| Chase Tibbs |
You can already feel the tension. The tug is coming from all sides. You feel you have to commit to one or the other. The middle ground is as grey as can be. And along with the wins, there are the losses that come with how you approach the conversations. On the one hand, if you don’t bring up conversation regarding the latest situation/news, aren’t you participating in the “quietness” around the current issue? On the other hand, if you bring up conversation on the current news, you may be risking your relationships because of your differing opinions and perspectives on said latest situation/news.
We live in a world where disagreeing is not tolerated. Multiple perspectives cannot find a harmonious community. Diversity in theologies and ideologies is unable to sit at the same table.
If only there was a handbook for conversation around the holidays when sitting with family and friends with whom we disagree...
Read More| ANNE WILLIAMSON |
When I hear the word greed, my body recoils. Shame is at least part of the reason. I may not be someone who perpetually wants more but I have early, hard-to-shake memories of feeling ashamed of the much more I already had. I recoil too because greed seems to be directly and indirectly responsible for so much pain: the Earth’s; the poor’s; women’s; even, when we begin to think spiritually, the pain of greed’s perpetuators.
Nick Hanauer, one of our country’s .01% ers, agrees… in a way. His concern for he and his fellow plutocrats is not spiritual; it’s practical. In his TED Talk, Hanauer explains why the inevitable consequences of greed in the form of historically high income inequality will be an unstable democracy and less profitable businesses – realities bad for all. In Hanauer's view, this alone should compel us to end gross inequality; he doesn’t mind the moral argument; he simply thinks it unnecessary.
I don’t agree....
Read More| ANNE WILLIAMSON |
It was the summer of 2002. I was sitting dead center in a large, megachurch auditorium. I had been struggling with my concepts of God and church for some time; so, although the good student in me wanted to sit near the front, I moved back in an act of deviance. I was there because the visiting preacher, Rob Bell, intrigued me; and yet, somehow, I needed him and everyone to know I would not be mindlessly accepting what was said. The best I came up with was to pick a less "enthusiastic" seat.
I only remember one part of the sermon that day: an aside where Rob Bell spent maybe a minute talking about corporate sin. It was a minute, though, I'd never heard uttered in church. I had grown up attending Sunday school and youth groups, going on mission trips and volunteering, being confirmed for Christ's sake, literally; yet sin committed on a larger scale, by societies or the groups within them, had never been discussed. The concept resonated deeply; why was this the first I was hearing of it?
Read More| ANNE WILLIAMSON |
There's this Jesus scene in the Bible that used to scare me and now I love. In it, Jesus enters the temple in Jerusalem during Passover and begins overturning tables, driving out the money-changers and sellers of doves. (Yep, that was a thing.) He's angry, proclaiming, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer'; but you are making it a den of robbers."
As a teenager, I didn't find Jesus' behavior very "Christ like." Ironic, I know. Where were the children on his lap, healings, and words of peace? Why was he so angry? LEARN, LISTEN, LOVE...
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