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John Edwards

John Edwards’ sins: can you forgive?

Which of these news stories is unbelievable: A cannibal zombie high on bath salts killed a man in Miami, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban large sugary drinks, and a politician admitted to his ‘sins’? If you said politician admitting to ‘sins’, you are correct!

On Thursday, former Senator John Edwards was acquitted on one federal charge and a mistrial was declared. Edwards has been through a tabloid scandal of cheating on his wife while she had cancer, fathered a child with his mistress, and proved to be an all around creep of a guy. Upon the mistrial, the former vice-presidential candidate declared:

I did an awful, awful lot that was wrong, and there is no one else responsible for my sins. None of the people who came to court and testified are responsible. Nobody working for the government is responsible. I am responsible, and if I want to find the person who should be held accountable for my sins, honestly, I don’t have to go any further than the mirror.

The trial proved everything we know about Edwards. He did some horrible things and unfortunately, based on legal scholars, he did not break any federal election laws. However, he did break some major moral laws. He committed an affair and lied to the world about his affair. He tried to cover it all up with money and the truth came out.

In his speech to the public after his mistrial he said, “I don’t think God is through with me…” That sounded disingenuous. If you watch his speech he starts to confess and seem contrite, and as his parents look on with an exhausted look on their faces, Edwards turns his confession into a public relations campaign to prove he is a good guy. Yuck.

Based on his “confession” can you forgive Edwards? Continue Reading…

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Two blogs, two different reactions on Dan Savage

It’s amazing how audience dictates the comment section of a blog and how each handle discourse. I posted my Dan Savage blog post on this blog and on my Times Union blog. Interestingly, I posted my blog post on Facebook. On Facebook, the conversation was civil, exchanged differing views, offer opposing ideas, and generally mild. On this blog, there were no comments about the post.

On my Times Union blog, it was a different story with over 55 comments. Most of the posts were critical of the fact that I spoke out against Dan Savage. Most of the commenters thinking revolved around the fact that Savage represented a community who has been unfairly oppressed by religious conservatives. Thus, my critique of Savage’s comments about the Bible being ‘bullshit’ and how he misunderstood slavery in the Bible were not apropos. Despite the fact that I deplored gay-bashing and Bible beating any group, it seems that many commenters believed Savage’s comments were just and called for. Many of the blog comments were attacks against Christianity in general, how religion is narrow-minded, and even some personally attacked me.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield (author, radio and TV talk show host), led a Q&A for the Washington Post, commented on Dan Savage. The Rabbi wrote “You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” and offers some important insight when he commented on a reader’s question/statement on the Dan Savage story:

bullying

Anti-bullying advocate: ‘Ignore the bullsh*t in the Bible’

Anti-bullying advocate Dan Savage recently told a gathering of 1,800 high school students to “ignore the bullshit in the Bible”. Savage is a columnist and a speaker for the gay community. Savage’s comments came at a conference for students and his forum was about responding to cyber-bullying.

His speech in context was as follows:

People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit about gay people in the Bible the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waived Bibles over their heads during the civil war and justified it.

As you see in the video, students who are presumably Christian, walk out in protest of Dan Savage’s comments.

Savage continued:

If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, slavery, what are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100 percent.

After his rant, Dan Savage welcomed the departed students to come back:

Millennials

Millennials losing faith in record numbers

This should not surprise us, but it should alarm us. Millennials, 18-24 year olds, are not only leaving churches in record numbers, but they are also losing their faith too. The Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, just released a shocking study on these young people.

Many Christians think young people are leaving churches for other religions and that is just not true. Young people are leaving their faith behind and quickly becoming the generation of “unaffiliated”.

Daniel Cox, the Public Religion Research Institute’s research director said,

“These younger unaffiliated adults are very nonreligious. “They demonstrate much lower levels of religiosity than we see in the general population,” including participation in religious rituals or worship services.

