Gleanings

I've run across some great blog entries and websites that I thought would be worth sharing:

Caleb takes a characteristically clear-eyed view of martyrdom, prophecy, and how certain interpretive strategies undermine the Christian life. His post is, in ways, a beginning of my response to why I find dispensationalism (one such interpretive technique) wanting. Here is one quote to whet your appetite for more:

For one thing, a view of persecution as inevitable discourages Christians from engaging in any efforts to make the world a more equitable place to live. There is no ethics behind the "nice cake" view of eschatology, only certain destruction. As Fred Clark put it in a different context, "At a very basic level, this worldview opposes and undermines any long-term thinking, any sustained effort to make the world a better place -- replacing the hope of redemption with a perverse longing for apocalypse." This worldview was not Stang's, clearly. It was precisely her "sustained effort to make the world a better place" that led to her death. So it should not marshalled as evidence to support a "perverse longing" for the world to perish. Christians, presumably like the God they worship, do not desire the destruction of the world, but instead its renovation.

I have also discovered an interesting post with Rev. Dr. George Hunsinger (of Princeton Theological Seminary) talking about Church Folks for a Better America, a group he has begun that presents a political alternative for those who are both passionately-committed Christians and uncomfortable with the politics of the right.