Following Jesus in rejecting empire
The number of poor has narrowed while the gap between them and the rich has widened. We’ve purchased more guns for protection yet witnessed more homicides. Freedom is our highest value yet we incarcerate more people than anyone else. We have better information yet promote more outlandish conspiracies. We have more friends and followers yet…
Hate crimes perpetrated by fellow Christians. The recent attacks in Atlanta committed by a young Evangelical. Christian insurrectionists storming the capitol. These incidents and others have stirred me to evaluate my own ministry as a full time Christian worker. How has my theology, my discipleship or my service to Christians allowed these things to exist…
Why should I repent of sins committed against Native Americans more than 100 years ago? I wasn’t there. I’ve never stolen anyone’s land. Many of us who grew up in western culture see ourselves as an individual thread rather than as part of a communal fabric. We fail to recognize that we are woven together…
I suspect Jesus was a Pharisee. Not in the figurative way we use the word, as in telling someone who says one thing and does the opposite “you’re such a Pharisee.” But I think Jesus literally belonged to the first century Jewish sect of the Pharisees. Think about it. The synagogue was a structure that…
(Image: George Leile. First American Missionary. Pencil drawing by Janine Bessenecker.) The Corporate-Capitalist Non-Profit Expanded and adapted from Overturning Tables by Scott A. Bessenecker. Copyright (c) 2014 by Scott A. Bessenecker. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com The Western Hemisphere in the late eighteenth century was convulsing. A slave revolt in Haiti plunged that…