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I consistently tell my students to listen purposefully and carefully to those unlike themselves. If you usually read the New York Times, be sure also to read The American Conservative. If you usually read World magazine, be sure to also read Sojourners. In that spirit, evangelical progressive Jesse Curtis, one of the most thoughtful and prolific bloggers out there, is planning to listen and read only conservative sources for the next week. Subscribe to his blog to find out how his experiment in empathy goes!

Sean Gladding, who lives in an intentional community in the East End neighborhood of Lexington, is a good representation of progressive evangelical spirituality. Convinced that the old salvation formulation of the Romans Road is lacking in some fundamental ways, Gladding emphasizes Creation and the New Creation in his narrative of faith and Scripture. His book The Story of God, The Story of Us describes how Christians can experience a glimpse of God’s coming kingdom even here on earth. Click here (for a guest post at Kurt Willem’s site) to read Gladding’s description of his narrative style. And you can watch him speak below.

Today Sean Gladding of a New Monastic community in Lexington named Communality spoke at Asbury’s chapel. It was a terrific talk and reminded of this book trailer. It highlights Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove’s translation of the Rule of St. Benedict and how it can be used in a contemporary urban environment.

A couple of years ago, I considered doing some writing on kitsch like Thomas Kinkade paintings and Precious Moments dolls. I called it “evangelical porn” because of its exaggerated features and failure to resemble reality. This graphic makes me want to return to the project.

In the early 1990s Jeremiah Enna and Mona Störling-Enna moved to Kansas City to join the arts scene. Twenty years later they now have over 800 students in their schools of dance and theater. They also launched The Culture House and Störling Dance Theater, which have come up with some impressive productions. Dismayed by the culture wars, the Ennas wrote Underground, according to Christianity Today, in order to bring about racial reconciliation in urban Kansas City. Arts critic Paul Horsley of the Kansas City Star named Underground one of the city’s Top 10 performances of the decade, calling it “one of the most vivid, heartfelt and theatrically astute pieces of dance theater ever to grace a Kansas City stage.” Read more about this fascinating evangelical story here.

Check out Mike Clawson’s just-published article on “Misión Integral and Progressive Evangelicalism: The Latin American Influence on the North American Emerging Church.” I had the privilege of meeting Mike unexpectedly at an archives a few weeks ago. We had a lot to talk about because his article touches on an important theme in one of Moral Minority’s chapters: “Samuel Escobar and the Global Reflex.” It’s about how engagement with the two-thirds world led some evangelicals toward an embrace of social justice. And his dissertation is on the emerging church movement. Mike, a grad student at Baylor, is doing some great work–keep an eye out for him. You can follow his blog here–and his wife’s terrific blog here (Julie is author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices).

 

 

Locals here in Lexington, Kentucky, should check out this talk being given at Your Edible Garden this Monday. Ryan Koch of Seedleaf will be talking about the spiritual components of community gardens and what it means to sow seeds in socio-economically diverse settings. Here are the details:

 

• What: Your Edible Garden Series
  
• When: Monday, August 27th, (6:30 potluck; 7pm discussion)
• Where: Beaumont Presbyterian Church (1070 Lane Allen Road)

Check out the latest post at The Anxious Bench by John Turner, author of a just-released biography of Brigham Young. He offers some whimsical thoughts on how much he likes to eat, recipes he cooks, healthful living, the More with Less Cookbook–and the first, sort of, review of Moral Minority. Here’s a taste:

Before childrearing reduced our adventurousness, my wife and I even enjoyed cooking. While living in Colorado for a year after graduate school and staying in a furnished rental home, we stumbled upon several years’ worth of Cooking Light magazine. . . . Those big, glossy pictures made me want to try every entrée and dessert.  We didn’t try everything, but we did our best. A few Turner family favorites:  Feta Chicken with Vegetables, Joe’s Special (swiss chard for breakfast!), Confetti Burritos (with sweet potato), and Moroccan Salmon. My mother-in-law even baked CL’s herb-crusted standing rib roast twice! The latter dish is just about the best-tasting beef I’ve ever had this side of Texas brisket barbecue. We had plenty of clunkers as well.  Gruyère-stuffed calzones – ugh. . . . Besides lapses in judgment and skill, there was a major problem with these Cooking Light recipes. They were not easy on the wallet. When you’re buying fancy cheeses, meats, and spices to make dinner, those dinners get expensive quickly. For some reason, it’s apparently necessary to own every variety of oil and vinegar known to humankind. Truffle oil? I thought truffles were fancy chocolates, not mushrooms. We couldn’t afford to really jump on the foodie bandwagon. . . . The More-with-LessCookbook is the antithesis of Cooking Light or other contemporary food magazines. . . . The cookbook’s discussion of irrational food consumption is just as appropriate – probably more – for 2012 as for 1976: too much protein, too much processed food, too many calories, too much food eaten by Americans while others go hungry. Men and women may not live on bread alone, but they certainly don’t need truffle oil. We need more of the Bread of Life, but if you’re like me, you could use a bit less of certain earthly things.

