Restorative Theology

NuDunkers: Welcome to the conversation

2013-05-09T11:32:00.001-04:00

So this "NuDunker" thing has been going on for almost seven months now; the first blog posts coming out in late October of last year. We've conducted, to date, three live discussions on G+ Hangouts (the one from last week w/ David Fitch & Geoff Holsclaw being viewable here on YouTube), and a raft of blog posts have accompanied each one. In the process we've picked up two more interested

NuDunkers, Prodigal Christianity, and Charity

2013-05-02T14:57:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow (Friday) at 11am Eastern, the NuDunkers are holding our third live chat on Google+ Hangouts. This is our first hangout with special guests, though, so we're excited! For that hour we'll be talking with evangelical neo-Anabaptists, David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw, about their new book, Prodigal Christianity: Ten Signposts into the Missional Future. See the event page for more details. (

The War on Drugs and the birth of a police state

2013-04-24T15:11:00.001-04:00

Boston SWAT, April 16, 2013 (Photo by Jozef Stazka/Flickr) The terrible events in Boston last week were many things. One thing that struck me was the massive show of power on the part of police departments. Shutting down an entire city, conducting a sweeping manhunt, etc. This is no small task. In the case of events like last week, this is generally seen as a very good thing, even if it was

Good news and bad news for the information age

2013-04-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Your brain on news; w/ thanks to Rod Dreher. (Image from Up!; copyright Disney/Pixar) "Gospel" literally means "good news." To most Christians this is obvious. Yet sometimes the obvious needs to be called out of its obviousness to us. We need to make this word, gospel, appropriately strange. In his book God and Gadgets, theologian Brad Kallenberg says that as news, the gospel of Jesus Christ

Hunger games and martyrdom at Gitmo

2013-04-15T12:03:00.001-04:00

"How long, O LORD?" -Ps 13 (Illus. by Matt Rota/NTY) I want to make the claim here that there is a kind of martyrdom happening at the US military prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. First, read this blood-chilling first-hand account of the hunger strikes and the treatment being carried out on the bodies/souls of imprisoned human beings: Hunger Striking at Gitmo... ONE man here weighs

Mere Orthodoxy: The Frame for Watching Mad Men

2013-04-12T09:54:00.001-04:00

Matthew Lee Anderson, the editor of the Mere Orthodoxy blog, was gracious enough to let me contribute a post in their series on AMC's hit drama, Mad Men... The Frame for Watching Mad Men: When Joan sells Johnny The MO crowd tends to be - by my assessment - socially, culturally, and theologically conservative American evangelical...but they're part of the new generation of evangelicals that's

Brethren droning about drones?

2013-04-03T16:49:00.003-04:00

Yes, this is a real toy Predator drone. Read the customer reviews; you'll be glad you did. A few weeks ago the Mission and Ministry board of the Church of the Brethren issued a resolution against drone warfare. It's on its way to the Annual Conference this summer, where it could potentially be adopted by the highest governing body of our denomination. Until this morning, I hadn't had a chance

Brethren Love Feast as sacred liturgy

2013-04-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

My kinda countryside. Approaching Salem Mennonite, Freeman, S.D. Last week I had the pleasure of spending Monday through Wednesday in Freeman, South Dakota, teaching and preaching at joint Holy Week evening services between four Mennonite congregations in the area, hosted at Salem Mennonite Church, where my friend Nicholas Detweiler-Stoddard is pastor. He and I worked together over the

Boring worship makes life always interesting

2013-03-22T16:04:00.003-04:00

Okay, so maybe not THAT boring (Photo by Louisa Billeter/Flickr) If church-going Christians don't go through their work-a-day lives being surprised and/or offended by the ways of the world, the ways of the world have become the background by which they live those lives. This is a problem. If church-going Christians come to worship expecting to be entertained (or even "inspired" or "recharged

Book reading update

2013-03-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

It's been months since I've updated the "What I'm reading" Amazon widget off to the right, so I'm setting about doing that today and I'll make a few comments here. First, I finally finished reading Chris Marshall's excellent book, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice. In some ways it was the perfect book for me,

Philosophy, history, and the quest for understanding

2013-02-26T13:25:00.001-05:00

In the introduction to his book, Why Study the Past?; The Quest for the Historical Church, former Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, a trained historian/historical theologian, has this to say about history and its driving impulse: "(H)istory is a set of stories we tell in order to understand better who we are and the world we're in." For the past month I've been taking an Intro to

The political eschatology of Les Misérables

2013-02-18T17:01:00.001-05:00

Eschatology at the barricade; Photo by Laurie Sparham/Telegraph.co.uk Here in the little town of Toledo, we have a local treasure: The Wieting Theater. It's been in town for ages, but had started to fall on hard times and was threatened to close until a few years ago when local citizens and the theater guild - who didn't want to see this public gathering place die at the hands of a 60" HDTV

