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Politics/Law

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

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Responses to these events that ignore the underlying issues they express—that would see soccer-related violence, like the uprisings this week, simply as ferociously bad manners that can be corrected by cutting off social media access—invite more of the same. Absent religious institutions, soccer grounds, or other outlets as sites for organized repression and/or expression of the powerlessness and hopelessness that characterizes youth culture in places that simmer like East London all over the economically floundering developed world, more such outrage is always just one blind, stupid authoritarian action away.

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(A)theologies

Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

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Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies. This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.

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(A)theologies

My Lent: Ashes, Addiction, and the Reality of Hell (Pace Rob Bell)

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Those who are ready to send Rob Bell to the hell he purportedly denies have unwittingly confirmed the suspicion of skeptics who want nothing to do with a religion whose practitioners seem to relish every opportunity to squabble, berate, and condemn; who strike a contentious pose on every theological issue; and who have the profoundly mistaken idea that at the heart of the Christian gospel is the doctrine of karma rather than that of grace.

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Culture

Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath

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As National Day of Unplugging looms (it begins a week from today) I hope we all can agree that taking time away from the frenzy of everyday life is a good thing. And pausing to reflect on the role of technology in our lives is important at a time when social technologies in particular are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life with effects that we are just beginning to describe and understand. But I do have to wonder if the keen, even if not hostile, focus on technology as such misses the phenomenological, relational, and spiritual mark just a bit.  

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(A)theologies

Chilean Mine Rescue: Largest Global Spiritual Event Ever?

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One wonders how religious leaders might have exercised a more meaningful presence in the event as it unfolded and was engaged across a global digital landscape. As I scanned the emerging Facebook communities throughout the day and monitored Twitter feeds and news site comments, it was clear that few religious leaders were participating in what has to have been the most significant global spiritual conversation that has ever taken place on Earth.

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