Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Book Reviews

Can Christians Support the Death Penalty?

by in Book Reviews

The answer to the question posed in the title of this post is no. A resounding, definitive, absolute no.

There are a great many issues that Christians can reasonably disagree on, but the death penalty isn’t one of them. A way of life focused on the grace and love of Jesus Christ leaves no room whatsoever for support of capital punishment. Not only that, but the Christian calling demands that we vehemently oppose the cycles of violence and injustice perpetuated by the continued practice of state sanctioned execution.

Don’t agree with me? Then I challenge you to read Shane Claiborne’s new book (released tomorrow), Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us (HarperOne, $17.99). And that’s not an empty challenge. If you’re a Christian who supports the death penalty and you’re willing to read Executing Grace with an open mind, email me at editor@unfundamentalistchristians.com and I’ll send a copy to you.* I’m confident that Claiborne’s passionate, comprehensive, and heart-wrenching examination of capital punishment provides what is, to my mind, an irrefutable case as to why Christians simply cannot support the death penalty.

In Executing Grace, Claiborne explores the theological, historical, and cultural factors that inform the modern practice of capital punishment, giving voice to the victims of unspeakable crimes, and telling the sobering stories of those who have perpetrated… [Read more…] about Can Christians Support the Death Penalty?

How LGBTQ People Can Revitalize Christianity

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Elizabeth Edman is a queer priest. She is also a priestly queer. It is from the perspective of these intertwined and inseparable identities that her new book (on sale tomorrow), Queer Virtue (Beacon Press, $25.95), challenges Christians to embrace queerness and to boldly proclaim a faith that “is and must be queer” (3).

Of course Edman doesn’t mean that straight Christians should turn gay. Queerness extends far beyond sexuality, it is “an impulse to disrupt any and all efforts to reduce into simplistic dualisms our experience of life, of God” (3). Queerness stands at direct odds with binary distinctions, legalism, and fundamentalism. It is an affront to the side of Christianity that dominates so much of the current public discourse about matters of faith and ethics.

Edman has had enough of the violence done in the name of Christianity—not just the physical, but also the spiritual, emotional, and psychological violence—and in Queer Virtue calls upon the progressive church to take back the ground they have ceded to the voices on the right and to embrace the “other,” to rupture the status quo, and to realize a new vision of personal and corporate religious life. It is her hope that lessons gleaned from queer experience “will provide trajectories for Christian inquiry that could bring new energy and urgency to the progressive church and its proclamation of the gospel” (13).

In Queer Virtue, Edman explores the essential teachings of Christian… [Read more…] about How LGBTQ People Can Revitalize Christianity

The Sin of Certainty

by in Book Reviews

Usually as I read a book that I’m planning to review, I’ll make note of particularly quotable sentences and paragraphs. When I’m done with the book, I’ll have a nice collection of excerpts to build my review around.

But after one chapter of Peter Enns’ new book, The Sin of Certainty (HarperOne, $25.99), I realized that approach wouldn’t work — virtually every page offers pithy and profound insight and wisdom.

Finding relevant excerpts to quote for a review wasn’t a matter of plucking a few needles from a haystack, this book is all needles, and sharp ones at that!

Just now I flipped to four random pages that contained these gems:

“The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than trusting God” (21)

“The long Protestant quest to get the Bible right has not led to greater and greater certainty about what the Bible means. Quite the contrary. It has led to a staggering number of different denominations and sub denominations that disagree sharply about how significant portions of the Bible should be understood. I mean, if the Bible is our source of sure knowledge about God, how do we explain all this diversity? Isn’t the Bible supposed to unify us rather than divide us?” (52)

“Life’s challenges mock and then destroy a faith that rests on correct thinking and the preoccupation with defending it. And this is a good thing. Life’s challenges clear the clutter so we can see more clearly that faith calls for trust instead.” (116)

“All Christians… [Read more…] about The Sin of Certainty

The Jihad of Jesus

by in Book Reviews, Islam

For many people, the word jihad is likely to conjure up images of bearded men wearing suicide vests, of black-robed militants brandishing AK-47s, or of clandestine terrorist cells plotting to overthrow the United States.

But what if, instead of representing violence, hate, war, and death, jihad was understood as a nonviolent struggle for peace, justice, understanding, and love?

