Faith Challenges: It Ain't All Comfort

I'm thinking that beyond the issue of ideology making it difficult for us to process information contrary to our accepted beliefs, there is a lot of pressure within Evangelical circles to conform. If you do not fit the mold, you do not belong is a common message and motif. This kind of thinking an message makes it difficult for people to assess new information. Pressure to conform to the official or popular message all too easily becomes the defining basis of belonging to the community. Either one accepts the established norms, leaves, or remains silent in their disagreement in order to stay within the circle of faith. I have seen this pressure keep clergy from speaking out in fear of losing their positions. I have seen church members leave believing that they were not accepted or valued. I have seen individuals shamed and cast away for daring to question what others took for granted. In the SBC, Fundamentalists used ostracism and defamation to attack seminary professors, pa...

Writing a book is a learning experience. At least in my case, it is more of a learning experience for the author than for the readers. Part of that is simply that the limits of a book do not lend to incorporating many discoveries that lie beyond the scope of the book. I began writing on the economic teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures by doing searches for various terms, but soon realized that I would need to read the text verse by verse to pick up on other economic themes that were not expressed in terms of gold, money, poverty, and wealth. Economics is about more than our forms of money. It includes the creation of and distribution of wealth. In my study, I soon saw that the consistent comments against the fertility cults in and around Israel were about more than competing deities. They were likewise about the economic practices and attitudes that informed these cults. The reason the people participated in the fertility cults was in order to gain control over the agricultural and...