someone has a new book...

...coming out in october

DESCRIPTION
There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.

This is a book about those two numbers.

It's a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror,

Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity,

It's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest, it's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.

nt wright: are we wrong about heaven?

n.t. wright is in the new issue of time magazine (click the pic for the article). if you've read wright or any other formidable scholar - or authors like dallas willard, rob bell, lewis and so many others - you won't find anything earth shattering here in terms of foundational theology.

but i love that this is in TIME - and i love that light is being brought to the scriptures in pop culture. take a second to read it - it's not long.

EXCERPT:
N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different..."

click here for the full article

book musings

[i can't stop... reading. i lose more sleep this way. here are some questions/thoughts that emerged from reading pieces of "everything must change."]

can the suicide machine really be stopped? can the earth really be liberated from the destructive framing story that drives it? is Jesus' healing and transforming framing story really powerful enough to save the world?

...[to unleash the needed change requires] doubting, rejecting, and defecting from our old framing stories, and instead, discovering and adopting - in a word, believing - a new framing story. that, once again, is exactly where i believe Jesus steps into human affairs, challenging us simply to believe his good news (mark 1:15), and to believe him as the bearer of that good news (John 6:29, 35; 7:38; 10:37; 14:1).

if the word believing seems too soft a strategy for confronting global crises, i would reply that believing seems like a soft or weak thing only when it is domesticated belief. tame believing for and within the dominant system may be easy, but wild believing against and beyond it turns normal people into heroes and history changers. martin luther, martin luther king, jr, galileo, nelson mandela, gandhi, mother teresa, saint francis... they all showed this heroic courage to believe against and beyond the dominant systems of their day.

so we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.

mclaren:

A community of people who begin to wake up to the covert curriculum in which they swim each day would want to band together to share their insights about it. They would help one another not be sucked in, not be massaged into passivity... They would remind one another of the alternative framing story they had come to believe was good, beautiful, and true, and they would seek, together, to live by this alternative framing story, the radical good news. They would develop practices of spiritual formation so they and their children for generations to come would be able to learn, live, and grow as part of the solution, not part of the problem; as agents of healing, not as carriers of the disease; as revolutionaries seeking to dismantle and subvert the suicidal system, not as functionaries and drones seeking to serve and preserve it.