Better Than Starbucks: The Local Church and the Beauty of Place
As Brent Kompelien notes, place is important because it pushes back against our individualistic tendencies. He writes, “Our attraction to non-places comes from a cultural identity crisis. We’ve been taught to look within ourselves for meaning, to define our own reality. Non-places are the best habitat for this kind of self-expression because they exert minimal social or moral force on our identity. By contrast, real places impose history, values, and obligations that shape our identity and behavior. So we’ve learned to avoid real places because they violate our radical individualism.”
Why Are You Breathing? It’s Not about You : PTH
“We have this tendency to make ourselves the gravitational center of reality, to act as if the whole universe is secretly revolving around us and out tiny decisions. And so we take up the daily task of building something, building ourselves, trying to establish something that will survive, something that will stay when so much around us is leaving and ending. But that doesn’t change the cold truth that some day the end will come. I’ve heard it said that being young is secretly believing that you’ll be the one person who lives forever. If that’s the case, then being older is quietly knowing that you won’t, and finding some way to come to peace with that. Here’s how I’ve come to peace with it: If things are going to end for us, as they did for my father, then it’s obvious that it’s not all about us. We are not the gravitational center of the universe. We’re in orbit around something else, around someone else. And I believe that this someone is God.”
Lemuel Haynes and The Right Preaching of Justice
Jared Wilson argues that Lemuel Haynes is one of the most important figures in American Christianity most of us have never heard of. Of Haynes, Wilson writes, “These two most significant truths about Haynes’s philosophical convictions—his Puritan theology and his American patriotism—would prove his two most powerful drivers in his life and ministry. He did not see these viewpoints as contrary at all, but rather complements. Haynes believed, for instance, that the abolition of slavery was not just a true move of human righteousness in reflection of the real belief in the Providence of God but also the truest form of faith in the American experiment.”
