made Flesh, InnerCHANGE, Servant Partners, Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, and Urban Neighbours of Hope (UNOH).

In 2005, a group of several hundred primarily younger people convened in Raleigh-Durham to discuss the need for a New Monasticism movement to more faithfully live out the gospel of Christ in our troubled world. As we met together, I was impressed by the desire of these young people to give more authentic expression to their faith.

Their communities include Rutba House in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Communality in Lexington, Kentucky; Camden House in New Jersey; and the Simple Way in Philadelphia. They are also connected to older intentional Christian communities, including Reba Place in Chicago and the Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco. Together, they have published a book, School(s) for Conversion: Twelve Marks of a New Monasticism, and they run Schools of Conversion for those who want to find their own way forward.

What makes the new monastics distinct from the other four streams is that they have no interest in planting new expressions of church; rather, they are creating new forms of community in which they seek to embody the gospel and reach out to those in need. Shane says, "Our deserts are the inner city and the abandoned places of the empire." This stream offers the most robust critique of modern culture, but also has the strongest voice for social justice and the care of God's creation.

Tom Sine founded Mustard Seed Associates in 1989. He has worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for numerous nonprofit organizations and speaks at gatherings all over the world with his wife, Christine. His newest book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, comes out next month.

Everyday there seems to be some new outrageous charge leveled at Barack Obama. One of the most pernicious is that he is a Muslim who is dishonestly masquerading as a Christian. This charge is so malicious - and so untrue - that it is time to set the record straight.

Barack Obama has never been a Muslim. He has never attended a Muslim school. From about age eight to age nine Obama lived in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country on earth, with more Muslim schools than one can count, yet his parents chose to enroll him in a secular, non-religious school comprised of teachers and students of all faiths. Nor can it be said that during his brief sojourn in Indonesia that his worldview was tainted by Islamic extremism; when Obama lived there, the practice of Islam in Indonesia was still among the world's most moderate.

Another false charge is that rather than using a Bible to be sworn into his elected office, Senator Obama instead used the Qur'an, the holy book of the Muslim faith. That is also a falsehood. The most cursory check of the facts shows that it was not Barack Obama who was sworn in with a Qur'an. It was Keith Ellison, the proudly Muslim congressman from Minnesota.

But by far the ugliest charge is that Barack Obama is lying about his Christian faith. The truth is that for years now, Barack Obama has been a baptized, fully confessed and practicing Christian, not only with his lips inside a church but, more importantly, with his limbs out in the community - striving to help the neediest and the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters of all creeds and colors.

It is correct that Obama was not born into the Christian faith. Rather, Barack Obama made a conscious decision as a mature adult to become part of the body of Christ. One measure of the seriousness of his faith is that he has been an active and faithful churchgoer since he embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ as his own.

Dr. Jeremiah Wright - his pastor - a wise, sensitive Christian freedom-fighter (in the very best sense of the word), and a man deeply committed to his faith in Christ, whole-heartedly attests to this, as does every fellow parishioner who has encountered Obama in his home church - the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. (By the way, the United Church of Christ is a predominately white mainstream Christian denomination.)

But what is also troubling about all the false information being spread about Obama is its obsession with doctrines and creeds to the apparent detriment of any sense of the spirituality of service. This tragically flawed understanding of Christian faith is apparently more concerned with the fleeting testimony of one's mouth than with the abiding testimony of one's walk in the world. If this was not so, if what was really the concern of those seeking to discredit Obama was that one be a Christian rather than simply bearing the name, then why do they not attack the people "of faith" who tell every listening ear that they are Christians, yet everyday spit on the very tenets that Jesus taught by making greed, self-aggrandizement and treating poor people as children of a lesser God their de facto religion? Why not equally publicly indict the rapacious "prosperity preachers" and fake healers who appear in pulpits and on television weekly to steal from the poor so they themselves can live in imperial luxury like the Roman Caesar, the same Caesar whose empire tortured Jesus to death? According to the teachings of Jesus, transgressions like these are what believers should be exposing and denouncing. Indeed, in Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus makes it clear that betrayal of the poor and the vulnerable is among the worst sins possible. Moreover, there Jesus reveals that if nothing else will get one banished to Hell, hurting - even ignoring - those he calls "the least of these" surely will.

