Unemployed Theologian

Last year I spent a lot of time writing about Advent, and the experience turned out to be deeply meaningful, so this year I decided to take a crack at Lent. Another season of the year devoted to austere reflection in anticipation of a coming hope. Lent, like Advent, is one of those traditions mostly foreign to my people (white Evangelical Protestants). As I mentioned when reflecting on Advent, we Evangelicals largely tend to ignore the Church Calendar because it seems ritualistic, archaic, perhaps a bit spooky. We get weirded out by it. But that's on us, not on our brothers and sisters who remember and retain the beautiful, historic practices of the Calendar, who recognize that ritual can engage the head, hands and heart in service of God. Granted, mere ritual cannot replace personal communion with God via prayer or devotional reading, but I see no reason to throw the baby out with the holy water. Just as Advent commemorates the Jews' period of waiting for their Messiah, Le...

At Christmastime it's hard to avoid religious iconography. It seems just about everywhere you look is a baby Jesus or the Christmas star, while everyone's singing or blasting old hymns about the Child, the Virgin, the curse of sin or the Angelic Host. From a cultural standpoint it's actually pretty fascinating we Americans allow ourselves to get so blatantly religious for one month a year (or longer, depending on the state of the economy), when the balance of the year we pride ourselves on our tolerance and inclusivity (real or imagined). But December belongs to the Christmas spectacle, to the trappings and traditions of the Christian holiday. Granted, what we celebrate now is often more commercial than it is Christian, more Santa than Christ, but the observation stands. I always forget the part where the baby Jesus is visited by Santa. It's actually a little surreal, a bit disorienting to see the Christian story, the story in which I find my life's meaning,...

In the pilot episode of HBO's Newsroom Aaron Sorkin, pontificating through his curmudgeonly protagonist, calls Millennials (those of us in our late teens or twenties) the "worst. generation. ever." In his own tirade on the woes of our culture, Louis C. K. joins in on the fun, calling us "the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots." Geeze guys, tell us how you really feel. Is that fair, though? Do we really suck so terribly as that? Critics of the Millennial generation often cite our laziness and entitlement as reasons why we're the worst, which... I don't know, maybe that's fair. I certainly don't have much ground to argue we aren't self-obsessed or work-averse. We are, in fact, the "selfie" generation, infamous for compulsively sharing every thought, shoe, food item and hairstyle for the wide internet audience. It's as though each of us assumes the world would be worse off without our unilaterally compelling subtweets and ...

Party at Jay Gatsby's A few weeks ago I found these words at the bottom of my ticket to George Fox's spring formal, a dance themed after the novel and fast-approaching film  The Great Gatsby . I would say loosely themed, considering the DJ offered no tunes from the roaring twenties but instead pumped the standard Top-40-techno-dance-hip-hop fusion, but having now seen the movie it was actually pretty on the nose. In any case I initially found it a bit odd that my Christian college would theme its dance around the bacchanals described in F. Scott Fitzgerald's anti-tribute to classic American excess, but I made no large fuss about it and indeed had a splendid time, cutting the rug with a few dear chums whom I will miss very much. It was no party at Jay Gatsby's though. No, it couldn't hold a candle to those raucous scenes depicted in the film, to the hyperreal colors, the impossibly shiny sequins, the manic, untethered energy, and no one in attendance at our dance w...