by | Mar 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
Ephraim Radner’s “narrow” concern for protecting the mundane goods of earthly life isn’t so narrow after all.
Around 15 years ago, as part of my first or second job out of college, I was sent to serve as the token young person at a lunch hosted by some boutique Washington think tank. The topic of conversation was the “good life” and how best to secure it in a rapidly changing world. Most attendees were in their twilight years, temperamentally and politically conservative, and, to my recollection, mildly appalled when I volunteered that many of my peers might not be convinced of the very premise: that there exists a single good life—oriented around God and virtue—to be sketched and secured.
Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty has no such doubts about the existence of the good life. But he too breaks from the classical notion my lunch companions had in mind, rejecting the modern Christian West’s association of the good and the life that pursues it with the immaterial, especially the “development of virtue and knowledge of God.”
Radner’s vision is more mundane. The good life of the Christian, he says, consists of receiving from God the mortal goods that are “our bodies, families, work, friendships, sorrows, and delights” and the church, and then surrendering them back to God in life and death. “Tending these goods is our vocation, our ‘service’ or ‘offering’ to God,” Radner contends, and it is also the proper aim of Christian politics, “no more and no less.” The ability to send these basic components of existence back to God in worship and forward to our children in peace should be the “benchmark for Christian political engagement,” Radner advises.
This argument is framed with a …
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by | Mar 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
Few Protestant traditions continue the footwashing that Jesus did at the Last Supper. Some want a revival of the practice.
Americans get cold feet when it comes to footwashing, experts say.
Maundy Thursday is a Holy Week service marking the Last Supper. In some faith traditions, that service has included footwashing from the example in John 13, where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet during the supper and says, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (v. 14).
According to interviews with theologians and pastors, footwashing is now a rare practice even in churches that consider it a part of Maundy Thursday or regular worship. There do not appear to be recent surveys of how often US churches participate in the ritual. A 2009 survey found a decline in footwashing in one Anabaptist denomination, despite the tradition’s high view of the practice.
Most evangelical traditions have historically embraced John 13 as an example of sacrificial love rather than as a specific commandment for a worship ritual. That approach was clear in a widely discussed Super Bowl ad this year from the He Gets Us campaign featuring footwashing. Other traditions like Pentecostalism that do include footwashing in church services don’t practice it very often.
“Other than Maundy Thursday service, the practice is few and far between,” said Lisa Stephenson, a theologian at Lee University who has done research on footwashing, especially among Pentecostal churches.
Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, does footwashing in church every few years.
It can be a “a visible sign of an invisible grace,” said Ben Sloan, the pastor of missions at Eastminster. But he added with a laugh, …
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by | Mar 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
Everything is different because Jesus rose again. But do we live as if we understand he is alive?
In the summer of 2022, I visited the charming Alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany. I wandered its leafy streets lined with mural-painted houses, their balconies overflowing with flower boxes.
After indulging in ice cream and shopping for the town’s famed woodcarvings, I settled in my seat for a five-and-a-half-hour performance of Jesus’ final week on earth. Since 1634, Oberammergau has put on a Passion play involving almost all its residents, first staged in thanksgiving for the end of a bubonic plague outbreak. Normally the performances take place in the first year of a new decade (2000, 2010, etc.), but the new plague of COVID-19 delayed 2020’s play by two years.
Scores of buses were depositing tourists from many foreign countries. Looking around, I saw groups from China, Japan, and Korea, in addition to many Europeans and Americans. That summer, almost half a million people would travel to secular Germany to sit through this presentation of Jesus’ passion, spoken and sung in a language that few in the crowd could understand.
What attracted them? I wondered. At one point, more than a thousand actors filled the stage, shouting in guttural German, “Kreuzige ihn!” (Crucify him!) The audience fell silent as Pilate’s soldiers tortured and mocked their prisoner.
Some in my tour group criticized the play for shortchanging the Resurrection; after all, only 3 of the libretto’s 132 pages focused on that seminal event. Yet the ratio reflects the Gospels’ accounts, which give far more attention to the ordeal of trials and crucifixion than to the triumphant conclusion. The criticism, however, raised a question: Would a tradition such as Oberammergau’s …
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by | Mar 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
More than 100 years ago, Latin America’s most secular country abolished Christian holidays. Local church leaders have struggled to reclaim them since.
This week, millions of Latin Americans are attending worship services observing Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.
In Uruguay, they are going to the rodeo.
While their Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking neighbors mark the death and resurrection of Christ, locals from the country of 3.3 million are celebrating Semana Criolla (“Creole Week”), a series of festivals honoring the country’s gaucho heritage. Many come to watch Uruguay’s national sport, jineteada, where riders attempt to stay on the back of untamed horses. Few of the activities, which also include traditional music and dancing, acknowledge the Christianity calendar, except when it comes to eating asado criollo.
Vendors sell the country’s local barbeque throughout the week, except on Thursday and Friday, a nod to the country’s Catholic heritage.
“It’s one of our many idiosyncrasies,” said Karina T., an anthropologist from Montevideo. (CT is only identifying her by her last initial because of sensitivity concerns about her ministry to Muslims.) “If you ask somebody why they eat fish on those days, they will probably say that it is something their grandparents did. Only a few will say something about religion. They don’t even know.”
This ignorance is somewhat intentional.
Uruguay was one of the first countries in the Western Hemisphere to constitutionally separate church and state, and nowhere is secularism more apparent than in the nation’s rebrand of Christian holidays. In 1919, the government legally changed December 25 to the Fiesta de la Familia and Holy Week to the Semana del Turismo (“Tourism Week”), during which time the capital city holds Semana Criolla. …
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by | Mar 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
She won a Grammy for “We Sing Praises,” collaborated with her brother Andraé on “Jesus Is the Answer,” and worked with everyone from Billy Graham to Michael Jackson.
Sandra Crouch, the twin sister and collaborator of gospel music legend Andraé Crouch, died earlier this month after an illness, her publicist said.
Crouch, 81, who died on March 17, will be honored with a musical tribute and funeral at New Christ Memorial Church in San Fernando, California, set for April 16–17, according to an announcement.
She died in a California hospital after having complications from treatment for a noncancerous lesion in her brain.
Though her brother’s name is more widely known, Crouch was influential in both ministry and music—within and beyond the gospel genre.
She cowrote “Jesus Is the Answer” with her brother—a 1970s hit on both Black gospel and white gospel radio stations. In the 1980s, she composed, produced, and sang the lead on “We Sing Praises,” for which she won a Grammy in 1984 for best soul gospel performance by a female, helping keep Light Records out of bankruptcy.
The label has continued to feature many other gospel acts, including The Winans, Walter Hawkins and the Hawkins Family, and Commissioned, as noted by jazz and folk singer-songwriter Dara Starr Tucker in a social media post paying tribute to Sandra Crouch.
If you grew up with gospel music in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, then this label itself is iconic for you,” said Tucker, who added that Crouch also played tambourine on hits of the Jackson 5. “For those reasons and so many more Sandra Crouch was a hugely influential figure in the world of gospel music.”
At the time of her death, Crouch was senior pastor of New Christ Memorial, after her twin brother took the controversial step in 1998 of ordaining her as copastor of the Pentecostal church started …
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