Viral Faith

Jesus is repetitive, and his Judean hearers do not get the message because of the power of the dominant myth to exclude other possible truths.  -- Wes Howard-Brook in Becoming Children of God Today, I read an article where an author was making an attempt to define conservative and progressive Christians.  In his eagerness to define the two groups, he used theological terms to try and describe political realities. The purpose of the article was to analyze how different Christian identities impact political and faith practices.  I would disagree with the author in understanding that both self-identified conservative and self-progressive Christians can agree on the Inerrancy of Scripture and the centrality and exclusivity of Jesus in salvation (those are the two criteria he used).  I share this only to emphasize the politicization of Christian identity formation.  In fact, there is often such a fierce affinity towards political realities, that it is often fused in...

  "So Jews othered non-Jews, Greeks othered non-Greeks, and Romans othered non-Romans.  Each divided the world into us and them, where them is always wild, violent, unmanly, dirty, stupid, lazy, horny and yet scary.  That was, of course, because they were not actually wild, violent, unmanly, and so forth, but they were actually scary... All this ethnic othering had to do finally with trying to put a finger on that fear factor.  Why are we so afraid?"  -- Stephen Patterson in The Forgotten Creed Throughout history, cultures develop narratives to understand their identity and root that identity in community values, informed by the experiences of a people.  The narrative or myth may be based entirely on a true rendering of historical facts or can be a carefully crafted multigenerational account of fictionalized stories that support a culture/nation/people's preferred understanding of themselves.  It should not be surprising to most to acknowledge that is ...