In his book The Jihad of Jesus (Wipf & Stock, $22), Dave Andrews draws upon Christian and Muslim history, theology, tradition, and scripture in a quest to reclaim jihad as a powerful challenge for both Christians and Muslims “to practice the radical, alternative, participatory, empowering, nonviolent jihad of Jesus” (163).

Andrews readily acknowledges the checkered history of both these Abrahamic faiths, and offers a sobering and honest examination of the violence that has occurred in the name of Christ and Allah throughout history. This leads him to address an all-important question head-on:

“Are the atrocities that are done in the name of Christianity or Islam true indicators of the nature of Christianity or Islam, or not?” (53)

His answer to that question is one that he realizes many people will characterize as “heresy, even blasphemy” (71). Andrews believes that, yes, the cruelties perpetrated in the name of Christianity and Islam are not mere aberrations of inherently peaceful faiths, but instead are a natural out-working of the “closed set… [Read more…] about The Jihad of Jesus

Review: Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious

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I recently asked my Facebook friends what connotations the term “religious” has for them. The answers ran the gamut, from the generally positive:
“sacred space,” “ritualistic,” “disciplined,” “a shared set of beliefs and moral standards”
to the safely neutral:
“vague,” “subscribing to a particular religion. no more, no less,” “parameters of how they view life.”
to the negative:
“intolerant,” “wrapped up in the letter of the law,” “makes me cautious,” “ick” “conjure[s] up derision,” “suspicion”
and even the outright hostile, in the form of a hastily retracted comment of “deluded” and “mean.”

It’s toward those on the negative end of the spectrum that David Dark’s new book, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious (InterVarsity Press, $20), is addressed. Dark argues that the term “religious” has become an unnecessary source of exclusion and judgment, a pejorative used to marginalize and suppress those with whom we disagree.

Dark makes an end run around the negative connotations, neatly avoiding both the knotty metaphysical issues behind religious belief as well as the pragmatic realities of thousands of years of human religious practice. Instead, he proposes radically redefining the entire notion of religion, characterizing it as simply the “controlling story” of our lives (14).

Given that definition, we are all, whether we admit it or not, deeply religious. We all have a narrative that we live by, we all have commitments and priorities and values that shape… [Read more…] about Review: Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious

Love in the Anthropocene

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“How will love arise in a world without nature as we have known it?” This is the central question of Love in the Anthropocene (OR Books, $18), a newly-released collection of two essays and five short stories jointly written by environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson and novelist Bonnie Nadzam.

Against the backdrop of a near-future earth that has been indelibly altered by humanity, Jamieson and Nadzam tell bittersweet stories of love: a father and daughter go on a fishing trip to an artificial park in which every tree, rock, stream, and fish are the product of technological design; two men rekindle a relationship while the city’s homeless are being deported to avoid rising sea levels; three female friends take a vacation from working at a refugee camp to enjoy the artificial pleasures of a domed city; a couple meets in a yoga class and carries on a virtual love affair; a blind date leads to an encounter with the world’s last living tiger.

Love in the Anthropocene has an agenda, but it is an agenda with more questions than answers. The authors address issues of environmental change “by telling stories and sharing meditations, not by issuing predictive declarations that are supposed to provide answers.” These carefully crafted vignettes, replete with moments of quiet beauty as well as deep unease, thoughtfully consider humanity’s effect on nature and nature’s effect on us.

At its heart, this is a book about what is real and about why we value that… [Read more…] about Love in the Anthropocene

Are Atheists Just Rebelling Against God?

by Randal Rauser in Book Reviews

We’re all familiar with the atheist caricature: that rude and crude purveyor of mockery and disdain for everything religious. We’ve encountered him in “God’s Not Dead,” we regularly see him (or more rarely, her) being pilloried on conservative Christian blogs, and there’s a whole cottage industry of Christian apologetics books that are intent on serving the righteous smackdown to atheists. In the words of theologian Randal Rauser, “These days within the Christian community, especially within North America, the atheist has assumed the mantle of the despised and distrusted social pariah on the margins.”

