Donald Miller's Blog, page 130

Don't Watch the Parade in 2011!

If you're read A Million Miles, you know the story of the Goff family of San Diego, and about their New Years Day Parade. More than a decade ago, when the kids were young, the family sat around bored on New Years Day. Dad decided boredom wasn't fitting for a day that God made, so he asked the kids for suggestions, and they decided to have a family parade down their small street. And as they notified neighbors, the family decided NOBODY could watch their parade, that people could only participate. And now the parade is huge. It's an annual, street tradition, complete with a Grand Marshal and Queen. And nobody is allowed to watch. Nobody can sit on the curb. Everybody marches in the parade.

It's a wonderful, true story about how much better life is when we participate. If you've not made a resolution yet in 2011, make this one with me: I will not watch 2011, I will participate. Here's a little video Richard Goff made celebrating this years parade (just a few days ago) and a reminder of how meaningful life can be when we get up off the curb and join in:

Here are some suggestions for participating in 2011:

1. Find out three of your neighbors birthdays. Mark the dates on a calendar or set a reminder on your phone. Bake a cake with their name on top and deliver it to them on their birthday.

2. Scout your community for some kids without money and ask their parent or parents if you can help send them to camp. Have a big dinner with all your friends and tell them about the kids. Brainstorm how you are going to come up with the money. It will cost about $500 per kid, but you can do it.

3. Invite everybody you work with, one by one or two by two, to your place for dinner.

4. Give a speech.

5. Audition for a play.

6. Join a kickball league. Dominate.

7. Write a children's book and have it printed through Amazon's self-publishing program.

Any other suggestions? What crazy things did you do in 2010?

My favorites: Trying to climb a mountain and getting turned back in a hail/snow/rain storm at 3AM. Hosting the Storyline conference (may have been a decade hilight) and having our movie funded by you guys! Helping to start a non-profit in Denver (way to go Lori!) and working with a friend to get their book published (way to go, Bob!). Lots more. Amazing year.

2011 is more than a new year, it's the start of a new decade. Take some risks and live a great story this year, sacrifice for somebody else, and you'll set the tone for the next ten years.

Have fun and happy new year!

The Blog Will Return on January 3rd

I'm stepping away from the blog for the rest of the year, but will return on January 3rd.

I'm looking forward to another year of blogging, though I can't commit to anything beyond that. Having not blogged much before, I decided to take a year and see what committing to a weekly, and many times five-days per week column felt like. Here is what I've discovered, personally:

1. Keeping a blog is a good experience because it forces me to look for interesting paradigm shifts in life that I might not otherwise notice. I remember spending a winter month on Orcas Island up at Len Sweet's place years ago. There's not much to do on Orcas during the winter except for write and hike around to see the beauty of the place. In other words, write and rest. I can see why Len has been successful at what he's done over the years, and also why he's such a mellow and understated guy. His personality grows out of that island. Anyway, while there, I picked up my first camera, mainly because I was seeing so much beauty. Once I picked up a camera, I was hooked. I found myself up before the sun, and scouting a good bit of the day for a place to shoot sunrise. I'd also check maps and ask around at local stores for the best places to shoot wildlife. Blogging has been like that for me; a reason to look for wisdom and a deadline.

2. I am a perfectionist when it comes to writing. I'll edit and reedit a book long after it should have gone to press. But with blogging, I learned that, while you'll have plenty of people point out your mistakes, most folks are forgiving. So blogging has been a lesson in receiving grace, but also an act of humility in that I have to show people the work, warts and all, and admit I'm not that good of a writer.

3. Writing is a discipline. The best writers, the ones with careers that have lasted decades, sit down to write every day, usually in the morning. I tended to write several times a week, but not on a fixed schedule. When your deadline is a year away, you can get creative with your schedule. But with blogging, I know people are looking forward to a new entry and it's something I think about daily. So blogging has made me more disciplined in the habit of sitting down and putting words together.

4. Blogging is free for the public, and it's a great way to test how much you really care about writing and the people who read your work. There's no money in it. In fact, it's an enormous time trap, reading comments, responding and that sort of thing. I'm glad to find out I'm not in it for the dough.

