• Nancey Murphy & Christian Nonviolence

    From “Dissident Discipleship (p.129),” After my colleague Nancey Murphy delievers an address in London, two Muslim men sought her out to ask, “Did we hear correctly? You are a Christian and you believe in nonviolence?” “Yes, I come from a long tradition, Anabaptism, which, like Jesus did, refuses violence.” “And you would not kill, even…

  • Powerful Practices

    Taken from the work of James Wm. McClendon, Jr. and Nancey Murphy, powerful practices suggests that one should not be too optimistic about practices but should understand that practices are themselves corruptible and throughout time go through a series of “decline as well as progress.” (fn) Practices can be taken over and infiltrated by the…

  • Four Models of Emerging Churches

    I’ve had a lot of vested interest in the emerging church for a number of years now, partly because of my own previous experience in communities that reflected many of the qualities present in Bolger and Gibb’s “Emerging Churches,” and partly because upon reading that book I was better able to organize my own disparate…

  • Some Thoughts On This Past Quarter

    We’ve reached the end of the quarter, which turned out to be pretty good albeit pretty busy preparing for baby Daniels. The Church In Mission class I TA’d for was a great learning experience, and it’s always good to work with Ryan because he welcomes input and lets me enter into what he is learning…

  • Towards a Post-Foundationalist Quaker Theology: Slavoj Zizek, Quietism and Pink Dandelion

    Accepting the whole of a tradition and not just the parts I found Slavoj Zizek’s opening to his book The Fragile Absolute, to be instructive for a present day study of Quaker theology. He begins by presenting the challenge of two choices: How is a Marxist to counter all the various “thoughts” of the post-modern…