Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Guest Author

For Every Season

by Marguerite Sheehan  in Christian Spirituality

Many people my age, on hearing the passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes that says “to everything there is a season,” break out singing Turn Turn Turn Turn! The Byrds, who put that text to music for my generation, were singing about how we all try to make sense of the issues of our time and make peace with being mortal. There is a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up. A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. We sing and pray and live these truths and we have to keep repeating them because it is still very hard to swallow that there is a season for everything and nothing lasts forever.

The phrases from that song/text that are haunting me these days are these: “A time to keep silence and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate.”

There is so much talking going on and so much hate. So much silence and yes, thank goodness, so much love as well. If anyone ever thought that politics and religion should not mix or that some things are best left well enough alone, they are certainly put to the test now, in our mixed up and very vocal culture. Social media, including lovely blogs like this one, never mind FaceBook, Twitter, Snapchat etc., have us all chatting up a storm and sometimes forgetting the age old wisdom of “a time to keep silence.” We seem compelled to broadcast live who and what we love and hate as though saying it out loud gives our emotions validity. If I say it, it must be true. So… [Read more…] about For Every Season

Why I Bought Hotel California Four Times (So Far)

by Yvonne Shao in Christian Spirituality

My mother bought me the Eagles’ Hotel California as a Christmas present when I was in junior high. I loved the gritty, glamorous songs even though I didn’t have enough experience to understand most of them. Playing the record before school in the mornings helped me steel myself for running the gauntlet of junior high in a small town.

The songs met me where I was. New Kid in Town radiated within me and seemed realer than real most days.

Great expectations, everybody’s watching you

You’re walking away, and they’re talking behind you.

Hotel California, the ultimate road trip, let me see a future where I could love, lose, and learn. I would be stronger, no matter what love and life threw at me. If the Eagles could do it, I could do it.

However, when a visiting preacher came to our church, he told us about the evils of rock and roll. He played some song snippets backwards, which sounded quite clear after he told us what the garbled words were. I loved the Eagles, but I was more scared of hell. If the Eagles were against God, they had to go. My mother and I smashed Hotel California in the kitchen after we got home that night.

In college, I took the first few steps on my road to prodigal-ness. I missed the songs that had soothed my soul in junior high, and I no longer felt compelled to follow all the religious teachings I had learned, so I got Hotel California on cassette. I played it in my Honda Civic, driving… [Read more…] about Why I Bought Hotel California Four Times (So Far)

Christian: Is Your Bible an Idol?

by Darrell Lackey in Christian Issues

The Bible is not God, nor do symbols on a page contain God. God is not hiding in the ink or paper molecules/atoms of the Bible. God existed before the Bible. Every time we read or quote a passage of Scripture in an authoritative way, it doesn’t mean God is speaking either to us or through us. It simply means we are reading symbols on a page that represent meanings, which we then interpret. Whether or not we truly understand the meaning or purpose of those symbols is something else entirely. It’s possible I am idolizing my understanding of those symbols, rather than worshipping (or even interpreting correctly) what they may be pointing toward.

A person could memorize the entire Bible. They could quote a Scripture verse for every problem, argument, or issue at hand. One could study the Bible deeply every day, for a lifetime. One could do all this and never know the God of whom it speaks. One could do this and be a mean, angry, and selfish person. One could do this and never lift a finger for another human being. One could do this and be nothing more than a judgment machine, handing out judgments, opinions, and confident assertions about the world and everyone else.

How do I know this? Because I’ve experienced it. I know some of these people. I stopped being impressed by people who’ve memorized a lot of Scripture a long time ago. Why? Because I knew too many of them who were awful people.

Bible knowledge will never substitute for a relationship with the subject of that… [Read more…] about Christian: Is Your Bible an Idol?

Lebanon and the Balance of Love

by Rich Rosendahl in Current Events

My wife and I just spent a week in Lebanon. What follows are our first impressions of this remarkable place. Although we would have loved to spend months exploring the beautiful country, we split our short time between the urban sprawl of Beirut and the agriculturally pristine Bekaa Valley. It was in the Valley where we met with Syrian refugees, the main purpose for our trip.

