March 2012
“We know life and death in and with our bodies.”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
WatchTED @ Lunch with Brene Brown about Listening to Shame
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Book Opening: The Contested Public Square
I’m opening this book with a political science graduate student here at FSU named Matt. Matt and I have talked about all sorts of different things in the past - from the Resurrection to the nature of evil to pornography to basic Christianity. He’s a great discussion partner to have for a book, and this is right up his alley - being about the development of the mixing of political...
“The “god” whom Americans worship as the final and absolute lord of...”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
Book Opening: Suffering: A Test of Theological...
I couldn’t have enough good things to say about McGill’s other book, “Death and Life: An American Theology”, and now I get to read his other (and earlier) book “Suffering”. From the forward, it appears that he will be visiting some of the same topics: the giving of life as God’s power, the suffering of God as inextricable from the mercy of God, and the...
WatchTed @ Lunch with Billy Collins
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Book Closing: Living the Resurrection by Eugene...
I needed a good, quick read for a group that I read with before Easter came and I had this book sitting on my shelf. I was half right, it was a quick read. It wasn’t horrible, but it couldn’t really be called good either.
Eugene Peterson’s book “Living the Resurrection” is about living out our Resurrected lives in three ways:
Sabbath Keeping
Communing...
“Foam rubber mattresses, anesthetics, fast airplanes and color...”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
“According to [common American] church teaching, Americans are not alone in their...”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
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“Persons [in the system of avoidance] are considered a success not because they...”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
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WatchTED @ Lunch - Alain de Botton about what atheism can learn from religion
Book Closing: Death and Life: an American Theology...
I may never give another five star rating to another book after having read this book, which I can only give a five star rating to. McGill’s short little book on Death and American Christianity is packed with as much if not more punch than the poems that he quotes in it.
McGill’s focus is on that which we try to take the focus away from in our everyday lives: death. McGill...
40 hours and a Sabbath
The average American employee works approximately 55 hours. I’m pretty average as a pastor. I keep track of the amount of hours that I work and what I do in those hours, and it usually ends up to be about 55 hours of work.
BoingBoing (which directs you to Salon.com), thinks that I’m actually cutting my own productivity by working 15 hours too much. Yeah, the difference between my...
“From diapers onward, every American is severely punished for failure. Failure...”
– Death and Life and American Theology by Arthur C. McGill
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing;...”
– Ephesians 2:8
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Book Opening: Living the Resurrection by Eugene...
I received this book a while ago, and it has been staring me in the face along with a few other books that I still haven’t read yet. It makes me look back at when I was buying more books than I was reading and thinking about how idiotic it was to think that I was amassing knowledge by amassing books that I hadn’t read.
Today my Circuit (pastors of 7 Lutheran churches around here,...
“Only if we can create around us a life apparently without failure, can we...”
– Death and Life and American Theology, Arthur C. McGill 