Also in that Matthew 25 passage, Jesus teaches that if we are to judge each other at all, it must be by the standard of whether we are trying to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. That is the gospel's paramount measure of faith, not how much one shouts Jesus' name or how often and how loudly one can recite doctrine and creeds. Jesus taught - and modeled - that what is most important for those who follow him is to spend their time and treasure in this world, engaging in loving, self-sacrificial actions with the express purpose of manifesting God's love and justice on earth as in heaven.

For me, that is the standard by which all those who seek to lead or govern us must be judged.

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D. is a professor of biblical interpretation at New York Theological Seminary, the author of The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Teachings of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted

When I asked a leading progressive biblical scholar who was doing the very best bible work on images of God and gender theology, she didn't hesitate in her answer: Elizabeth Johnson, she said.

Johnson, a Roman Catholic sister in the Congregation of St. Joseph, is interviewed about images of God in the January U.S. Catholic (Honor your Father and Mother). This is the theme she also takes up in her new book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (Continuum, 2007).

Stale images of God aren't working for today's seekers, says Johnson. New ones are emerging from the experiences of all God's people – male and female. In the excerpt below, she reflects on God-language and invitational language in worship. But read the whole interview. It's excellent.

What does it mean that we call God by male terms?

I have this sentence that I quote over and over again: The symbol of God functions. The male symbol of God functions to privilege a certain way of male rule in the world and to undercut women's spiritual power, women's own sense of themselves as made in the image of God.

We women have to abstract ourselves from our bodies to see ourselves in the image of God if God is always depicted as male. It has serious ramifications for spirituality and for the identity of believers and for the community.

Why is there so much resistance to using feminine images of God?

I think the rejection of the inclusive language lectionary, which the U.S. bishops applied for in 1992 and which was rejected by the Vatican, was a clear recognition that once you start making room for even nonsexist language about humanity, let alone feminine images of God, there's a fear that women will want to move in socially and politically, and then you've got a challenge to church structure as we know it. I think there's a great deal of fear of women's power.

Can you imagine a church that took female images of God to heart?

Let me say, I think women and men are equal in sin and grace. I don't think women are going to be the salvation of the church or of this country. I think we can all get on power trips. I'm convinced of it, maybe because I've been in a women's religious community, and I have six sisters. I am disabused of this romantic notion of women's greatness as compared to men.

At this moment in history, women have figured out what's wrong with the current pattern and how their experiences have led to different ways of relating, organizing, and running things. Given the chance, they would bring that pattern into the church and let it play off and see what develops.

Rose Marie Berger, a Sojourners associate editor, is a Catholic peace activist and poet.

During the South Carolina Republican debate, Mike Huckabee garnered greatest applause when defending his views of wifely submission as part of his evangelical faith. The questioner quizzed Huckabee about being one of 131 signers of a 1998 USA Today ad by the Southern Baptist Convention that asserted, "a wife is to graciously submit herself to the servant leadership of her husband." Huckabee responded by saying "I am not the least bit ashamed of my faith." He joked that his own wife was not submissive and appeared to temper his original statement by affirming the idea of mutual submission in marriage (a view, by the way, specifically rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention).

Some evangelicals might find this acceptable, but many more do not—not to mention the American public as a whole. Over the last decade, the Pew Research Center has tracked a steady decrease of the impact of conservative religion on views of gender. In 1997, 28 percent of Americans strongly disagreed with the idea that women should return to "traditional roles." In 2007, 42 percent strongly disagreed with the same statement. One wonders how many Protestant Christians—evangelical and otherwise—are included in that 42 percent.