There have also been negatives. I've wondered whether blogging has deluded me of writing the good stuff. I've also wondered if blogging has negatively affected my sales. Interestingly, if I take a week off from blogging, the metrics on the internet suggest more books are sold. But I doubt those are reliable. Regardless, a writer writes, so I'll just keep these blog entries coming into 2011.

I am planning a facelift on the blog next year, but I don't know when that will happen. The content will stay mostly the same, though I've learned a bit this year about the need to keep it short and interesting, so maybe the blog will be shorter and more interesting. You can be the judge of that.

So those are the end of year thoughts. I hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas season, and find yourself reflecting on the Incarnation. He came to us, proclaimed a message of peace, then left to prepare a place for us. Even as I type these words they sound absurd. I'm a fool to believe it, and yet I do. Christ be with you this Christmas.

Besides the Bible? What Jesus Meant by Gary Wills

The following is an excerpt from Besides the Bible – 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Change Christian Culture, which will be released this month by Biblica.  The book was authored by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective, and features guest essays from Donald Miller, William P. Young, Jonathan Acuff, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others.  You can order the book from Amazon or, our favorite, Powells.com, and you can learn more about the book at BesidesTheBible.com.

What Jesus Meant, by Gary Wills

Essay by Penny Carothers

In college I was drawn to Jesus the radical—the champion of the underdog and the Jesus of liberation theology. Except for one little catch: I wasn't drawn as much to Jesus as I was to the way he lined up with what I already believed. A theological system is far less challenging than the person of Jesus.

Other people like slogans, too. I know some folks who wear a lot of black who like to say that Jesus was homeless and a vagabond. So, too, are they. Others I know base their life on the belief that the Christian faith is the system by which we should run not only our lives, but our government.

Gary Wills takes issue with all of us.

In What Jesus Meant, Wills repeatedly uses the original language of the text and copious amounts of Scripture to demonstrate that using Jesus to advance a political or religious agenda—even if we believe it's an agenda God gave us—is nothing less than idolatry. Wills goes deep into the life of Jesus, examining his life, his words, and his radical, anti-hierarchical message. He brings to the page a Jesus who cannot be hemmed in by any theology, political system, or worldview. He brings us the essence of Jesus's message, and it's not easy to hear.

"In the gospel of Jesus, love is everything. But this love is not a dreamy, sentimental, gushy thing. It's a radical love, exigent, searing, terrifying."

So, too, is Wills' book. Someone wiser than me said the closer we get to Jesus, the more obvious it is our efforts and our actions may not reflect the vision and life of Jesus. This idea is also the point of Wills' book, forming the base of his most basic argument: Christ is not a Christian.

But page after page, we can't help but ask, if he's not a Christian then what is he?

By quoting Jesus himself, Wills shows us a Savior we can't easily categorize: Christ is a "divine mystery walking among men" who continually confronted the customs of his day. He is radically anti-hierarchical and egalitarian; he eschews any form of politics or religion. (In fact, it was religion and politics that killed him.) And yet, like us, his followers continually tried to hem him in, to capture a message they could systematize or use to their advantage. Despite our desire for boundaries we can understand, Jesus' actions went against everything his followers—and their religious and social context—perceived as "normal." Jesus is continually, in the words of Dostoevsky, "exceptional, vague, and enigmatic." And so, like the disciples, we find that it is virtually impossible to follow in Christ's footsteps; as Wills says, "we'd have to act like gods ourselves, which he expressly forbids."

What then, does it mean to follow Jesus? After Wills strips away so much of what we thought we knew, he offers this example.

"[Jesus] preferred the company of the lowly and despised to that of the rich and powerful. He crossed lines of ritual purity to deal with the unclean—with the lepers, possessed, the insane, with prostitutes and adulterers and collaborators with Rome. . . . He was an outcast among outcasts."

And this is what leads us to Wills' most penetrating insight, even though it's restating a concept we've heard a million times before:

"[Jesus] intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of that Father."

At the end of Wills' book, we no longer carry our assumptions about justifying ourselves by following in Jesus' footsteps or doing Jesus' work, but we do know this: the kingdom is coming—and already is—wherever we find the personal presence of Jesus. Period.

