He has an essay on Washington Post On Faith today about the need for a spirituality of hope to undergird a politics of hope, here is the link

Nick also drops a bombshell, he is selling his soul back to Jesus, if you buy him an iPad, check it out. And let’s be honest, this is Nick doing what Nick does. He is being skeptical, and yet hopeful!No really all kidding aside. The more I think about the events that have led Nick to suggest re-entering Christendom through the use of a ipad, the more I think he may be on to something. Only time will tell really what that something is, but, it’s worth exploration.

You can pick up a copy of The Galilean Secret here on Amazon.

[Direct link to - ep 153 - Evan Drake Howard and The Galilean Secret]

In this podcast Josh grabs another round table podcast with the likes of Julie Clawson, Ben Lowe, and Tom Sine. The four of them discuss the (lack of a) Christian response to the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico as well as other issues facing the American Christianity’s move towards more active caring for creation.

For more on the three guests click below: Julie Clawson, Everyday Justice
Ben Lowe, Green Revolution Tom Sine, The New Conspirators and Mustard Seed Associates (also, see Christine Sine’s blog)

You can also read Josh’s blog on the oil spill here.

If you wish to volunteer to help in the clean up efforts, please click here.

Finally, there is a first in this podcast. Drop us a line if you think you know what it is!

Nick & Josh

[Direct link to ep 151 - Oil Spill Roundtable with Ben Lowe, Tom Sine, and Julie Clawson]

Tags: ben lowe, bp, christianity, Emergent, julie clawson, oil spill, podcast, progressive, religion, tom sine

[Direct link to - ep 148 - Danielle Shroyer, Boundary-Breaking God]

enjoy..

jc

Here is the video:

Thanks to Dan Ra from nextgenerasianchurch.com for recording the conversation.

Also be sure to check out the Sustainable Faith conference April 22-24 and purchase a copy of The Hopeful Skeptic to help out the podcast.

If you use the promo/discount code “podcast” when you purchase your ticket you will receive the student/pastor discount.

[Direct link to - ep 147 - Philip Clayton and Tony Jones in Atlanta]

I’d would encourage you all to check where you can buy your copy of my co-host’s book, The Hopeful Skeptic: Revisiting Christianity from the Outside. Your purchases help make this podcast (and many others) possible.

Also check out A Sustainable Faith, for more conference information April 22-24. If you are interested in going, email Nick at nick[at]thehopefulskeptic[dot]com for a discounted ticket. And if your going through Atlanta, let him know, you could carpool.

[Direct link to ep 146 - Bishop John Shelby Spong, Phyllis Tickle, and Brian McLaren.mp3]

Enjoy!

Joshua

So, if you grew up in a popular American Christian experience like mine, Good Friday was a time to recall the miracle of the Romans Road, when the cross was laid over the pit of hell (complete with hazard cones warning drivers to beware of impending doom) delivering to safety those individuals who would accept the torture of Christ in a representative capacity for their own cosmic debt.

And if you’ve been on a similar journey as mine since, you’ve perhaps grown a bit cynical about that thoroughfare constructed 19 centuries after the fact out of 5 sentences of a 20 page letter to the Romans as well as its complimentary campaign reducing Jesus’ Good-Friday event to a rescue mission to hack into the Matrix and change God’s rules- a mission that God would have sent Jesus to do for me if, even if I were one and only human on the earth (and yes, I’m proud to say that the “I” here is me, the guy writing this post, and not necessarily you- at least that’s how I remember the shtick going).

And if you were living and breathing 7 years ago you had to have heard of or seen Gibson’s Passion of Christ.  If it did its job, you might have gotten even more eeby-geeby about the gore and agony that Holy Week culminating in Good Friday represents.   And perhaps you shake your head, like me, at those friends who watch it year after year hoping to shame the sin away by “identifying with the pain” of our savior, or hoping to leverage the cinematic shock-and-awe to drill a deeper well toward even deeper gratitude than the year before.  But death-movies like Gibson’s have lost their sting to me.

So instead of blogging through biblical, theological or historical evidence that could either make you feel more self-confident, or could lead you to throw up your hands dismissing my argument as unfounded, I want to ask you to do a little exercise.  It is a directed meditation that will require 10 minutes of your dedicated attention.  Whether you’re reading this on your Driod or iPhone or laptop, or even if your secretary prints out RSS feeds from Josh’s blog and lays it on your desk next to your morning coffee, I need you to stop for a sec and get a blank sheet of paper.

