Kindle Notes & Highlights
and the worst pain a scapegoated person feels is not the pain of the angry accusers accusing; it’s the pain of the friends standing by, saying nothing.
As the humanity of sexual minorities remains hidden, the humanity of sexual minorities is dishonored—a vicious circle, literally.
This may be why resurrection appearances in general are striking in their counterintuitive emphasis on the humanity of Jesus.
welcome with an asterisk.
“You’re welcome* to a seat on our bus!” (*as long as it’s in the back of the bus).
he had chapter and verse to support his views—or so he believed.
Members of my demographic group suffer because we share in the essential vulnerability of the human condition, and not for the added cause of our race or gender.
Remove the power of accusation, and you’ve undone Satan.
Yet there’s nothing at all gentle about exclusion.
The parties harmed—not those enforcing, supporting or acquiescing to the policies, of course—best measure harm.
My conscience was clear—until it wasn’t.
I wonder how much this statement applies to my life today? What attitudes do I currently hold that I will regret later?
regard their change as a kind of conversion: a transformation wrought by the Spirit against deep internal and external resistance.
Learning more and more that conversion is not a one time deal, but a lifelong experience with mileposts along the way
It lost an understanding of the meaning of Jesus’s dying and rising in solidarity with all victims of scapegoating. It lost a sense of the Spirit, poured out on all people in his name, as Paraclete—defender of those accused by an encircling mob. In losing its message, it lost its way.
“This just can't, it just cannot, be right. It can't be what God wants … what he cares most about. These people ... are capable ... of getting it wrong.”
God might be, but he could not possibly be that rigid or small.
We can derive many backstories out of the Hebrew Scriptures; the question is, which of these backstories makes sense of “Christ died for our sins”?
I'm inclined to think we do not need to choose WHICH reason Christ died in accordance to the Scriptures, so much as He died for ALL of the reasons, I think it can be a many faceted logic, rather than a singular equivelent statement
The Scriptures are a living word, adaptable to many different cultural contexts in many different ways.
A God who kills his son to pacify his own wrath seems creepy to me,
Is it too much to ask God to be more loving than I am? I certainly hope not, for all our sakes.
fueled by mimetic desire, we resolve our internal group conflicts (in families, on the job, in society) by targeting a vulnerable member or minority group. We accuse them of faults we are blind to in ourselves, projecting onto them what we are loath to face in ourselves.
“Jesus died for our sins” means that he died “on account” of our scapegoating ways.
This seems overly simplistic
A revival of Christianity, in its current form, would fuel much that is antithetical to the kingdom of God
I think this is part of why I feel conflicted about evangelism
“He would find people who would take up the challenge of his time, but they would not do so out of commitment to Christ”
The reason we are “ethically challenged” is not that we lost our knowledge of good and evil, but that we gained it.
In grasping for the knowledge of good and evil, we’ve lost our childlike connection with God.
and can be viewed as a form of midrash on the binary involving the tree of life vs. the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
They are preoccupied with discerning the difference between good and evil, regarding such knowledge as the aim of their religious project.
Jesus is concerned, instead, with what gives “life,” rather than what gives “knowledge.”
It’s important to note that the Gospel material on the Pharisees was shaped by the concerns of the early Church in its various localities, including disputes between various factions of the Jesus movement and disputes within the broader Jewish and/or Gentile communities. The depiction of the Pharisees in the Gospel is not simply driven by a desire to provide the most accurate historical record of this sect within Judaism at the time of Jesus.
This is an incredibly crucial point, and I feel like it might be a microcosm of the broader issues with Scripture. As we get further and further away from the historical context scripture was written in, how much does its meaning change?
Judaism When Christianity Began, by Jacob Neusner, and Siblings: Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity at Their Beginnings, by Hayim Goren Perelmuter. See also, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Mark Zvi Brettler, and The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, by Amy-Jill Levine.
He is painfully aware that, in his zeal for morality, he actually used something given by God—Torah—to oppose the work of God.
So much of the writing, speaking and marketing about spirituality has been shaped by the advantaged perspective of those with the best media access in a consumer culture.
Scripture was employed as salve for weary souls and inspiration for courageous action—but read with the critical eye of those who suffered under white supremacist interpretations of Scripture.
our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action”—they
What kind of praying and what sort of spiritual practices can empower the work of resistance in our hearts, our communities and our world?
Much human expression is trans-rational, because rationality is only one of our many “heart capacities.”
When I think about what it means to pray in tongues, I wonder if it doesn’t do us some good to speak things that don’t lend themselves to words now and again.
If language contains and promotes ways of thinking and being that fall short of God, maybe it’s a small act of resistance to speak in tongues.
Essenes gathered in proto-monastic communities
What makes the Essens "proto" monastic as opposed to the groups that came later?
Let people have their anger! Minorities are often punished for their anger because majority people are shocked by it or consider it disproportionate.
Often, these churches are disproportionately dependent on conservative givers (who are more generous givers on the whole).
Share power with those who have less ... and question your internal resistance to do so.
Remaining passive as though it is a virtuous form of “rising above politics” is a cop-out.
centered.” But most churches led by women or people of color don’t see political action as opposed to spiritual action. They intermingle the two as easily as does the humanity and divinity of Jesus.
(As I sometimes tell our liberal congregants, “Put your money where your bleeding heart is!”)
This plan was aborted with the presidency of Andrew Jackson,
This is either a typo or a factual error. I believe he means to refer to Andrew Johnson here
When these pioneering missionaries proselytized, they transferred their own Euro-American-shaped church customs and theologies to those non-Westerners, who became Christian.
How much of what I was doing was also naïvely enmeshed in racism and/or a sense of national, cultural or religious superiority?
Faith and spirituality continue to influence us, and the world is becoming more religious—not less.
It was more important for colonized Africans and enslaved blacks to submit to missionary teachings, to learn to recite Scriptures and creeds, and be added to the membership to expand the Church’s geographical presence as evidence of the successful propagation of the Gospel among them and in foreign lands.” (M. Smith, 236)