That's much more radical, searing, and terrifying than a political program, a theology, or a church that was founded on the person of Jesus. What Jesus Meant brings Jesus to life and confronts us with the exacting penetration of his words and deeds. It's not easy, but that's the point.

Penny Carothers is the Social Justice Editor for the Burnside Writers Collective. She is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, with her daughter Quinn and her husband David.

Besides the Bible? The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll

The following is an excerpt from Besides the Bible – 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Change Christian Culture , which will be released this month by Biblica.  The book was authored by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective, and features guest essays from Donald Miller, William P. Young, Jonathan Acuff, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll

Essay by Dan Gibson

As a writer, I always love to come up with a great opening line — something that just destroys the reader with my cleverness and wit.  That last sentence wasn't a particularly skilled opener, but Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has one of the best:

"The scandal of the evangelical mind, is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."

I don't think Noll, a professor at Notre Dame, was aiming for a real zinger, but instead a tone-setting lamentation over the state of Christian intellectualism in America. Even more than a decade and a half later, the stinging criticism of that line still burns as I reread it. It's one thing when the secular world calls us out as backwoods yokels, but when a prominent Christian intellectual levels that charge, it hurts a little more . . . largely because I know he's right.

While Noll's criticism of evangelical culture (or more appropriately, the lack thereof) could probably be extended to broader society as people get busier and busier, relying on television for both information and entertainment it's not hard to find evidence Christians in America do a lousy job in the thinking department.  For example, 95 percent of the chain emails—those featuring myths easily debunked by a quick bit of Googling—that cross my inbox on the way to the virtual garbage can have been sent to me by churchgoers. This isn't to say that there aren't exciting intellectual things going on in Christianity (professors and academics like Mark Noll are testament to that), but there remains a legitimate perception modern Christians have little to add to public dialogue.  Regardless of where you stand in the creation debate, the tendency of Christians to resolutely reject what the secular world regards as common knowledge doesn't help our reputation. Images like that of a saddled triceratops statue in the lobby of Kentucky's Creation Museum, or the championing of a former beauty queen as a spokesperson for our faith, make for easy laughs and reinforce an image of Christians as uninformed, ignorant rubes.

Noll's book lays out the evidence for a strong intellectual approach to Christianity championed by the Reformers and early Americans like Jonathan Edwards, unfortunately lost over time, and influenced negatively by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Fundamentalism. As the American church decided that the battle for souls hinged on holding liberalism at bay, the scientific world became an enemy of the faith. When enthusiastic evangelical preachers worked to detach the supernatural from the natural, the thoughtful end of the political world became a place without much value for end-times-focused believers. While many of the country's great universities began as religiously associated institutions, Christian colleges are now regarded as isolated enclaves, a far cry from their inception as faith-based homes of forward-thinking academia.

While in 1994, Noll might not have predicted the "thinking from the gut" era of George W. Bush, his book did effectively encourage some Christians (and Christian institutions) to improve their interaction with intellectualism. The internet age has helped some, as like-minded believers have been able to connect and interact over distance. Clearly, we can still do better, as Noll's text is not yet obsolete. In the meantime, I'm sure I have an email forward purporting NASA scientists' discovery of a "lost day in time."

Dan Gibson is a writer, editor, and researcher living in Tucson, Arizona. He is married, has two children, and manages an amateur soccer club, Sparklemotion. A Facebook group created in his honor has over 30 members.

Besides the Bible? Silence by Shusaku Endo

The following is an excerpt from Besides the Bible – 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Change Christian Culture , which will be released this month by Biblica.  The book was authored by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective, and features guest essays from Donald Miller, William P. Young, Jonathan Acuff, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others.

Silence, by Shusaku Endo

Essay by John Pattison

Francis Xavier disembarked at the southernmost tip of Japan in August 1549, and for two years the trailblazing Jesuit missionary preached in the streets, debated Buddhist monks, and conversed with local warlords. When Francis left Japan, he was hopeful about the modest inroads he had made bringing the gospel to the Japanese. And for a time Christianity did seem to flourish there. By 1582, two hundred churches served 150,000 Japanese believers.  The number of Christians increased to 200,000 by 1591 and 300,000 by the early years of the next century.

