This… is… so… awesome!
HT: Chuck DeGroat
Tag Archive - post-anything Christianity
The Book Everyone Is/Will Be Talking About
Yesterday I came home to an unexpected package from Amazon. Inside was a book that will no doubt be the book everyone’s talking about over the next few months. The next Blue Like Jazz is Rachel Held Evans‘, Evolving in Monkey Town.
This is the story of someone too young to write her own story. Evans knows it–and that’s part of what makes it such a good read.
Like Blue, Evolving in Monkey Town is not just a story about an individual wrestling with questions, having a sure-fire faith all wrapped up only to have it begin to burst with the introduction of hard questions. It is the story of a generation that has gone or is going through the same experience.
Having read through the first quarter or so of the book, Evolving in Monkey Town strikes me as the memoir of the “post-” generation. A world marked by self-descriptors such as “post-modern”, “post-conservative,” and “post-liberal” finds itself simultaneously defined by its past (modern, conservative, or liberal) while having left it behind to find a new expression of a yet-affirmed more ultimate noun.
In this case, “Christianity.”
Those of us who have found ourselves holding onto Christianity while simultaneously parting with a host of things we were told were inseparable from faithfulness to God will resonate with the anecdotes, but most especially with the theological framework that seems to put the stories in proper relief.
That theological framework is, roughly, that how we hold our theology is as as its contents; and, the questions we ask are often as important or more important than the answers we might give.
This is a narrative of storied theology–a memoir brimming with the conviction that the static categories of religious affirmation are much less important for both individual and church than the reality that we are bound up with the story of God that, yes, reaches a certain climax in the work of Jesus, but also carries forward into new days and times and thus finds itself surprisingly reinterpreted in the places to which it comes.
Go grab a copy and let me know what you think.
Anne Rice Renouncing Christianity?
The interwebs have been all a tizzy over the past day or so, as Anne Rice declared on Facebook that she was renouncing Christianity. For the sake of Christ.
My take on it: chill out, people.
First, it seems that she is couching some things provocatively (and it’s working, people are provoked). Given how she has couched things on her Facebook page, it is clear that she is not giving up on her faith in Christ. It’s clear that she’s not suddenly disbelieving the resurrection of Jesus or the value of his death. This is not a renunciation of her Christian faith. She is wrestling with how to follow Jesus when the world of Jesus’ followers seems so often incongruous with the kind of community that should be bearing Jesus’ name.
Second, it does seem that she may be distancing herself from all or most Christian community in this effort. I do see that as a mistake. Jesus came to save persons by joining them to a people which is his body on earth. So for all its imperfections, the “church” is a crucial part of life following Christ.
I, of course, resonate with the struggle against the establishment. But I have to keep coming back to the notion that I can’t simultaneously love Jesus and profess hatred of his wife. That relationship isn’t going to last very long.
Do I think Anne Rice is renouncing The Faith? No. Clearly not.
Do I think she has some important points she’s drawing attention to? Yes. Certainly.
Do I think she is taking the right course? I’m not sure what, exactly, she’s done, so it’s hard to say. It looks like she could do better by exercising some patience; or, by exercising her impatience as a prophet from within.
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