Dear Theophilus

Here is part of a speech printed in Jesus for President by the Chaplain who blessed the Atomic Bombing, which is especially fitting as we just marked the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings on August 6th and 9th. "Sixty years ago, as a Catholic Air Force chaplain, Father George Zabelka blessed the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the next twenty years, he gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing. Zabelka, who died in 1992, gave this speech on the 40th anniversary of the bombings. He left this message for the world: As a Catholic chaplain I watched as the Boxcar, piloted by a good Irish Catholic pilot, dropped the bomb on Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Japan. I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to the men who were doing it...It never entered my mind to prot...

Controversial post about violence. Are we called to complete non-violence? I believe so. I have been having a huge debate with members of the seminary I will be attending in a few weeks. Here is a passage from Jesus for President that really stuck out to me and fits with what I ahve been thinking about immensely: "There is another young man, a decorated veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, who felt that the world killed the good in him. You might remember reading the letters he wrote home from the war. He told his family he felt like he was turning into an animal because day after day it became a little easier to kill. His name was Timothy McVeigh. He came home from the Special Forces in the Gulf War, horrified, crazy, dehumanized, and became the worst domestic terrorist this country has ever seen. His essays cry out against the bloodshed he saw and created in Iraq: 'Do people think that government workers in Irag are any less than those in Oklahoma City? Do they think that Iraqis do...

"In the Market We Trust" I had a liberal, secular professor in my senior year of college at Chico State. There is a redundant statement. But if this professor was liberal at Chico State, they were pretty liberal, but it is in her that I saw Christ shine brilliantly, more so than many Christians I encounter. We discussed world problems the globe over and each time her heart bled in all the ways Christ's did. I saw her teach with fury about injustice, I saw her walk with humility in her own struggles against the world and try to make sense of the things of God. She looked like Micah 6:8, "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." There is one phrase that stood out to my over the course and it had little to do with the actual lecture. We ended up talking about poverty and poverty reduction. I mean, we all want poverty reduction, don't we? But then she said so...

This passage is definitely interesting. It has been interpreted many different ways, but this is one of my favorites. I will post the Scripture and the JfP's interpretation: "This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus." (Revelation 17:5-6) "After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted: "Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive l...

What is this this picture saying? How can this be justified? One could possibly say, "We are to be subordinate to the state, Romans 13 says so." Ok, for the sake of not arguing, why even fly the Christian flag? Let me clarify my own opinion a bit. I think Christian flags are uber-cheesy and not appropriate, but that aside, let me see it from your point of view. You have a flag, that you give value and power to represent, symbolically, the Kingdom of Christ for you, as a believer. You then choose to fly it under a secular authority that does not represent Christ. I looked up the rules, there is no law, only etiquette. At the very least, "When flags of two or more nations are displayed, they are to be flown from separate staffs of the same height. The flags should be of approximately equal size. International usage forbids the display of the flag of one nation above that of another nation in time of peace" ( Flag Rules and Regulation, Rule 11 ). We can fly a Christian...

The Mustard Seed Revolution! This section was so awesome, it completely changed the way I think about this parable and the way I expect the world to change, but first, the parable: " He told them another parable: 'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. '" Matthew 13:31-32 "What Jesus had in Mind was not a frontal attack on the empires of this world. His revolution is a subtle contagion - one little life, one little hospitality house at a time. Isn't it interesting that Saul of Tarsus went door-to-door (Acts 8:3) trying to tear up the contagion, like it was a weed? But the harder people tried to eradicate it, the faster it spread. When mustard is crushed, its potency is released. As we say, 'In the blood of the martyrs lies the se...

Jesus' unique calling for a unique people! The language mentioned earlier comes a couple pages before. Mentioned earlier are: Kingdom, Gospel, Messiah, Son of God, Ekklesia, Savior, Faith, Lord, Emmanuel, and Worship. All these words had duel meaning in that they were used by the existing, non-Christian States and then Jesus politically and spiritually hijacked them for the Kingdom he was going to build. The numbers are the points I want to highlight. "But it wasn't as if Jesus, in using such language, wanted Rome's power or wanted to gain a foothold in the culture war's of his time. He didn't want to climb Caesar's throne [1]. This political language doesn't harmonize with the contemporary church project of 'reclaiming America for God [2].' Precisely the opposite: Jesus was urging his followers to be the unique, peculiar, and set-apart people that began with Abraham. He didn't pray for the world in order to make the governments more relig...

The idea of the Jubilee is something that has always blown my mind. This gift of God that the Israelites never opened is quite possibly the most radical idea ever commanded of human beings on a societal level. I love it on so many levels. This book, being about the church and empire, has an empire focus, but still awesome nonetheless. It says: "One of the most exciting of the Sabbath laws was applied every seven years. Just like the Hebrew people were supposed to refrain from working every seventh day so that their land, animals, and servants could rest (a marked contrast to their overworked life in Egypt), every seventh year, the Hebrew people had a celebration called the Jubilee (named after the jovel, a ram's horn that sounded to herald the remission), during which during which they would take the whole year off of work. During this one-year break, all the food that continued to grow in their fields was free for the taking for families who were struggling to get by (Exodu...

"Jesus for President" isn't the latest fundamentalist cliche' to get people to hate Obama. This book is a paradigm shaker... and one of the first for our generation. JFP is about questioning our love triangle which has forced Jesus/Church, the State and Us into unholy matrimony. I am a bit skeptical at this point because our state is literally made up of us. "We the people" are the federal government and so it would be hard to see us apart from ourselves. But I love the idea and know a bit about the author to know that his view about being set apart has not kept him from some Holy mischief and protesting injustice, voting and counseling presidents. The point of this book is very clearly laid out, "This book is a project in renewing the imagination of the church in the United States and of those who seek to know Jesus" (p. 17). Section 1 "We hear people talk about 'the man' or 'the system,' but the prophets talked about 'the...