The Catholic News Agency is reporting that a Democratic committee has rejected an appeal to “acknowledge and welcome differing positions on the issue of abortion.” The group pushing the new language, Democrats for Life of America, said that nearly one-third of all Democrats self-identify as pro-life. In the 2008 election, about one-fourth of Obama’s supporters considered themselves pro-life. A representative said, “We represent a large contingent and a diverse group of pro-life democrats who want to be represented in the Democratic Party . . . As a big tent party that is open-minded and inclusive, we should be welcoming to those who are pro-life.” But the committee this month said no.

My book Moral Minority shows that this rebuffing of evangelical pro-lifers is not new. It’s rooted in the early 1970s, when a Democratic Party that was arguably more pro-life than the Republican Party began to transform toward a pro-choice orthodoxy. Here’s an excerpt from the manuscript that describes the new trajectory:

As President Carter soon discovered, insurgent resolve launched the Party on a new pro-choice trajectory. Calling abortion “wrong” and explaining that Roe v. Wade was “one instance where my own beliefs were in conflict with the laws of this country,” Carter’s equivocations on abortion offended growing numbers on the political left. Pro-choice feminists denounced the Democrats’ official 1976 platform that recognized “the legitimacy of both pro-life and pro-choice views.” They condemned Carter’s support of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited most Medicaid payments for abortion. They resented the fact that devout, pro-life Catholic Joseph A. Califano, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, enforced the Amendment strictly. Presidential assistant Margaret Costanza fielded an extraordinary number of phone calls from public interest groups, the public, and even other White House staff members “expressing concern and even anger” over Carter’s position. Costanza urged Carter to reconsider. The President wrote a stark “no” on her written request, adding that his public statement was “actually more liberal than I feel personally.” Costanza, in turn, called a protest meeting of nearly 40 high-level pro-choice female members of the administration in July 1977. Carter did not yield, and Costanza eventually resigned. In 1980 Democrats adopted an explicit pro-choice position and strictly enforced the new orthodoxy. Formerly pro-life, Ted Kennedy had declared to a Massachusetts constituent in 1971 that “wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized—the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” Within a decade, Kennedy reversed course. Other pro-life politicians with evangelical or Catholic backgrounds such as John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, Mario Cuomo, Bob Kerrey, Dick Durbin, and Bill Clinton, also become leading defenders of the right to choose. In fact, five of the contenders for the Democratic nomination in 1988—Jesse Jackson, Joe Biden, Paul Simon, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore—had flipped to a pro-choice position under party pressure.

I don’t have a copy yet, but the recently released A Faith Not Worth Fighting For looks like a good one. The Englewood Review of Books concurs in a very positive review. Here’s a taste:

Gregory A. Boyd’s chapter tackles the issue of whether nonviolence is expected of nations or of only Christians, Ingrid Lilly addresses the Old Testament war narratives, and Andy Alexis-Baker takes up the question of why Jesus didn’t ask the centurion to abandon his military vocation. Alongside essays from Samuel Wells, John Dear, and J. Nelson Kraybill, the essays exploring the Biblical witness concerning nonviolence are rich and honest. As Kraybill points out, Scripture’s theology on the issue tends toward the polyphonic, creating room for nonviolence though not univocally bearing witness to nonviolence. Other issues, such as the practical questions of protecting third-parties, policing, and attacks upon loved ones, are taken up by Stephen Long, Schlabach, and Amy Laura Hall. Alongside other essays by Justin Barringer and Robert Brimlow, the more personal, existential questions of nonviolence are addressed with candor and honesty. As with any issue of discipleship, the question of nonviolence is not one which can be simply thought but not acted upon. These chapters address the pastoral issues of nonviolence with sensitivity and academic acumen, looking at nonviolence as it impinges upon our daily life.

One of the co-editors, Justin Bronson Barringer, hangs out across the street at Asbury Seminary. We haven’t met yet, but I hope to soon!