I haven’t put my hand over my heart for the pledge of allegiance or spoken its words since grade school. I’m not from an Anabaptist tradition, and I call East Texas home, so displays of nationalistic pride are simply part of my inborn religious habitat. Yet, to my high-school mind, I quite plainly did not pledge my allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Allegiance was a zero-sum game, and God was the winner.
No surprise, experience has given rise to a more nuanced view of the world. Yet, nuance—complexity—requires some way of navigating the dilemmas of non-zero-sum games, when winning and losing are hard to sort. In the biblical tradition, we call this capacity for complexity…
Ashley Easter is a Christian feminist, writer, speaker, and abuse-victim advocate who educates churches and secular communities on abuse, introducing them to safe practices and healing resources. She is also the founder of The Courage Conference, a judgement-free place for…
It’s easy to deconstruct faith. It’s a lot harder to reconstruct it.
People today are finding themselves in this season of deconstruction and reconstruction, re-examining Jesus, aching for conversations that integrate the entire arc of scripture with the cultural realities…
A few years ago, a man came to see me, deeply unsettled.
He had recently heard a sermon on Judges 11:29-40. In this story, a warrior named Jephthah swears that if God grants him victory in war, when he gets…
This is part 2 of a response to the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel.
Read part 1 by Dennis Edwards: What’s This Really All About?
When Dennis and I started to craft a response for Missio Alliance regarding…
The American religious and political landscape has experienced serious upheaval since the 2016 election. Since then, many have been rethinking their relationship with Evangelicalism.
In this free webinar, you’ll hear from Natasha Sistrunk Robinson and Santes Beatty provide guidelines and…
This Week on Seminary Dropout…
Dominique DuBois Gilliard is the director of racial righteousness and reconciliation for the Love Mercy Do Justice (LMDJ) initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). He serves on the board of directors for the Christian Community Development Association and Evangelicals for Justice.
Does Pentecost overcome Babel?
Does baptism in Jesus obliterate all distinctions?
David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw talk about Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” They ask if there is a better way of understanding this text in light of Babel and Pentecost.
Ashley Easter is a Christian feminist, writer, speaker, and abuse-victim advocate who educates churches and secular communities on abuse, introducing them to safe practices and healing resources. She is also the founder of The Courage Conference, a judgement-free place for…
It’s easy to deconstruct faith. It’s a lot harder to reconstruct it.
People today are finding themselves in this season of deconstruction and reconstruction, re-examining Jesus, aching for conversations that integrate the entire arc of scripture with the cultural realities…
