James Alison on Atonement

This essay was talked about in a recent sermon and the preacher promised it would be linked on this blog. So here it is: James Alison - Some Thoughts on Atonement.

Agree or disagree with him, it is a worthwhile read. Here is an excerpt to get you going:



Now, rather than make mockery of it, I want to suggest that the trouble with it is that it is far too little conservative. I want to put forward a much more conservative account. And the first way I want to be conservative is to suggest that the principle problem with this conventional account is that it is a theory, and atonement, in the first place, was a liturgy...


Stephen Colbert Does it Well

It is a strange thing to see public figures talk about their faith and for it to not be totally cringeworthy and unrepresentative of the kind of religion we think is meaningful. 

Unlike all of that, Stephen Colbert's recent profile in GQ is pretty amazing. Here is an unreasonably long but worthwhile excerpt. Read the whole thing here.

That day after he got back from Michigan, we eventually got around to the question of how it could possibly be that he suffered the losses he's suffered and somehow arrived here. It's not just that he doesn't exhibit any of the anger or open-woundedness of so many other comedians; it's that he appears to be so genuinely grounded and joyful...

“So my reaction when I hear that question isn't”—he shifted into a somber, sonorous voice—“ ‘Oh, I don't want to talk about that.’ It's that I don't want to say this—ready?” He snapped his fingers and locked eyes with me in a pose of dramatic intensity. “MY. MOTHER.” His face softened. “But the answer is: my mother.”




Two Great Recent Things on the Internet

Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of the political blog Wonkette and currently a political writer for GQ, has an incredible essay at the Daily Beast in which she "comes out" as a Christian. The piece is calm and straightforward, but surreptitiously explosive. The context, a liberal political writer on a liberal news site, makes the simple and sincere profession of Christian faith by definition exotic and almost unrecognizable...


From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - “How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing?”

From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - “How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing?” It’s funny, but also misses a deeper point: no one should be baffled or shouting “Gotcha!” at political conservatives who love Ayn Rand; the fusion of religious traditionalism and economic libertarianism was an intentional strategy and major victory for the modern Right in the U.S., theorized by the political thinker Frank Meyer, embraced by Reagan, and creepily dubbed Fusionism. It’s held together enough to shift our country rightward for a while, it’s now starting to show some cracks, but this video just shows how self-contradictory it is. Trying to combine a purist form of economic individualism with values of community and the importance of moral and religious traditions is like trying to mate a grizzly bear with a banana slug. You end up with a slimy monster that will eat your face. Only this one isn’t imaginary.


Wanderers to Wonderers


- Henry David Thoreau


Against Empathy

At Boston Review there is an interesting forum about empathy.

Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, argues provocatively that “if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.” Most of the respondents find reasons to disagree with him, and so do I, but a more limited form of his argument makes sense to me - that empathy alone is not enough to guide us living moral lives. Cool rationality and warm but healthily self-differentiated benevolence can be just as important as feeling a ricochet of someone else’s suffering in your own gut.


Viewing Myself from a Distance

David Brooks on how we can best understand ourselves:




Becoming Interested in Life Again

Two of my current heroes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, the six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel, and Michael Silverblatt, the brilliant and super-humane host of the public radio show “Bookworm,” recently sat down for a conversation that indirectly but powerfully cuts to the heart of why Root and Branch was created.


What Would Jesus Conceal and Carry?

I’ve been thinking about guns.  Not the ones I wish I had instead of the stick-like things that emerge from my upper torso, but the ones that have been facilitating all the shootings that have been the subject of grisly news reports and impassioned Facebook pleas for gun control lately. Not just the shootings in recent months. Over half of the deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. in the last 50 years have happened in the past decade.

I have to make a confession: the killings reported in the news have not disturbed me enough. What I mean is that I don’t always feel shocked, the stories don’t necessarily stop me in my tracks or make me unable to go about my daily routine. These things happen, it’s horrible and tragic, but that’s just part of this sort of messed up but ultimately not-that-bad world. True, people are killed in Chicago all the time, some very close to where I live, but even that fact is crazily easy to ignore and distance myself from. 


Flannery Says...