But an ill wind was blowing. In 1597, the pilot of a galleon from the Philippines told Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a powerful territorial lord, that the Spanish Empire used missionaries as pawns to pave the way for a future invasion. In a drunken rage, Hideyoshi ordered the crucifixion of twenty-six Christians. In 1614, Hideyoshi's successor turned against Portuguese missionaries on the recommendation of the English and Dutch, Portugal's rivals for the riches of the East. Declaring that Christianity "must be crushed," native and foreign believers were expelled or slaughtered. Diabolical new forms of torture were developed to compel Christians to apostatize, including one method, fumie, requiring the suspect to trample on a holy image of Jesus or Mary. Refusing marked them as a Christian, and they could be burned alive, thrown into the sea, or tied to a stake on the beach where they were beaten to death by the changing ocean tides. Japan's "Christian century," as it is now called, came to a close in 1638 when 37,000 men, women, and children were killed by government forces in a failed rebellion with religious undertones. Japan closed itself off to the world, and Japanese Christianity was forced underground for more than two hundred years.

It is in this dark period that Shusaku Endo's deeply affecting Silence is set. The character at the center of the novel is Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a Portuguese priest who learns that one of his former seminary professors, now a well-known missionary, has been captured in Japan, tortured, and has renounced Christ. Finding it impossible to believe that his mentor and teacher chose apostasy over "glorious martyrdom," Rodrigues travels to Goa in India. There he meets a Japanese fisherman named Kichijiro who agrees to sneak Rodrigues and another priest onto shore near Nagasaki, where Ferreira was last seen.

Kichijiro is not to be trusted. He is a broken shell of a man, a Christian who tramples on the fumie at every opportunity to confirm his own weakness and wretchedness. As promised, he connects the Portuguese priests with clandestine Christians in a fishing village. Rodrigues and his companion hide in a charcoal hut where they hear confessions and perform baptisms. When local officials send armed samurai to intimidate the village, the priests are forced to separate and flee. Kichijiro finally betrays Rodrigues for three hundred pieces of silver, and this, amazingly, is where the heart of the story begins. Rodrigues is confronted with an impossible moral choice: to formally renounce his faith or be responsible for the death of several native Christians. Father Rodrigues entered Japan proclaiming the Jesus of Easter; in his hardship and torture, he will discover the Jesus of Good Friday.

Shusaku Endo was Japan's best-loved writer when he died in 1996. Though Christians comprised less than one percent of the Japanese population, Endo, a Catholic, was a fixture on the bestseller lists. Philip Yancey, who helped introduce Endo to many American Christians in his books The Jesus I Never Knew and Soul Survivor, summed up the potency of Endo's writing: "The most poignant legacy of Jesus was his unquenchable love, even for—especially for—people who betrayed him. One by one, Jesus's disciples deserted him; still he loved them. His nation had him executed; while stretched out naked in the posture of ultimate disgrace, Jesus roused himself for the cry, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' This is the Jesus who speaks from the fumie, whose love extends to apostasy and beyond."

John Pattison is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Burnside Writers Collective, where he serves as Deputy Editor, as well as in newspapers around the country. He is a regular contributor to Relevant Magazine and Relevant Online. He lives in Oregon's Willamette Valley with his wife, Kate, and his daughter, Molly.

Besides the Bible? Man's Search for Meaning

This week I'll be featuring essays from a new book to which I contributed called Besides the Bible. It's a great book for book lovers in that it contains essays about books that should, will or have created Christian culture. Some books you'll agree should be in the book, and some you'll disagree and some will just shock you. All in all, it's a tribute to the strong literary history Christian culture has enjoyed throughout the years. I'll feature my essay first, then keep going all week. Enjoy!

Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl

Essay by Donald Miller

The following is an excerpt from Besides the Bible – 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Change Christian Culture , which will be released this month by Biblica.  The book was authored by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective, and features guest essays from Donald Miller, William P. Young, Jonathan Acuff, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others.