The hard numbers:

1 in 4 young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion
25% say religion is unimportant
1 in 4 Millennials said that they attend religious services at least once a week
Among Catholics, whites were twice as likely as Hispanics to say they are no longer affiliated with the church
37% say that they never pray
Fewer than half (40%) say that religion is either very important or most important thing in their life
45% who attend or attended a religiously affiliated college reported attending worship services once a week compared with just 13% attending or attended a private college
6-in-10 (62%) Millennials also believe that present-day Christianity is “judgmental.”

The crucial bit of information within this data is that within the “unaffiliated group”, 55% identified with a religious group when they were younger. Meaning, we are seeing a growing segment of younger people not only leaving their church, but also losing their affiliation with their faith.

The study also found that Catholics are losing the highest number of childhood believers, with about 8%. White mainline Protestant adherents lost 5%. For those who reported a change in their childhood and young adulthood religious affiliation was the unaffiliated, which moved from 11% to 25%.

Compared with other generations, Millennials do not have a bright future ahead for religious faith and worship attendance. Denominations and churches must act quickly, but decisively to change their strategies. Instead of pumping money into dying churches, denominations must support growing churches.

Pastors and churches must understand that Millennials are a values based generation. That means, they will affiliate with causes that embody their conviction for ethical causes. They care about the oppression of peoples, injustice of poverty, and have compassion for the lowly. Churches must see their outreach as a missional outreach to their community. By embodying the Gospel message, churches must share the salvation of Christ and Jesus’ mission to uplift the oppressed. If 62% of Millennials believe that Christianity is judgmental, then we churches and believers have a lot of work to do to change.

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The voice of the empty tomb

Today, many of us will connect with family and friends joining in the Easter celebration. Many traditions exist abound. Growing up in Maryland, our church always had an Easter egg hunt, as many churches do. Kids running around trying to gather as many eggs as possible. Parents watching as they wear their new Easter outfits.

Easter in the northeast can be hit or miss for Easter egg hunt. I learned that first hand last year. My wife organized an Easter egg hunt for the church and guess what happened? It snowed! Snow on Easter!?! We almost canceled the event but we did not want to disappoint the kids waiting and wanting that classic Easter celebration. So, we had it inside, not exactly a spring type activity, but a reality in the Northeast.

You may have heard of an Easter egg hunt that was canceled recent. Because of weather? Low turn out? No. This year, the Associate Press reported that an annual egg hunt in Macon, GA – traditionally one of the largest Easter events in central Georgia – had to be canceled because of aggressive parents. Reports from Georgia tell of parents injuring kids and other adults. Children were trampled on. Parents were too aggressive to make sure their kid wasn’t holding an empty egg.

Nobody wants to get an empty egg for Easter. After all, an empty egg is just about as good as being given an empty gift box at Christmas: just a big disappointment.

What’s so great about something empty? Continue Reading…

Maundy Thursday

Why we call it Maundy Thursday

Today is Maundy Thursday — no, not Monday Thursday, which would be an interesting concept: society could work Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off! Some Christians misunderstand that this day is only a “Catholic” celebration. Christians both ancient and modern have remembered Christ’s last supper with his disciples on Maundy Thursday, which begins the great triduum, the three days of the paschal celebration.

The word “maundy” comes from the Latin word maundatum for “commandment”, which comes from Jesus’ words from the last supper: “I give you a new commandment; that you love one another…” The full Latin phase is maundatum novarum, which means “a new commandment.” According to Robert Webber (The Services of the Christian Year, #252), these words were translated in the French word mande. This in turn was anglicized into “maundy.”

During this day, Christians celebrate Jesus’ last supper with his disciples through serving and receiving communion with a special service. Often, all of or some of John 13 is read. This scripture recalls: Continue Reading…

Jesus

Newsweek’s hipster Jesus article all hype

How do sell copies of a dying medium? Put a hipster looking Jesus on the cover. It’s kind of interesting… the whole, “What if God was a dude?” routine. Hipster, yeah, it has been done before and we get it. Not really surprising.

