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A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .
Because the church is not a place to worship God, but rather a therapeutic center for the meeting of one another’s unchecked, unexamined needs, the pastor is exhausted. Only a few months into his or her first pastorate, the new pastor realizes that people’s needs are virtually limitless, particularly in an affluent society in which there is an ever-rising threshold of desire (which we define as “need”).
Resident Aliens
Stanley Hauerwas & William H. Willimon
we study the Scriptures, we see how many texts we have misread, contextualized, and exegeted to hear what we want to. Like this one about the poor being among us, which Jesus says in the home of a leper and after a poor marginalized woman anoints his feet with perfume. The poor were all around him. Far from saying in defeat that we should not worry about the poor, since they will always be among us, Jesus is pointing the church to her true identity—she is to live close to those who suffer. The poor will always be among us, because the empire will always produce poor people, and they will find a home in the church, a citizenship in the kingdom of God, where the “hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.”
The Irresistible Revolution
Shane Claiborne
The critical issue, then, for both the religious and the spiritual alike, is this:
Can your enchantment judge, criticize, and unsettle you?
Can your enchantment point out your selfishness and self-indulgence?
Can your enchantment, be it burning sage for your spell or singing “God Bless America” in your pew, hold a mirror up to your hypocrisy?
Can your enchantment weigh your nation or political party on the scales and find it wanting?
Does your enchantment create sacrificial obligations and duties in your life that you cannot avoid or ignore?
Does your enchantment call you to extend grace to people you’d prefer to hate?
Does your enchantment bust up your cozy self-satisfaction and dogmatic self-righteousness?
Hunting Magic Eels
Richard Beck
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