NuDunkers: A vision for Brethren theological education

2013-02-11T15:08:00.002-05:00

(Moocow image by Gordon Lockhart;remix of ‘la vaca de los sinvaca‘by José Bogado/Flickr) Last week the NuDunkers held our second live discussion on Google+ Hangouts, on the topic of pneumatology. Here's the video, and the event page has a transcript of questions and discussion items that were raised by folks watching the video discussion. Unfortunately, I missed the whole event because of an

#etmooc assignment: Make an animated GIF

2013-02-07T16:51:00.001-05:00

[View the story "Evolution of a GIF" on Storify] V1 V2 Online animated GIF generator: Picasion

Tracking that elusive Spirit

2013-02-05T12:32:00.000-05:00

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8; photo by byronv2/Flickr) This Friday the NuDunker folks are hosting our second public conversation on the topic of pneumatology, which is the fancy seminary word for "talking about the Holy Spirit." You'll be able to

What's a MOOC? Why philosophy?

2013-01-28T12:12:00.001-05:00

Here we go! This week I am starting one of those MOOCs that higher ed people have been hearing so much about over the past year - Introduction to Philosophy from The University of Edinburgh (via Coursera). For the uninitiated, MOOC stands for "Massively Open Online Course." (I pronounce it with a long "o" and a hard "c.") In the paradigm which they've been most discussed, they are free online

Lay visitation as post-Christendom ministry

2013-01-17T12:26:00.000-05:00

Ty Grigg, a co-pastor of Life on the Vine in suburban Chicago, has a great post up at David Fitch's blog. He asks: Do We Still Need "Home Visitations" in Post-Christendom? He lists the following challenges to the tried and true pastoral ministry practice: The “parish” is more geographically unbounded Home is a private space The pastor has lost privilege of access In a co-pastor model, who

Restorative justice in a murder case

2013-01-07T16:01:00.000-05:00

Conor McBride (Photo by Ryan Pfluger/NYTimes) There is an amazing story about restorative justice in a Florida murder case by Paul Tullis over at the NY Times. Read it. All of it. It's long but worthwhile: Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice? (See also an interview w/ the family on USA Today: Parents who forgave their daughter's killer: It 'frees us') This story was all

Scripture, women in ministry, and correcting problems

2012-12-26T16:47:00.001-05:00

New Testament scholar, Ben Witherington III, has two short videos that very quickly address some scriptural interpretation issues around women in ministry, and how those "problem texts" in the New Testament have been appropriated by subsequent Christian traditions to, for instance, rule out women from ministry. Check 'em out... In the congregations and traditions which have shaped my

Postscript to media catastrophism: Nationalism

2012-12-21T15:36:00.000-05:00

Playing in my thinking about the media but not making it into my last post is this thesis: The U.S. media is inherently nationalistic. As such, the bounds of "we" and "they" split along the borders of this nation-state. When tragedies within these social-imaginary borders occur, it is "us" that are collectively shocked, angered, and grieved. But what of tragedies outside these borders? Amongst

Newtown and Draco: Catastrophism in the media

2012-12-19T23:19:00.000-05:00

For the media, it's called "profit."(Image by Dooitasheimashte via deviantART) Last Friday when I discovered the news via Facebook status updates from friends that 20 children had been murdered in Connecticut, my blood turned to ice. I made the atypical trip to Yahoo! News and read a few AP stories about the tragedy, and checked back a few times throughout the day. That was it, and I haven't

Review: "Migrations of the Holy" by William Cavanaugh

2012-12-14T11:27:00.000-05:00

[Note: The following review appears in the The Conrad Grebel Review 30, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 319-21. Reprinted here w/ permission.] William T. Cavanaugh. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. The animating thesis of Cavanaugh’s book is succinctly encapsulated in its title, “Migrations of the Holy.” The argument goes that

Reading and politics in the new nearby

2012-12-13T23:47:00.001-05:00

At last! I've been waiting a long time to have enough bookshelf space to stick all my books from grad school. For the past four years, they had to live scattered across a number of bookshelves at home, some in my study carrel, and some even had to get packed into boxes. I longed to see them all together and in a place where I could easily get to them when needed. And this week, that's

Settling in, finding a new voice

2012-12-03T14:40:00.002-05:00

Christ United Methodist in Toledo; east out my home-office window It's been quiet for a few weeks here at this little blog. This has mostly to do with being exceedingly busy with moving back to Iowa, moving into an old house in Toledo that needs some tender loving care, and trying to figure out what it's like working remotely for EMU. Things have been busy, we've been tired, but we're

NuDunkers, NuMedia

2012-12-03T10:52:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, the first NuDunkers public video discussion came together on G+ Hangouts. Here's the hour-long video of the conversation, which basically covers how NuDunkers came together and what our hopes and prayers are for this project... Andy, Dana, and Josh have all posted their reflections of the first meeting, so make sure to go check those out. The only bit I'll add to what