What is more shocking is that Newsweek thinks Jesus is an Anglo-Saxon looking dude who doesn’t like buttons but snaps on his shirt. The Atlantic thinks he looks more like an Urban Outfitters Jesus. Give the cover a look and you decide which one it is:

The cover article is by Andrew Sullivan and he writes of the decline of Christianity. It takes him about 500 words to get to the point: Christianity is in crisis. I’m not troubled by the inaccurate depiction of Jesus or that Sullivan tells us what we already know about Christianity, but that he makes a bold statement without follow through. The article accurately describes the crisis but without remedy. Sullivan goes into great detail about how Thomas Jefferson and his edited ‘Bible’ sought to make faith palatable and how that’s supposed to correlate to solving the crisis.

The article really does not contribute anything to discussion of how to concretely connect Christianity to post-moderns or to enact reform. Sullivan writes, Continue Reading…

Trayvon Martin

Four troubling facts in the Trayvon Martin case

Last week, the evolving case of the killing of Trayvon Martin, a teenager, by George Zimmerman reached a fever pitch. Outrage on the part of pro- Martin groups swirled in a mix of frustration, anger, and sadness over law enforcement’s decision not to bring Zimmerman to trial. Protests in Orlando and other cities and towns around the country proclaimed one thing: justice for Trayvon Martin. We know by now, based on facts shared by law enforcement, that there is enough evidence for Zimmerman to be charged with a crime.

Celebrities, religious leaders, and even the President have weighed in on the tragedy with mixed results. An example of this fever pitch outrage manifested in director Spike Lee retweeting on his Twitter account a false address of the Zimmerman family. It turns out that the addressed shared was not a family related to Martin’s shooter, but another family with the same name. Death threats and intimation tactics were employed by individuals against the family, which resulted in Spike Lee apologizing and settling with the family.

I have waited to weigh in on Trayvon Martin because of the tenor of the tragedy. There is, and rightfully so to some degree, a great deal of sensitivity surround this case. I’ve waited as long as I could for officials to release more evidence. I didn’t want to blog on hearsay or speculation. Let me be clear here: It’s obvious that justice is needed for Trayvon Martin and his family, which calls for a trial. However, there are deeper issues present than just a teenager being shot and his shooter not charged.

Here are four troubling facts in the Trayvon Martin case: Continue Reading…

Churches, Millennials

Church giving increases, but hurts Millennials

millenials
As the economy rebounds it appears that contributions to churches are increasing as well. According to 4th annual “State of the Plate” survey , 51% of churches last year saw an increase in church giving, up from 43% in 2010 and 36% in 2009. That should make all churches rejoice. However, if you look deeper into this report, we see that we shouldn’t celebrate just yet.

This study shows increase support of churches, but concerns arise from which churches see an increase in giving:

The increase seen in 2011 was most noticeable in the most mega of megachurches: 86 percent of churches with more than 10,000 congregants saw an greatest rise in giving, compared to 39 percent of churches with fewer than 100 people saw an increase.

Still, nearly one-third (32 percent) of churches said giving was down in 2011 — although a smaller share than the 39 percent of churches that reported a decline two years ago, according to the survey.

This means that mega churches, which tend to be populated by affluent Christians, saw a rebound in giving compared to smaller churches, which tend to be populated by less affluent churches goers. This followers the pattern in our society: the rich are getting richer, and the poor are becoming poorer. Even in churches, we see an income and giving gap. As the economy rebounded for the more wealthy, the lower-income segment of the population continues to struggle. How can a wealthy mega church continue to pump money into their large buildings and staffs when their neighbors are suffering to survive?

dystopia

Why dystopia is in vogue

This past weekend the movie “The Hunger Games” opened to millions of adoring fans. Over 35 million books have been sold in “The Hunger Games” series and the books currently sit atop of Amazon’s best seller list. It seems that our culture is shifting to an interest in dystopia. Almost everyone I talk to who read “The Hunger Games” said they couldn’t put the book down.

Move over Harry Potter and Twilight. You have been replaced.

Dystopian novels and movies are all the rage. But, why now? Isn’t dystopia for sci-fi fans?

One of the major reasons why “The Hunger Games” is so en vogue, much like Harry Potter was, is because people love a good epic battle between the forces of good and evil. Especially, if there are young people involved. Erik Feig, president of production at Lionsgate, the studio behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” sheds light on this type of entertainment:

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