We first arrived in Beirut and were immediately met with a long lost friend called—traffic. Our loosely planned 25-minute cab ride to our hotel turned into an hour and a half of stop and go exploring. Our driver was friendly, helpful, and spoke excellent English, which we needed, considering our broken, less-than-kindergarten level Arabic.

Our drive was long and it gave us a chance to see much of the city. We were surprised to see so many signs in English and so little writing in Arabic. We were more surprised to see how a beautiful, newly constructed building can sit on one corner of a street, contrasted by a bombed and bullet ridden building, the remnant of the war, sitting kitty-corner.

This was our first insight into what is our first impression of this beautiful country and culture—Lebanon seems to hang in the delicate but powerful balance of Love.

While in Beirut we explored the famous Hamra district, which has great food and great shopping. If you can find it, there is a restaurant (sans sign) tucked behind a Starbucks called Ta Maburta—I highly recommend the Kibbe.

Hamra is… [Read more…] about Lebanon and the Balance of Love

If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

It’s a daunting question. If God wants all human beings to be saved — and surely he does — then why aren’t the requirements of that salvation clearer? This is a central theme woven through my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? (reviewed on this blog here), a theological memoir spanning a forty year journey trying to understand the nature of God’s grace.

I started off that journey assuming that salvation was simply a matter of right belief. But over time I began to face a growing list of nagging questions that challenged that paradigm. In this article I briefly consider three of them.
What must you believe if you are to be saved?
In my conservative upbringing, conversion and faith were first of all about belief. You needed to believe particular doctrines about God and his Son, Jesus. But which statements of doctrine do you need to believe in order to be saved? The disturbing fact, as I soon discovered, is that Christians don’t agree on how to answer this question.

It is hard to convey just how disturbing this fact of disagreement was, but consider this analogy. Imagine that a deadly plague is spreading across the landscape. Fortunately, medical personnel have identified a vaccine to protect people from this terrible plague. Great news, right?

So you think. But then you discover that there is extensive disagreement among those health professionals on how the vaccine should be administered in order to make it effective. Some say… [Read more…] about If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

Shaken

by Jordan Blaylock in Poetry

Shaken

When everything is falling apart,
Everything is breaking, your heart
Feels like a cheap commodity
Tossed about in and out of shops,
Left feeling tarnished and dirty.

And your faith? Oh, your faith.
When your prayers float out
And you’re not even sure about
How far to heaven they float
Or even if they go anywhere at all.

Life falls apart.
And so do you.
But you build again.
Work through the pain.

And, right now?
Wanting to scream
And split the seam,
It’s okay.

And it’s okay to be shaken.
Faith and all.

 

Photo via Unsplash.

About Jordan Blaylock
Jordan Blaylock is a nurse, working on going into ministry with the UMC, and loves to write. She’s also managing the Unfundamentalist Instagram account.… [Read more…] about Shaken

Why I Left

by Ami Vielehr in Christian Spirituality

In the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, I lay distraught and wrestling in that place between sleep and wake where nightmares haunt, on a twin bed in a cold stone monastery in Hyde Park, NY. A place that was supposed to provide silence and rest became the spiritual tomb of the religion I deeply loved and once held as truth. It seemed that in that one moment it all became lucid … a pinpoint clarity … the knot of supposed truth of all I had once argued for, unraveled. The suppressive, patriarchal confines that I grew up with came crashing down and crumbled onto that tiled floor.

Looking back now, I know it did not begin there in that room on that post-election morning. I was knocked off my Pharisaical horse sometime around my second year in seminary—the blinders ripped from my eyes by professors and pastors who loved The Word too much to let it be abused. The first stirrings of hesitation came when I began to understand the blatant misuse of the text for power mongering and gender oppression—where those who had no problem preaching a God of love while holding the Bible as a vicious weapon to silence any and all who disagreed with their literalist interpretation.

