MAKING IT PLAIN by @druhart.bsky.social

Growing up as a putative 'Christian' & spending all my adult life as one, I had been pushed to believe that my central purpose in life was to 'share the good news' which meant get people to listen to the 'Gospel' & then get them to say the 'sinners prayer'.

For 2000 or so years now, there's been a thread of the Christian faith that has insisted that it's about what you do that resembles what Jesus did that shows your faith.

The first people called 'Christians' were identified by what they did, not by the points of their faith that they believed.

There are many kinds of Christianity in time and location, and we are neither unique nor necessarily more advanced or more pure in our ways of thinking about our faith, much less in our ways of practicing our faith.

And this is the book I helped edit this summer, a set of essays by 16 writers on how to survive these current times.

Available now!

Ingram Spark: shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params...

Amazon: us.amazon.com/Fieldnotes-F...

So I ended up buying two copies of the book because...well, it's a good book, and I want to read it more than one time.

😂

But seriously, it's a great book.

@druhart.bsky.social #MakingItPlain

heraldpress.com/978151381634...

MAKING IT PLAIN, by @druhart.bsky.social , not only explains this embrace but also shows the path out of that captivity into a more holistic faith that considers both the individual and the community.

#ChurchHistory #Anabaptism #Mennonite #History

heraldpress.com/978151381634...

The church in the West often acts as if it has no history and thus has no baggage to account for. But this is not true of any organization, no matter the length of its existence.

And the baggage of the Western church is its collapse into the embrace of the state as the tool of evangelism.

One curious thing about the development of Christianity in the West is how it quickly found a partner in politics and the state.

I won't give the "pastor" who said this terrible thing about Christianity any more attention but I did want to show that both of these thoughts came up in sequence in my feed.

ADVENTURES IN TRANSLATION
This was my "wrapped the chain around the axle" moment today.

My assignment this _month_ is to read a long-form essay, understand it, and then read it out loud / record it for my professor.

#deactivatetwitter

I'm completely done.

Liv gramè kreyòl ayisyen an rive jodi a e mwen trè kontan resevwa l paske m bezwen konprann gramè pi byen.

Taps sign:

Christmas was about migrants fleeing persecution and trying to find a safe place to have a baby.