SPOILER- don’t read ahead, trust your cells to the process and give yourself 10 minutes (9½  now) to go through this exercise.  This means you too, my old friend who is scanning this because you’ve just got a minute. Go ahead and get the paper… I’ll wait:

1. Okay, now take your piece of paper and fold it in half twice to make four equal quadrants.  No need to draw any lines, the two creases should suffice.
2. Turn it horizontally and write in the bottom right quadrant the names of people and organizations that fit the following categories:
   1. People you are against
   2. People who have hurt members of your family and those you love
   3. People who hurt you when you were young
   4. Groups that insult you or your friends or your religious practice
   5. Countries that mean harm to yours
   6. Political parties that sabotage what you see as right and just
   7. Pundits and media moguls who profit from demonizing you and people you value
   8. Companies, technologies, superstars, industries, ideologies, and leaders with power who misuse their power to devour others.
   9. That neighbor that you just can’t stand
   10. Now on the bottom left write the names of people and groups that you self identify with:
       1. Your family members
       2. Those who enjoy living, shopping, eating, and working in the same places as you
       3. Those who you help to get elected
       4. Non profits and special interest groups you donate time or money to
       5. Those who you’d take into your house when they need help.
       6. Those who have given you favors, breaks, and gifted you with opportunities to progress in life.
       7. Those who subscribe to and/or share your religious group’s gathering habits, styles, ideas, and language.

4. Now draw a horizontal line along the horizontal crease above the two groups.

The gospels give us a window into three years spent by Jesus re-imagining a place over that horizon in which the divisions below the horizon no longer exist.  He saw a kingdom where those who were cursed would be blessed.  He saw a world where the oppressed would carry the oppressor’s pack an extra mile.  He saw a faith that would reunite the religious and irreligious.  Jesus’ mission to “proclaim freedom to the prisoner, and good news to the poor” would affect the prison guards and the wealthy as well.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Jesus did not say every behavior, group, or ethical decision was “relative” or that grace abounded such that injustice or self-sabotage would be free from consequences. Jesus said he’d bring a sword between parent and child.  He knew that his cruciform presence, his servant leadership would exacerbate divisions.  That either side would have to fall like a seed into the ground and die to be born anew with eyes for that other horizon.

He challenged those entrusted with power to measure out consequences for injustice and self-sabotage. And this challenge would wear out those authorities (imperial and religious, as well as the public power of social media who would cry “crucify him”) until they resorted to the last resort–violent death.

1. Now, draw a cross below the horizon, between the two sides somewhere along the vertical crease (of course I have ideas for what you could draw above the horizon, but this is a Good Friday blog not an Easter Sunday one).

My beef with the Romans Road is that it trains our imagination to think of ourselves first.  And when that is our primary metaphor it can pervert the power of Good Friday into a therapeutic form of asceticism. Instead of imaging this Good Friday, that it’s all about a back room deal to get you and those in your group on the bridge over troubled waters, image that the divisions of your everyday life are made physical, demonstrated in the crudest most humiliating of forms.  The cross and the torture devises of empire belong below the horizon line of the promised future. What changes the crucifixion’s cruel macabre character is Jesus’ vision for what lay beyond it’s horizon.  Empire and death are made a laughing stock on the resurrection side of that horizon. Join Christ on the road to Calvary by laying down your arms, your defenses, your revenge, your bounded sets, by daring what CS Lewis liked to call the “deeper magic” to happen.

No doubt, death is real.  We feel it to our bones and it is serious stuff.  But Good Friday’s glory does not come from death’s gravity. Good Friday is Good because it is the masterful cosmic foreshadowing of the prevailing community of forgiveness. The vision of the Crucified one, on Friday of Holy week, is good news to everything on this side of the horizon, it is proof that God would not want any single one to be left out of the story.  ‘Even if you or I would dream it otherwise.

Do you recall that curtain ripping in the Holy of Holies at the strike of 3pm?  Paul would later write that the dividing wall between people is also removed (Eph 2.13-16). So, what shall separate us from the fellowship forming love of God in Christ Jesus? Nothing!  There is no longer Covenanters or pagans, no longer male and female, no longer enslaved or free citizen… all things are made new.  Even that old foe, death, no longer has its stinging capacity to separate us.  The empty cross proves that corporeal threat is impotent in the face of God’s love, and the empty tomb proves that sacrificial death is empty too.  Jesus was betting on that! Good Friday is the inhaling of the deeper magic.  On Good Friday, we are invited to join Christ in letting-go of the demand we hold on others and in letting-come the power to forgive, heal, reconcile and belong within a New Creation.