I had spent months, if not years, grappling with the safe, predictable religion of my youth, which said grace was enough—one that preached of purity, acceptance, and love, but was infected with hypocrisy, hate, and exclusion. And I was left to wrestle while an enigmatic and mysterious faith began… [Read more…] about Why I Left

Hearts Without God

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

A self-fulfilling prophecy is when people blame a circumstance on a vague but seemingly objective evil in the world and use it to justify a narrative when the situation occurs (as was claimed or prophesied).

Example: in America, we don’t have a “gun” problem, we have a “sin” problem. When someone commits mass murder, and happens to use a gun to do so, the issue is never about his weapon of choice and access to it. It’s about his heart. Making the argument about sin, or the poor hearts of people in our country, positions the conversation away from gun control and into a state of learned helplessness where the rest of us are just supposed to accept the outcomes of these atrocities as normative.

And then we all sit back and watch as gun violence and mass shootings wreak havoc. And we watch everyone argue about what they think the problem is and their solutions that the prophets claim will never work. Meanwhile, nothing is done, and the condition persists. And the prophecy is fulfilled time and again while the prophets get to claim that they were right all along—that the evil in the world can’t be solved by laws or regulations, so why bother attempting to change anything? The true problem in America isn’t gun violence, it’s hearts without God, right?

Hearts without God has been the “end times” battle cry of many fundamentalists, and it’s becoming very costly. Not just relating to gun violence in America and the 30 thousand lives that guns claim annually, but even… [Read more…] about Hearts Without God

Accept the Loss of Expect

by Connie Miller in Christian Spirituality

“I feel like I am grieving the loss of something, but I do not know what that is.”
—Me, explaining why I haven’t been to Bible Study lately

Finding out my son is faced with a muscle disease has been the most faith shaking and faith building experience in my life. The phone call from the doctor saying he has a muscle disease and that now we just have to put a name on it sent me into grief. Grief for a loss I did not understand.

“What have I lost?” I would ask myself. He’s here, and we aren’t looking at muscular dystrophy, a fatal muscle disease. So, why am I grieving? I asked for clarity and comfort. I asked for strength. I just kept asking, and one day I received.

I love podcasts, and one of my favorites is the For The Love with Jen Hatmaker Podcast. I was listening to the Chrissy Kelly: How To Survive When Your Dreams Dissolve episode. It was an awakening of the soul—I realized what I had been grieving this whole time!

I had lost expectancy. I could no longer know what was going to happen, as a mom. Plans of sports, school, careers, graduation, marriage, all of the hopes I always took for granted, they are all up in the air.

As a mom, especially if you have twins or more, you learn to expect the unexpected. Some ideas and plans you learn to let go of, but not normalcy. You don’t expect to let go of simple ideals. Yet, when you are facing the unknown, you have to die to the design of normal mom… [Read more…] about Accept the Loss of Expect

Beyond the Letter of the Law

by Bruce H. Joffe in Christian Issues

Chief Justice Roberts, one of the four justices who voted against expanding marriage rights to all people, expressed in his dissent that, while he thought marriage equality might be a good thing for society, he didn’t see any Constitutional right to it.

A few days later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writing in Time magazine, rejected the Chief Justice’s assertion, saying that Roberts was wrong, that the Constitution “had everything to do with it.”

I guess it all depends on one’s perspective.

Some on the Supreme Court believe it’s their responsibility to uphold the words of the Constitution al pie de la letra—according to the letter of the law, ensuring that what was written centuries ago doesn’t change with the times.

Others, however, believe that the words written when our Constitution was ratified are meant to be signposts and guidelines; it’s not the words that are important, but their meaning and intent.

So, interpreting an age-old document in the light of changing norms and realities becomes paramount in the Supreme Court’s responsibilities.

For those of us reared in Judeo-Christian traditions, it’s a familiar dilemma, since we must ask ourselves the same questions about what’s written in the Bible.

Do we follow the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?

“Of all the things that grieve us, perhaps what’s been most difficult is seeing some of our friends, family members and folks we’ve sat next to in church giving their hearty… [Read more…] about Beyond the Letter of the Law