Authors /
Kristin M. Swenson
Kristin Swenson is associate professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is author of Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time (Harper).
The wrong way to protest
It's easy—from the comfort of my desk, where I’m healthy, well fed and securely employed—to experience a sense of "enough," as I wrote last week. It’s easy to champion compassion, justice and peace (what's not to like?), even when it puts me at odds with a few biblical texts.
The gift of enough
Before my Great Aunt Esther died, she lived in downtown Minneapolis in poverty. Oddly, this is not embarrassing to my proper, upper-middle-class, Christian family....
Sunday, October 3, 2010: Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26 ; Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-9; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
This week's readings include sentiments that appall me: dashing children's heads against rocks; applauding the idea of Jerusalem as a woman abandoned and abused because she had it coming; accepting...
Sunday, September 26, 2010: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Amos 6:1a, 4-7; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Security and risk are nothing new. Today's biblical texts deal not with stocks and bonds exactly, but with living in the real circumstances of a difficult and uncertain world while also accepting the possibility of good, of help and support, comfort and security.
Biblically challenged: Overcoming scriptural illiteracy
A 2007 Kelton Research survey revealed that people know more about what goes into a Big Mac than they do about the Bible; they can name members of the Brady Bunch better than they can name the Ten Commandments. Twelve percent of adults think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Ark, and about half don’t know that the book of Isaiah is in the Old Testament. The situation might have comic possibilities for Jay Leno and other comedians, but for preachers working to craft a biblically based sermon, the situation is confounding. If parishioners can’t follow references to significant people, places or things in the Bible, they may miss or misunderstand the whole message.
Fear and trembling
It's one thing to profess; another to do. Christians put a lot of emphasis on professing—belief, repentance—but we also know that without doing, those words are just so much hot air....
Toward a somersaulting spirit
I got a delightful report from a colleague's gregarious seven-year-old the other evening about summer church school. When the little girl asked what my favorite Bible story is, I hemmed and hawed....
Keep going
Sometimes liberation is not enough. When the Hebrew people finally escaped Egypt, they might have shaken off their shackles, so to speak, but they still weren't done....
In the I AM
When I read Romans 12:9-21, I think: this is the best of it, this is what marks and makes a good Christian. Love truly and even more generously than the next guy....
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About 150 years ago, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, "There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming." ...