In 1942, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, along with his parents and pregnant wife, were taken by Nazi soldiers into the concentration camps, where his family would eventually be killed. Frankl survived the camps, including Auschwitz, and in the most dire of human circumstances realized a personality theory involving man's need for meaning—a theory that would contend with Sigmund Freud, who was alive at the time and positing that man's primary desire was not for meaning but for pleasure.

Tested in the concentration camps, Frankl realized no amount of torture could keep a person from living a fulfilling life, if only they had three elements working for them: a project in which they could contribute, a person to love, and a worthy explanation for their suffering.

His finding interestingly mirrors the Teacher's search for meaning captured in Ecclesiastes. The Teacher argued that one should find enjoyment in his work and in his wife, that one should fear God, and that while, technically, meaning is hard to prove, experientially it is possible within this framework.

Frankl rightly argues meaning is experiential, and his three elements provide a recipe, if you will, to experience that meaning. His emphasis on worthwhile suffering stands in contrast to an American culture obsessed with comfort. One might say our lack of suffering fuels a cycle of meaninglessness.

What makes Frankl's argument so important for the church is its invitation to suffer for the sake of the gospel, indeed, to suffer for something worthwhile, thus providing a sense of meaning to life. Christian leaders, then, should not try to make their congregants more comfortable, but call them into challenges that, by necessity, involve discomfort and even suffering if they are going to shepherd their congregants into more meaningful lives.

Frankl's book is no more religious than the Teacher's essay on meaning, and yet both have a masterful religious subtext, delving into the complex nature of fallen man, resistant against exposition at odds with their intended purposes.

Frankl's book has now sold more than twelve million copies and is considered one of the ten most influential books in America. He died in 1997.

An Invitation to my Home…

At The Mentoring Project, we've taken our donor relations to a very small level, or rather, a very intimate level. For our key donors, we are issuing an invitation to my home for a house concert. If you're already giving more than $50 per month, make sure you are on the invite list. And if you'd like to start helping The Mentoring Project provide positive role models for kids growing up without fathers, sign up. We'd love to have you over sometime in 2011. There will be more than a few opportunities, so if you were planning a trip to the Pacific Northwest, consider planning it around one of the concerts at my house. You can learn more here.

The Most Impressive Thing in the Room

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading The Weight of Glory this week and was struck by Lewis' comment that much of what we do we do to "win worship." Much of what we tweet, blog about, write about, and say in conversation is an attempt at such. Lewis considered this an inheritance from Paganism.

What is most sad about winning worship for ourselves is that any attempt at such marks a disinterest in God who is worthy of worship. I don't say that to make us feel guilty, which doesn't do anything to serve us in this instance, but in that freedom from self is found in love, in having found something so incredibly big and beautiful and awe-inspiring that in the face of it we are hardly self aware. Winning worship, then, is what happens when we aren't aware of something greater than ourselves. When I attempt to "win worship" it's because I'm not standing before anything bigger or more impressive than myself, and in fact see what's standing in front of me as less than me, and am calling it to worship what I believe is the most impressive thing in the room, myself. It's gloomy.

The Great Stumbling Block of the Creative Mind

The great stumbling block of the creative mind is the awareness of self from the perspective of others. Self awareness isn't the enemy, because we are in fact masterworks of God, but rather the overemphasis regarding what others think of us. When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.

In his introduction to C.S. Lewis' sermon The Weight of Glory, Walter Hooper says Lewis was not capable of writing a great work until he converted to Christianity, not because only Christians create great work (obviously) but because his conversion marked an inner change in which he ceased to take much interest in himself.

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.

Thoughts on Standing Beside a Bomb in a Crowded Square

A few nights ago, twelve friends and I attended the lighting of the Portland Christmas tree in Pioneer Square. My friends had all flown in for Thanksgiving, and we decided to join ten-thousand others who walked from all over downtown for the event. What we didn't know is the spot where we squeezed into the crowd was 25 feet from a van  filled with what a young man believed were six, fifty-gallon barrels of explosive material. As you know, the FBI had staged a sting, and as the young man made a call on his cell phone from the train station across town that would detonate the bomb, we were singing Christmas carols well within the blast zone. We didn't hear about the threat until the following morning, and didn't even know how close we were to the bomb until I saw a picture in the paper, taken only a few steps from the corner of Pioneer Square where we had been standing.