Rauser has had enough of the vitriol and is on a mission to alter the course of dialogue between Christians and atheists. His slender but robust new book, Is the Atheist My Neighbor?: Rethinking Christian Attitudes toward Atheism (Cascade Books, $15), tackles the Christian disdain for atheism head-on, with a call for Christians “to repent of prejudices against atheists.”

Is the Atheist My Neighbor? offers a comprehensive and decisive refutation of the widely-held Christian perspective that atheists actually do believe in God. This viewpoint is what Rauser calls the Rebellion Thesis: “While atheists profess to believe that God does not exist, this disbelief is the result of an active and culpable suppression of an innate disposition to believe in God which is borne of a hatred of God and a desire to sin with impunity.”

Rauser surveys attitudes toward… [Read more…] about Are Atheists Just Rebelling Against God?

The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings

by in Book Reviews

I’m a skeptic. Perhaps not quite skeptical enough for my atheist friends, but nevertheless I’m extremely dubious about claims of paranormal and supernatural experience. The Ouija board doesn’t work for me, I’ve never seen a UFO, and though I go hiking in the mountains almost every weekend, I’ve never run across Bigfoot. Bears: yes. Bigfoot: no.

But despite that lack of personal experience, I find accounts of the supernatural fascinating, not necessarily because I think they’re real, but because of what they say about ourselves. We all seem to long for something more: to discover we’re not alone in the universe, to be able to communicate with a deceased relative, to experience something that transcends the mundane physical world of the everyday.

In this regard I agree with Timothy Dailey, the author of the new book The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings (Chosen Books, $13.99). Dailey says that “we can all recognize the universal aspiration for ultimate meaning that is somehow wrapped up in that ineffable, bewitching quantity called love.” I do think we’re all searching for love, and I do think we often look for it in the wrong places.

However, Dailey thinks that our longing for transcendent love is being fed by a nefarious plot: “a diabolical conspiracy is afoot: a plot to lead human hearts and souls eternally astray.” This conspiracy “promises to fulfill that universal, unquenchable yearning for love. Through… [Read more…] about The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

by in Book Reviews

Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse’s new book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, $29.99), engagingly traces the rise of the Christian Right as a political force in America.

Kruse explores how business interests of the 1930s fought back against the New Deal and, in an attempt to counteract government regulation and oversight, enlisted the aid of religion. This Christian libertarianism “linked capitalism and Christianity and, at the same time, likened the welfare state to godless paganism.”

That movement eventually mutated into something far more powerful. Kruse summarizes this development:

In their struggle against the New Deal, the business lobbies of the Depression era had allied themselves with conservative religious and cultural leaders and, in so doing, set in motion a new dynamic in American politics. The activism of Christian libertarians such as James Fifield and Abraham Vereide had sought to provide the right with its own brand of public religion that could challenge the Social Gospel of the left. But the rhetoric and rituals they created to topple the New Deal lived on long after their heyday, becoming a constant in American political life in the Eisenhower era and beyond.

Much of Kruse’s book centers around the “twin pillars of ceremonial deism,” embodied in the phrases “one nation under God” and “in God we trust.” Kruse traces the history of these mottos as they became central tenets of American… [Read more…] about One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

How (and why) Adam and Eve evolved

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Adam, Eve, a garden, a snake, an apple. Images that pervade Western culture. Images viewed by many as mere myth and by others as absolute truth.

What really happened at the dawn of human existence? Were Adam and Eve real people? Was there really a Garden of Eden? Did sin really enter the world through a piece of fruit?

Do Christians really have to believe all this stuff, even when science seems to point in a different direction?

In his forthcoming book The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (IVP Academic, $17) Wheaton College Old Testament Professor John Walton sets out to address these questions by exploring what the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about the origins of humanity.

Walton rejects the idea that there is “an essential, inherent conflict between the claims of the Bible and the current scientific consensus about human origins.” From his perspective,
The perceived threat posed by the current consensus about human origins is overblown. That consensus accepts the principles of common ancestry and evolutionary theory as the explanation for the existence of all life. … regardless of whether the scientific conclusions stand the test of time or not, they pose no threat to biblical belief.
Walton’s understanding of Genesis includes these core propositions:

That Genesis 1 is an account of functional, not material origins. It describes God ordering the cosmos into a sacred space, but has virtually nothing to say about the… [Read more…] about How (and why) Adam and Eve evolved