Tag: faith

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this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law

Image via thisamericanlife.org
Image via thisamericanlife.org

As I was cleaning my house Sunday morning, sweeping floors, vacuuming up dog hair, doing loads of laundry, unloading dishes, dusting, I was catching up on listening to several of my favorite podcasts.  In particular, I listened to an episode of “This American Life” called “This I Used to Believe.”  It’s a take-off from the NPR series “This I believe” about people who used to believe strongly in something, but no longer do so.  You can listen to this episode at this website.

The part that made me hit pause, walk away from my chores, and sit down to blog was the second segment of the show called “Team Spirit in the Sky”.  It was about a woman who saw a story on the news about a Texas football coach (I can’t help but picture Coach Taylor from “Friday Night Lights”) from a Christian school who touched the lives of an opposing team from a juvenile lock-up by having fans from HIS team learn their opponents’ names, cheer for them, form “spirit lines” for them, and root for them when his team played them.  For many of the lock-up’s players, it was a unique experience to finally be rooted for in any sense of the word, and for the coach, a chance to live out in some small way the biblical idea of loving one’s enemies.

The woman telling the “This I Used to Believe” story was a woman wrote to the coach after seeing the news story to tell him that though she was a lapsed Catholic who became an agnostic following the death of a close friend to cancer, she is glad that he is living out an authentic Christian faith for his players and everyone else in his community.  And at first, the coach responds, and I, the listener was thinking, “YEAH! This guy is getting it right!” The coach says he feels that God is speaking to him about this woman who has emailed him, and they begin a correspondence.  She even agrees to talk on the phone with him, intrigued that God has been waking him up many nights in a row, bothering him about what he needs to say to this woman who has lost her faith because of one of the most classic questions in theology: why do bad things happen to good people?

But then the coach totally drops the ball. Continue reading “this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law”

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we are what we eat: thoughts on eating and believing

The face of malnutrition is becoming what I see more and more when I have a bite of meat. Photo by John Stanmeyer via National Geographic.
The face of malnutrition is becoming what I see more and more when I have a bite of meat. Photo by John Stanmeyer via National Geographic.

I have a feeling I’m on a slow slide to vegetarianism.  It almost feels inevitable to me as a bleeding-heart liberal who weeps for global poverty and worries about the environment. The more I read, the more I feel that maybe, though I love it, meat is incompatible with many of my most deeply held beliefs.

Now, before anyone flips out, I’m not a PETA obsessive.  I do care about the cruelty involved in meat production, and would prefer that all meat come from animals who are raised without cruelty, with basic dignity, who are fed the kinds of things they were born to eat, and who are killed in as respectful a manner as possible.  I’m not morally opposed to eating meat based on ideas of animal rights.  Though I love animals, I do believe that we’re omnivores, that some animals are made for eating, though I support anyone’s choices and reasons for becoming a vegetarian.  I buy organic, free-range, cage-free, local eggs at $5 a carton, and as much as possible I try to do the same with the meat I eat, though I can’t always afford free-range chicken and grass-fed beef.  I’m just beginning to feel that I’m still not doing enough.

Today’s musings are fueled by a piece I read in my latest issue of National Geographic Magazine, to which my parents give me a subscription each year for Christmas, as I’ve loved flipping through it for as long as I can remember.  The piece, called “The End of Plenty” by Joel K. Bourne, Jr., is about the global food crisis.  Basically, even before the current economic crisis, we (the world) were consuming more food than farmers had been producing, and we’ve been doing that for over a decade.  This has caused massive increases in global food prices, the price of rice doubling in the past two years, for example.  This spike in prices hits the world’s poorest of the poor hardest, as they typically spend 50-70% of their incomes just on food alone. Continue reading “we are what we eat: thoughts on eating and believing”

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some thoughts on the state of church (and state)

This started out as a bullet point in today’s “bufflo tips,” but then I realized I had a whole lot more to say on the subject than could be tied up nicely in a sentence or two.

If you ask me, the Church needs to do some turning. Via Afroswede @Flickr.
If you ask me, the Church needs to do some turning. (This picture is actually of a church in a town I consider one of my homes, Little Rock, AR) Via Afroswede @Flickr.

This post by Courtney E. Martin at The American Prospect about the much-hyped Pew study on Americans’ religiosity or lack thereof, was very interesting to me as a Christian.  In particular, this portion of the report on why so many people have recently left the faith:

About half … became unaffiliated, at least in part, because they think of religious people as hypocritical, judgmental or insincere. Large numbers also say they became unaffiliated because they think that religious organizations focus too much on rules and not enough on spirituality, or that religious leaders are too focused on money and power rather than truth and spirituality.

In particular the bit about rules over spirituality speaks to me in ways similar to the kinds of things I have been reading and thinking lately. How have we, who claim to follow a Savior who told us that his yoke (his list of rules, each rabbi had one) is easy and his burden is light, become known for our Pharisaical emphasis on rules rather than for echoing our Savior’s emphasis that following him leads to a right heart from which right actions automatically flow? Again I’m going to pimp Dallas Willard, who argues against our petty gospels of “sin management.” We should be known for freeing people of their burdens, not for adding to them with lists of rules, because without the life-transformation that comes from being a disciple of Jesus in the truest sense (not merely an intellectual agreement with the idea that Jesus is Lord and died for our sins, but truly a modeling of one’s life to be like Christ), following the rules is impossible.

Also, Martin writes:

The report, which indicates that one-fourth of adult Americans have changed their religious affiliation from what they were raised with, also explains, “The unaffiliated population is a very diverse group. Not all those who are unaffiliated lack spiritual beliefs or religious behaviors; in fact, roughly four-in-ten unaffiliated individuals say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives.”

I would say this is definitely true for me.  If you asked me today, I’d probably claim “unaffiliated.”  I grew up in a Presbyterian, PC(USA), church in which I was very active, and for which I am very thankful.  I was encouraged to ask questions, to learn about theology and church history, and even to doubt.  I attended PC(USA) churches in college, and now that we have moved far far far from home, we sporadically attend an Episcopal church and go to a small group hosted by a Baptist church.  Even though I’m not attending church services as regularly as I did growing up, I’m reading my Bible more than ever and also reading books about theology and Christian living.  In particular, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, and Dallas Willard have been topping my reading lists.  For the time being, I’m experiencing remarkable spiritual growth also remarkable because it’s taking place outside of a church. Continue reading “some thoughts on the state of church (and state)”