I've not talked about Islam or terrorism on this site at all. But reading about the young man, and hearing the talking heads discuss the threat on the internet has me wondering what we are really up against. Is it Islam? I don't think it is. I think it's extremism. And extremism takes many shapes and forms. For instance, the Mosque in Corvalis, Oregon where the young man worshiped was burned by arsonists two days later, but this was not called terrorism, it was called arson. And a middle-aged white man, angry about high taxes gassed up his plane and flew it into an IRS building in Austin, Texas last year, but the news was quick to report that this was was not a terrorist attack. Really? Sure looked like one to me. Why weren't tons of middle-aged white guys who have small planes and listen to Glenn Beck sent to Cuba for water boarding?

I don't think our enemy is specifically a religious enemy, though I do believe some religions are false. I think our enemy is extremism, extreme black and white thinking, an extreme belittling of other opinions, an extreme and insecure demonization of others, an extreme desire to control, and to make the mistake of thinking extremism is produced only in the Muslim community is ignorance. Extremism is a fall of man problem, a human problem, not just a religious problem. There are liberal extremists, conservative extremists, Calvinist extremists, humanitarian extremists and so on and so on. Here are a few marks of an extremist. Feel free to add to the list:

1. Extremists think in black-and-white absolutes. This does not mean there are not black and white absolutes, it only means the extremists can not see the world in color, the way the world actually exists. Ideas are either right or wrong, good or bad, and there is no neutral territory. You and I may say murder is wrong but eating broccoli is neutral, but an extremist wants to make a moral statement about broccoli and murder both.

2. People who do not agree with an extremist are perceived as threats. An extremist is very uncomfortable living in a world where people can just get along. Instead, they break people down into those who are for them and against them, with us or against us. Extremists believe people are out to get them and so see the people around them as enemies or allies.

3. Extremists do not admit they are wrong and are unwilling to consider another point of view.

4. Extremists are not passive. Extremists are aggressive. Extremists strike first, often out of ignorance or without understanding what they are striking out against. But they do strike out. They react in extremes.

5. Extremists believe, without question, their view is morally superior. They see themselves as right and strong and their enemies as wrong and weak and worth persecution, belittlement and even acts of violence.

And these are just a few loose characterizations of extremists.

I should also say that extremism is not without it's causes. Many Muslim extremists are reacting to the outright oppression of their people around the world, or the afore mentioned immorality around us here in the west. But where a normal person may have an objective view of such things, and perhaps choose appropriate channels to affect social change, an extremist wishes to eradicate the other view completely.

I should also add there is plenty of extremism in the evangelical church. Whether it's burning a Koran, or a pastor standing before his congregation belittling other pastors, we see heavy to light extremism in churches all over America every Sunday. An extremist pastor has made a theological stand that is absolutely right, morally superior, and has very real enemies that must be eradicated. An extremist pastor is dividing up everybody into the with us group and the against us group. Some of this has merit, but be certain this is a manifestation of an extremist personality filtered through a theological grid as justification. Lets not be confused. Jesus had very real enemies, and they ended up killing Him even as He cried out to God asking for their pardon. That is a very different stance than the modern war monger waving a Jesus flag.

People who are drawn to extremism are drawn to its feel of strength, it's moral absolutes, it's clear definition of enemies and so forth. Extremism paints a world with bold, straight lines, in which one can step into the role of hero or warrior with ease.

But aren't there Christian reasons for extremism? Absolutely. Biblical Christian extremism, though, looks very different. Biblical Christian extremism looks like being wrongly imprisoned without fighting it, or being stoned to death, or being crucified, or going hungry bringing food to the starving, or crossing a bridge in Selma, Alabama, or turning water into wine for a tipsy wedding party, or leaving your job to bring Christ to the hurting and so on and so on. Christian extremism is willing to die for people, not demonize them to validate their belittlement and oppression.

So, can we just stop saying we are at war with terrorism and start admitting we are at war with extremism, be it a muslim kid or a middle-aged AM radio junkie? Can we just stop calling some pastors provocative and start calling them extremists? And can we answer extremism the way Christ did, by dying for the ones who know not what they do? That's the kind of extremism I could get behind.