White Man, Brown Family

I spent Father’s Day in Durham with both of my two families: my white family and my brown family. In the afternoon, I went down to the Eno River to swim with my white family where I noticed with perhaps a little too much pride that we were the only white people there (I guess most white people stick to chlorinated pools). Then on Sunday night after I put my boys to bed, I went out to the soccer field to see my brown family (the mostly Mexican immigrant kids from my former youth group who adopted me into their family). I only had a few minutes with them because I was meeting my friend Mitch for a drink so I had to settle for a few quick hugs while the ball was at the other end of the field.

God’s not at work unless I’m in charge

I’m continuing my travelogue through Willie Jennings’ Christian Imagination as a way of coping with the tedium of Virginia’s Annual Conference. Chapter two of Jennings’ book is called “Acosta’s Laugh.” It concerns the perspective of 16th Jesuit theologian Jose Acosta who was one of the first Europeans to develop theology within the context of the New World, in Acosta’s case Peru.

The “Because I said so” God: a product of colonial evangelism

At Methodist annual conferences, there are a whole lot of reports that have to be shared and approved, which makes for a lot of boredom. To cope with this boredom, I have been reading Willie Jennings’ Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.