The American Church’s anxiety and desperation to survive – much like that of our nation’s reeling education system – frequently occludes its view of how to be helpful both to the world and to itself.
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Jarrid Wilson's suicide - and the urgency of pastors being free to be themselves
Who better than a pastor – a person literally paid (however poorly sometimes) to live in a peculiar way on behalf of a group of people unable to live this way most days – to practice the art of prophetically being one’s authentic self, rather than constantly attempting to be one’s best, most marketable self?
Read MoreThe President is right: Mental illness is killing all of us.
At the very least, perhaps the next right thing for us is to take a deep breath and pause for a moment in the realization that our president isn’t altogether wrong – gun deaths in America are driven by a mental health crisis. However, instead of that un-wellness resting upon a lone shooter or evil terrorist, it is visited upon all of us who still believe that the same circular conversation will actually result in something different.
Read MoreChurches don't need unflappable CEOs. They need non-anxious parents.
At no other point in our lives than when we’re emphatically staring down a hurricane force meltdown by something we inexplicably love on a cellular level can we know more about what it means when the scriptures remind us that God isn’t an unflappable CEO, but is our Parent and our Partner and our Priest and our Prophet and our Spirit and our Soul and our Strength and our Savior and our Friend and the one thing that refuses to give up on us, even when we’ve soiled ourselves yet again.
Read MoreEntitled Millennials aren't killing the American church; entitled churches are.
We have to live in the world we work to create. That means your church is entitled to keep existing, denominations are entitled to keep existing, Christianity is entitled to keep existing insofar as they selflessly pump love and trustworthiness into an atmosphere of anxiety, scarcity, pain and partisanship parading as truth.
Read MoreFinding an alternative to the anxious pursuit of happiness parading as American Christianity
What if the slow death of our churches was good news for the world, even if it’s bad news for those of us who benefit directly from their perpetuation? What if releasing control over what happens to the thing that saved, fed, served and gave us a purpose was actually the most faithful and Christian thing we could do for it?
Read MoreListening to depression as a spiritual and political practice.
Normal brain chemistry can’t overcome food insecurity, crippling student loan debt, joblessness and the general sense that unfettered capitalism has helped to produce a nationwide mental health crisis. Being human in America is incredibly difficult, maybe that’s why it’s so damn depressing and anxiety inducing.
Read MoreContrary to the view of Triumphant Christianity, Easter is for Failures
“If we read forwards rather than backwards, we find that the season of Easter is about how, at the core, Christianity is a way of seeing everything for people who never got what they wanted from God, from life, from their families and friends and even from the very religion founded in the name of Jesus and his resurrection. Christianity isn’t a religion that saves us by finally bringing our dreams to life; it’s one that sustains us by keeping us afloat even when those dreams die again and again. “
Read Moreincarnate weirdness (or how not to give up social media for Lent)
Social media is the standardized testing of human relationships, and we can’t help but live our lives according to its scores.
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This is Chance the Rapper. He gave 1 million dollars to Chicago Public Schools, fights gun violence in his city, and is a genius. Read more about him here.
how (not) to listen to hip-hop.
One of the things I’m learning from hip hop, now that I’m giving it an opportunity to regularly instruct me, is that when a community of artists make constant and flamboyant reference to how accomplished they are in living the American dream – i.e cash, cars, attractive mates, more bedrooms than family members, etc. – and all it does is offend me, perhaps it is the dream rather than the dreamer we should be calling into question. Hip hop is a mirror into the soul of America, and it would seem based on how my community has responded to it, that what we see terrifies us: people are treated as products, as disposable and dispensable, drugs are vehicles for escape, violence and self-preservation are our guiding moral compass, and money is the metric that tells us how well we’re doing at surviving all of it.
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