If the media thinks that Huckabee's views represent evangelical Christianity, they are wrong. Wifely submission is only one interpretation of scripture and not without significant criticism by biblical scholars and theologians. American evangelicalism has a long and conflicted record about its views of women, with egalitarianism as the alternative to submission. This week's other major news story—Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire primary victory—provides an instructive historical lesson about that evangelical alternative.

Hillary Clinton is not, of course, an "evangelical" using the current definition. She is a mainline United Methodist. However, she graduated Wellesley College. Although few would think of contemporary Wellesley as in any way evangelical, the school's 19th century heritage was that of evangelical feminism.

Henry and Pauline Durant founded Wellesley in 1871 (first classes held in 1875) as a distinctly evangelical institution. Henry, a wealthy lawyer, had become a lay-evangelist with a vision for a women's college that "will be Christian in its influence, discipline, and course of instruction." At the groundbreaking of Wellesley's first building, Mrs. Durant gave every workman a Bible as a gift before she placed another Bible in the cornerstone. The cornerstone prayer reads:

This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything ... that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ.

All of Wellesley's early professors were required to teach the Bible along with their regular subjects; all trustees were obligated to be active members of evangelical churches. Revivalist Dwight L. Moody served as a trustee and ardently supported the school and his friends, the Durants, in their endeavor.

The Durants not only preached the gospel—they were equally committed to the "cause of God's poor." They believed that universal childhood education was the key to alleviating poverty and that medical care needed to be widely available to the indigent. The Wellesley evangelicals believed that women were as capable as men in every field, with one exception: religious matters. When it came to religion, they believed that women were superior to men. In 1880, Noah Porter, Yale College president, addressed Wellesley women praising that superiority while warning them that such giftedness exposed them to "unreasoning fanaticism and tenacious bigotry."

Wellesley women took this all quite seriously. Submitting to no one, these young evangelical women became scholars, professors, theologians, pastors, missionaries, teachers, doctors, and lawyers across the globe. Although the Wellesley of Hillary Rodham Clinton's day had become secularized, the feminist legacy of 19th century evangelicalism continued to influence its priorities—full equality for women, quality childhood education for all, universal access to health care, and a passion for the poor.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) holds a Ph.D. in American Religious History from Duke University. She is the author of six books, including Christianity for the Rest of Us (Harper One 2006).

When I first landed in El Salvador, all I knew about the tiny Central American country was its war. What I found was lush mountain ranges, volcanoes, and air heavy with grief. It was 2003, and I was there to produce a documentary for a public radio series titled Despues de las Guerras/Centra America: After the Wars about the violence suffered by women during and after the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992 with a death toll of 75,000 mostly innocent civilians.

I returned to El Salvador in 2006 for six months on a Knight Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists. The violence, once largely relegated to gang controlled areas, had spread across the country. Impunity was rampant. Voices of dissent were marginalized. Rights curtailed in the interest of security. The first forceful voices I heard came from the pulpit, from Jesuits denouncing the violence and its profiteers.

I had the opportunity to interview Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino. (See Goodness Revealed: An interview with liberation theologian Jon Sobrino in the January 2008 issue of Sojourners.) Just a few months earlier, the Vatican had publicized a written notification that branded his some of his writing as "erroneous and dangerous."

Sobrino admonished the church for drifting away from the reality of its flock. The U.S. and Europe, he said, are merely "anecdotes," their imperial gaze a perversion of the mission of Jesus on this earth. He challenged the assumption that wealthy nations can exploit poor nations and return later with a promise to save them.

Sobrino's book Where is God?: Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope draws a compelling connection between the tragedy inflicted on New York by terrorists, El Salvador when a tremendous earthquake strikes, and in Afghanistan when a world superpower seeks vengeance.

Another important work that sets liberation theology in a current context is the anthology published in Sobrino's defense after the Vatican's sanction titled Getting the Poor Down From the Cross: Christology of Liberation. It contains the arguments for the tenets of liberation theology by some of the world's leading theologians, the primacy of the world's poor, and the duty of the Church to "walk with them."