Have a Good Friday!

Troy

Troy Bronsink is an artist and a pastor seeking the way of Jesus. He and his wife, Kelley, and daughter, Eve, live in the Capitol View neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, where they work in community organizing and public education. Troy is the abbot of Neighbors Abbey, co-leader of the Atlanta Emergent Cohort, & contributing author to the 2007 Baker Emersion release, “An Emergent Manifesto of Hope”.

Dwight is a teacher practical theology at Mars Hill Graduate School, is active with Emergent Village, a social network of missional Christians around the world (www.EmergentVillage.com) and is also an author, professional speaker and facilitator of learning. Dwight earned a Doctor of Ministry with an emphasis in Leadership in an Emerging Culture at George Fox University under the mentorship of Leonard Sweet, with Kent Yinger as my dissertation adviser. His dissertation explored a relational hermeneutic toward connective church structures and leadership.

Also, here is a link to my blog post on Health Care Reform.

Stay tuned later in the week for a dramatic reading of Rick Bennett’s Imagined Oscar Roundtable including the voices of Tony Jones, Philip Clayton, Josh Case, Chad Crawford, and others!!!

Enjoy the podcast!

[Direct Link to ep 144 - Dwight Friesen, Thy Kingdom Connected]

As always here is a great interview with a great intro. This is definitely one of Brian’s ‘great works’, we would recommend picking up a copy. But don’t take our word for it, listen to the interview and here some links:

Nick’s review, Scot McKnights interesting review for Christianity Today

Purchase A New Kind of Christianity here

Purchase The Hopeful Skeptic here

[Download Episode]

Peace…

JC

At the end of the day, one if the most powerful aspects of the event was the experience of the settling in on the face to face banter with the real questions on the last session of the last day. Over the course of about 45 minutes to an hour, the whole group of thinkers, practitioners, and participants shared from the Soul where they saw theology after google intersecting with major themes in contemporary life.

I’m not sure if others had the same experience, but about half way through the e-commissioning, something happened. Maybe it was the coffee I drank wearing off, or the adrenaline from opening the session up, or maybe it was something of the divine and holy Spirit moving in our midst; whatever it was, something settled in and I can’t help but think quite a few of us experienced It.

And do you know when it settled in? When we did not know the answers to the questions that we did not know were coming. You could feel it. A question would be asked, “theology after google says what to a young single pregnant latino girl who enters your congregation?” Pause…The funny thing is, in every time where there was a pause, it almost seemed like those were the moments when real theology was being done. Not in the answers that eventually came, but in the process of coming to that attempt at a simple or noble articulation. And while the articulation itself wasn’t some final answer to the what is the/a theology after google, it did reflect precisely the kind of work that unforeseen questions do in the shaping of diverse theological reflection.

And maybe that is something that many of us have taken away from Theology After Google (Claremont 2010); namely, that theology is what happens in the spaces before there is anything certain to articulate. That ultimately, theologies after google need the relational exchange of ideas, emotions, and experiences that come with life, context, and conflict to rekindle the collective imaginations of all the faithful such that we hold loosely to what we know until we must engage in the communal testing of those harmonies.

And maybe, because we know that theology after google will be so relational, and inventive, and incarnational, and embodied, we know that theology after google cannot and will not be done simply in the isolated places of academy, denomination, or mind; rather, TAG will be done in the intersection of those places with the embodied and avatar alike. For although theology has long been seen as simply that which is done in the flesh, the above notion that theology is what happens in the pause, also makes space for the new exploration of a what a digital theology might be like. Or to put it another, “how is the good news story that theology after google tells to the impoverished urban community different (or the same) from the that which might be equally good news to a new avatar friend who walks into a bar, or church, or shopping center in Second life?” And what does this mean for how we might be the Church to all in our relational spheres of influence?

If it could ever be said that an event is a comma and not a period, theology after google is that comma.

Joshua Case

In the air towards Salt Lake City Airport (2010)

Kimberly Knight is a pastor of a congregation in Second Life, an online avatar driven community.

This conversation stemmed from some buzzing discussion about what is church and what is virtual church.

Zach Lind and Nick did a rantcast about it a few months back and then some discussion flowed out of that. I think that podcast was started by an article on Out of Ur. All of that to say it was a busy conversation and here is some follow up with a practitioner.

Check out Kimberly’s personal blog here and the Second Life communities site here

[Download Episode]

Enjoy!

Joshua