Billboards and Prooftexting abortion
I pass this billboard at least three or four times a week: “Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb,” it reads, from the Revised Standard Version translation of Psalm 139, 13th verse. It makes me angry almost every…
Sunday thoughts: Homeless Jesus
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. — Hebrews 13:2 (NRSV) St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina recently installed a statue of Jesus as a homeless…
Hermeneutics & HJR-3
I’m working on a post to recap what was said during yesterday’s Senate Rules Committee hearing on HJR-3, which would enshrine discrimination against LGBT Hoosiers in our state’s constitution. But I wanted to comment on a specific religious idea that…
MLK, John Lewis, and transforming guns into plowshares
Over the last two months, I’ve written – then deleted – a half a dozen posts about guns and violence. I just can’t seem to find the right words. Every day I sit at my desk and see a small…
Ohio school district promotes non-religious Christianity
Yet another example of Christians reducing Jesus to a cultural symbol, drained of any religious or theological context: school administrators in Ohio are refusing to remove a copy of a famous religious painting from a public middle school. In this…
Bill O’Reilly and the fight to secularize Christianity
Last week, Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly insisted that Christianity was not, in fact, a religion, but rather a philosophy. That prompted this righteously funny, indignant response from Jon Stewart: In his bluntness, I think O’Reilly clumsily pulled back the…