In the epilogue, Sobrino writes, "If a Christology animates the poor of this world, victims of terrible sins - including ones committed by so-called believers - to maintain their faith in God and in his Christ, and to have dignity and hope, then this Christology will have its limitations of course, but I do not consider it to be dangerous in the world of the poor, but rather something positive. However, it is possible that it will be seen - and it has been seen - as dangerous in other worlds."

Michelle García recently completed a Knight Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists in El Salvador. Previously she wrote for The Washington Post from its New York bureau. She is based in New York.

When I went to check my post office box after Thanksgiving, among the pile of mail waiting for me were review copies of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity and Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

I first picked up D'Souza's bestseller. Throughout this book, he seems to possessed an amazing self-confidence that all the world's problems could be solved if only we would just become Christians. It reminded me of those books I read in my twenties back when I thought I knew all the answers. It's only been within the past few years that I've learned to start asking the right questions.

Yet, I have to admit that a side of me wished that I still possessed that absolute certainty about my faith. This year hasn't been an easy one for me on many fronts. In fact, I don't know where I'd be without my spiritual friends, who sometimes prayed on my behalf when I was too distracted to think straight.

When I picked up Come by My Light, I discovered a stark honesty that caught me off guard. Mother Teresa was not the woman the world thought we knew. As Shane Claiborne noted when I interviewed him for The Wittenburg Door, whenever people ask him about his trip to Calcutta, "they say, 'Oh, you met Mother Teresa,' like she glows in the dark or something."

While rest of the world put her on a pious pedestal, this seemingly simple nun from Calcutta spent most of her ministry wandering in the wilderness. She pours out her personal pain in private letters that she penned to her spiritual director and others in her life. These letters indicate that ever since she began her ministry to the poor, the voice of Jesus that guided her to start this work became silent. This silence continued throughout her entire ministry. She describes the darkness with a piercing honesty that brought me to tears.

Pray for me - for within me everything is icy cold - it is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as our Lord has all the pleasure - I really do not count.

As expected, atheists like Christopher Hitchens use her personal pain as further evidence that God does not exist. Hitchens gloats, "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person."

Unlike this anti-God guru, Mother Teresa knew that just because God was absent from her heart, that didn't mean God had abandoned her. With a Job-like sense of determination, she learned to embrace this darkness as a part of her ministry.

Let Him do with me whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants. If my darkness is to light some soul - even if it be nothing to nobody - I am perfectly happy - to be God's flower of the field.

Just as I'm about to finish this book, Shane Claiborne just happened to arrive in New York City on the first Sunday of Advent. (For a recap of that visit, see "What Would Jesus Buy?") I'm not about to call him a saint because I know he'd just start to giggle and throw paper airplanes at me. This ordinary radical relayed stories of finding hope and healing through his work with those spiritual souls that society has discarded. I couldn't have asked for a better Advent candle to help illuminate my darkness.

During my interview with Shane, he remarked:

Someone asked me after she died, 'Is her work going to live on?' I actually think Mother Teresa died a long time ago when she submitted herself to Christ, and the thing that everyone loves about her was her work, that's Jesus. That's going to live forever. I've been to Calcutta since Mother Teresa died, and there were more people there than were ever there when she was alive. She's sort of like the seed that dies, and fruit is born.

For those who find themselves struggling in the darkness during this Advent season, I highly recommend reflecting on Mother Teresa's words. Through her prayers of pain, I pray that you can be reminded that you are not alone.

Becky Garrison's books include The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, January 2008), Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church, and Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church.

The denomination which I am now seeking to enter and belong to, the Episcopal Church, is a denominaton that many others are now seeking to depart. 

Such a situation carries within it two things: danger and opportunity. The danger is self evident. The opportunty will come from listening to the jackhammer on our roof. The image of a hammer on the roof comes from my Bishop Greg Rickel. I've added "jack" to the "hammer" to note the severity of the "noise." But we must remember that we are people of the paschal mystery. Out of death, can come new life and renewed purpose.

