During a keynote in Holland, MI, last month, I made a passing comment about the Nones and the Dones—”the religiously unaffiliated and the religiously exhausted.” A remarkable article I read this week speaks to what “being the Church” means from the perspective of the Dones. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a psychologist, theologian, professor, and author […]
The mechanics of an oppressive society
Walter Brueggemann explains in The Prophetic Imagination some of the ways that King Solomon’s reign returned the Israelites to the oppressive culture they’d once experienced under the Egyptians. The top three tools are the “economics of affluence,” the “politics of oppression,” and the “establishment of a controlled, static religion.” According to Brueggemann, Solomon’s regime used these three cultural elements together to […]
Labor and rest
Sometimes it can be helpful to read one of my cultural traditions from another perspective. I’ve read most about the Sabbath recently from Jewish writers and evangelical Protestant theologians. But today my devotional brought me this query from Quakers in the southwest region of the United States: Have you taken a day of rest and restoration […]
What you do with 1,440 minutes
It’s appropriate that this post is about time. For about a week, the chorus in this part of the Western Hemisphere has been complaining about Daylight Saving Time, the time management system that, in most US states, takes an hour from spring and adds it to fall. The goal is to lengthen the amount of […]
In a world of matter, you can’t live on ether
In the misty Grecian past, philosophers imagined that the perceptible world was composed of five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and ether. Ether, or quintessence, was said to fill the realm in which the gods lived. In our time, most people no longer build our understanding of things on four or five elements. But we do still work […]