Both the modern liberal and the modern conservative frameworks for being church are crashing down around us. From these ruins, both we and our more conservative friends need new to forge new alternatives and pathways forward for being church and working together on the core things we hold in common: Love of Triune God, the creed of Nicea, the dominical sacraments, the story of Jesus recorded in the scriptures, (albeit with varying frameworks for interpreting the scriptures among the churches) the call to mission, the call to reconciled relationships with one another reflective of the relational being of God, and the call to loving service, in and for God's world.

We who remain in the Episcopal Church should not waste time and missional energy being angry and "against" those who are more conservative, but instead direct energy and resources towards engaging renewed mission, reconciliation and service.

Let us pray for those have left us and ask their prayers for us who remain.

And let those of us who remain in the Episcopal Church give thanks for the "Interim Report House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church," November 2007, which says:

As Episcopalians, we approach and express our faith and relationship with Christ through our Baptismal Covenant and Eucharistic community. Now is the time to articulate and renew these leadership trajectories, and to re-kindle enthusiasm for both evangelism and mission... We need to undertake these efforts with a sense of urgency: urgency in evangelism, urgency in leadership development, urgency in outreach, urgency in structural reorganization—but first and foremost, urgency in more clearly defining who we are, where God is calling us to go, and how we should "press ahead" in mission in response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

With this new urgency, there is much to be done. Anglimergent is small, and newly forming cohort of emerging Anglican leaders that ready to be put to serious work to help lead and transform our church around and renewed focus on mission, reconciliation and service in the way of Jesus Christ. There are amazing missional opportunities before us. It is Advent once more.

Karen Ward is Abbess of the Church of the Apostles: An Intentional, Sacramental Community in the Way of Jesus Christ. www.apostleschurch.org

Last week, a Liberty University student asked Gov. Mike Huckabee to account for his recent surge in the polls. "There's only one explanation for it, and it is not a human one," Huckabee claimed, "It is the same power that helped a little boy with two fishes and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people. And that's the only way our campaign could be doing what it is doing." In other words, God apparently wants Mike Huckabee to be president—or, at the very least, win the Iowa caucuses. And, evidently, Mike Huckabee wants evangelical Christians to think that God has uniquely chosen him for office, as many believed God chose George W. Bush.

There is good reason for Christians to take theological offense at these claims—and that would be upon the basis the doctrine of providence. Very generally, providence is the idea that God orders human events that enacts God's will for the universe. In popular American religion, as Gov. Huckabee articulated, providence often becomes God's direct intervention in specific historical acts. I once heard George Marsden, the eminent evangelical historian with whom I studied in graduate school, refer to this version of providence as "the finger of God" directing human events.

But finger-of-God explanations are dangerous in relation to politics. If God is the power behind a candidate, then, if that candidate wins, he or she is both beyond reproach and immune to criticism—because, of course, that person is seen as divinely appointed or anointed. The politician's actions are synonymous with God's will. This opens the door for political silliness (God desires tax cuts) or hubris (God favors our political party)—as well as making God responsible for a host of reprehensible or potentially evil acts in the forms of injustice, oppression, or war.

Of course, western Christians once believed in finger-of-God politics—during the Middle Ages in the doctrinal form of the divine right of kings. This doctrine was eventually challenged from within Christian theology itself, when the Puritans argued that divine right had to be balanced with reason and responsibility within the body politic. Although the Puritans did not always practice what they preached, their tradition—as articulated by John Locke—undermined supernatural pretensions to rule. Locke's rejection of the divine right of kings was one pillar of the revolutionary republican politics upon which the U.S. was founded.

But rejecting "finger of God" theories of providence does not necessarily make one a secularist. It is possible to recognize providence in politics, while leaving room for nuance, humility, and mystery. Instead of seeing God as causing specific actions, it seems preferable to understand providence as the unfolding of God's story through time—a tale of sin, reconciliation, justice, and peace from creation to the end of history, of which God shares with us the narrative trajectories, not the specific twists of plot.

In this story, God does not control human actions as a divine puppet master. Rather, as human beings encounter the story, we change and our actions begin to conform to God's narrative of shalom. In this way, God's intentions unfold as we practice faith in humble gratitude that God has invited us into the story. Providence is not divine Mapquest or supernatural tom-tom. Rather, providence is a pilgrimage of God's people in time as they seek to live in mercy, kindness, and grace—and that is where God's will is made known. Not God's finger, providence is the breath of God, the spirit enlivening human beings to do justice.

Any number of the current candidates, Republican and Democrat, offer visions of how they understand their lives in relationship to an unfolding story of God's justice. But no one candidate should or can claim God's anointing on his or her campaign. If nothing else, American Christians might look at the last eight years as an example of the folly of finger-of-God politics.

Diana Butler Bass holds a Ph.D. in American religious history from Duke University. As an independent scholar, she is the author of six books including Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (Harper One, 2006).

Tuesday evening, Virginia Lohmann Bauman was ordained to the ministry at First Baptist Church in Granville, Ohio. Gini (as we know her) is Sojourners' Ohio Field Organizer. In her ordination paper for the American Baptist Churches, Gini wrote:

My faith journey began in my childhood and continues to evolve in wonderful and challenging ways. I am a preacher's kid, a wife, a mother, a lawyer, a mediator, a minister, an ecumenical bridge-builder, and a child of God who feels called to preach the good news of Jesus Christ and to serve God and the church through prophetic ministry and advocacy.

I had the privilege of participating in the service, along with several other staff members. It was truly a memorable occasion, full of the special joy I always feel when women are ordained to ministry, after long being excluded from church leadership. I was especially struck by the reflection by Dr. George Williamson, Gini's former pastor and a key mentor in her life and a long-time friend of Sojourners. George spoke about Jeremiah, Gini's favorite prophet, and his call to prophetic ministry. With his permission, I share it with you.

ON BUYING A FIELD IN ANATHOTH
A mentor's reflection upon the ordination of Gini Lohmann Bauman
by George Williamson, Jr.

Gini said for me to speak to prophetic ministry with reference to Jeremiah. Okay. Jeremiah clearly says prophetic ministry's a damn fool thing to do. It's certainly not something you choose to do. You get chosen - like being entered against your will in the divine lottery, and losing. In which case, he would have you beg to get out of it, and failing that, whine and complain to God.

Jeremiah, you know, was not a happy man, because the depth of human wretchedness revealed itself to him. He was not a married man, because who would marry him? He was not a pretty man, or pleasant to know. But he had a huge voice, like a volcano, stored in soul barrels between eruptions. His images got under peoples' minds and gnawed on them. He was a prophet. Everybody knew he was a prophet, and mostly left him alone.

Jeremiah never did any good. His first prophecy was of invasion by a mysterious "foe from the north," which never happened. He joined King Josiah's religious reformation, whose politically appointed revolutionaries didn't need him. Anyway, he decided it was a cover for rampant injustice, and as it became law, he came out against it. He got ordained, but was defrocked and disfellowshipped for preaching unbearable sermons. So he preached from the temple steps, and was jailed.

Last weekend my wife Amy and I were in Baltimore and attended Joel Osteen's event. Joel pastors the largest church in America with more than 38,000 people, and his latest book has already hit number one on many bestseller lists. Joel is selling out stadiums across the country preaching a gospel of healing, victory, promotion, and increase to people filled with sickness, defeat, depression, and debt.

Unlike some people, I do not think that Joel Osteen is a heretic. While I do believe that he needs a deeper theology of suffering, he is not like most prosperity preachers that completely undermine Jesus' teaching. Joel's teaching may only be an inch deep, but he certainly reaches a lot of people with words of hope.

The crowd went wild when Joel stepped on stage. He kept the crowd engaged throughout the evening with his message about the power of positive thinking. "We are to be victors, not victims," he said repeatedly. His mother shared a testimony of being healed from liver cancer 26 years ago. Joel shared his testimony of how he served at his father's church for 17 years in video production before responding to the call to preach. It was a story people could relate to because many have sensed God's calling on their lives, but have either run from that call or felt inadequate for the task at hand.

I went into this gathering as a critic of TV evangelists and superficial gospel messages. I could list a number of things I find problematic about the Joel's ministry, but rather than just criticize a brother, I thought I would focus on how we as a Christian social justice movement can learn from him:

1. The power of personal testimony: Joel shared about how he avoided the pulpit for so long and had only preached one sermon before he inherited his dad's church. We would do well to be more active in sharing our motivations for doing social justice ministry.
2. The importance of engaging hearts and not just minds: Joel was not afraid to cry when speaking about his father's death. Too many in the social justice movement have a strong intellectual understanding of Christ, but lack the passion or personal vulnerability to fuel the mission of God's justice for the poor.
3. The importance of racial and socioeconomic diversity: Joel's event had more poor people and racial diversity than most churches or even social justice gatherings I have experienced. This is likely a result of not just his broad appeal but his vast reach through television.

The challenge before Joel Osteen, as well as us in the social justice movement, is similar. We are called not just to be spectators, but active participants in God's mission in this world. The temptation is just to sit back and watch TV or intellectualize about social justice. The challenge is to go beyond mere observation to active participation in order to begin sacrificing our time and resources in response to the gospel so that we can change the direction of our country and world.

Aaron Graham is the national field organizer for Sojourners.

In honor of the publication 100 years ago of Christianity and the Social Crisis, the classic book by social gospel founder Walter Rauschenbusch, his great-grandson Paul Raushenbush published Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st century, the text of the original book with a contemporary response to each chapter. This week on Beliefnet, Raushenbush debates the issues his great-grandfather raised with Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church.

Yet this isn't a debate. It's a lovely dialogue between two people who show the significant new convergence occurring between traditions that have been at war for too long—the evangelical and the social gospel. I know both Bill Hybels and Paul Raushenbush and they are breaking out of the old dualisms. God is personal, but never private. The gospel is both personal and social. Without the personal, a life of faith and commitment to social justice is very difficult to sustain, as some streams of the social gospel eventually demonstrated. And without the social, a personal gospel becomes completely private and loses its integrity, as modern evangelicalism has too often shown. But many Christians, like Bill and Paul, are refusing to make those false choices anymore. Bill Hybels talks constantly about social justice, the urgency of racial reconciliation, and the message of peace. Lynne Hybels spoke at the Sojourners Pentecost conference this past spring, and she impressed us all with her passion for justice.

Usually within months of a person's salvation experience, there is both a sincere desire to pass on the message of Christ to any and all, and an equally intense desire to do whatever is necessary in the name of Christ to eradicate injustice, relieve oppression, and alleviate suffering of any kind. Selfless service of this sort isn't normal according to human nature; purely and simply, the desires are born out of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Paul Raushenbush speaks of the need for a vibrant personal faith to undergird the social gospel his great-grandfather espoused so eloquently. And both are critical of those in their respective traditions who are still stuck in the old separations. As he puts it:

Rauschenbusch in his time, and I today, feel that actions taken to carry out Jesus' commandments in this life are equally important as faith statements accepting Jesus. That is, we should try to realize the promise of the kingdom of God in this world as much as we proclaim Jesus as our personal savior for the forgiveness of our individual sins. It is through concrete action in this life that we most clearly experience the salvation that Jesus offers both right now and eternally.

I find their coming together in this dialogue very encouraging indeed. My essay in the book says it this way:

I still like his clarity in linking personal and social religion. "In personal religion," he says, "the first requirement is to repent and believe the gospel." But then, "Social religion, too, demands repentance and faith: repentance for our social sins." Faith requires, he said, "a revaluation of social values." He says there are "two great entities in human life—the human soul and the human race—and religion is to save both."