I don’t mean to Monday morning quarterback — actually, yes I do, because this question is the sort of thing I think about a lot (from the discipleship angle, not the presidential one). So, with the benefit of plenty of time to think, I thought I’d take a stab at my own response.

First, though, I’ll note that of the candidates’ answers, Newt Gingrich’s was closest to my perspective. His brief assertion that religion isn’t something that just happens on Sundays and, in that sense, is inextricable from daily life, was by far the most compelling point.

Even now, I still have no idea how Ron Paul’s argument makes any sense: that religion affects his character, and the way he lives, but wouldn’t affect his presidency because his oath of office would take precedence. Paul seemed to indicate he could set aside his faith at times, which I find confusing and problematic.

Santorum and Romney made safe claims about Judeo-Christian values and the Declaration of Independence, sticking to general faith fluff and an embellished religious history of America.

That’s all fine. No candidate said anything particularly compelling, but no candidate had an “oops moment” either.

I’ll never run for president. I don’t analyze polling data or focus groups. My answer, I have no doubt, would not be popular with much of America. But, here it is:

Every day, before I check my email and my to-do lists, I pray. Prayer centers me, reminding me that each day is a gift from God. Prayer reminds me I didn’t make this world. I didn’t found our great nation. I don’t live a perfect life. Every day, after that morning prayer, I’m called to respond to God’s grace and love.

Faith, religion, and service are inextricable aspects of my life. They are at my core. I try to live my life not primarily for personal gain, but to serve God and others. So it turns out that faith is actually a large part of why I’m running. After all: why would I put my family, myself, my friends through the gauntlet of a campaign if it were not for a larger purpose beyond self? We don’t need a president — or anyone in public office — thinking the world revolves around any one person. Public service, for many of us, is an act of discipleship.

Now, before anyone gets any ideas, I would not use public office to compel or advocate my particular faith tradition. My values come from my faith tradition, but they’re also certainly influenced by my family, education, and community. In this most religiously diverse country on God’s earth, we must seek to advocate for policy in ways that speaks to those of all faiths, and those of no faith. For me, my love of neighbor comes from Jesus’ teachings, rooted in the Bible, and is sustained by a community of faith. For others, their love and service is influenced by the teachings of Muhammad, or in the way of Buddha. For still others (some dear friends of mine) who don’t believe in God, life’s goals come from influences beyond faith. But atheists and agnostics can and do still seek to contribute to society, to support their community, and to live justly.

So, I hope, I pray, that faith would affect every aspect of my time in office, that it would demand from me humility, honesty, courage, love, care for the earth, respect, that faith would drive me to seek liberty and justice for all. Faith then, wouldn’t hinder me in office — it’s not something I can just set aside — rather, faith would help me as I humbly sought to serve both God and country.

What do you think? What would you answer? What struck you about the candidates’ responses?

Human Sexuality, taught by a UCC pastor turned sociologist, was one of the most personally affecting courses I took at St. Olaf College. It’s been seven years now since I soaked up lectures on everything from sexual physiology to the economics of the pornography industry, but an oft-spoken line of the professor remains with me: “Understanding your sexuality is the foremost component to understanding yourself.”

Many words come to mind to describe that wonderful course and the atmosphere created by the professor’s thoughtful pedagogy — non-judgmental, liberating, embodied, reflective, hilarious, sacred — but it’s that last one that sticks with me.

Looking back, I’m not sure how he did it. Somehow, though, without his even talking about faith much at all, I was convinced that the professor’s deep respect for his students as sexual beings came from his Christian convictions. Despite that fact that he gave several lectures bemoaning the sexist history of the church, I also got the distinct impression that when our professor enjoyed sexual intimacy with his wife (which he was open to discussing), he understood sex as a holy gift from God and within God’s love.

Pivot now to two sets of recent articles. First, Saturday’s NY Times has eight commentators discussing “The Gingrich Question: Cheating vs. Open Marriage.” As I flipped through the short essays weighing-in on open marriage, divorce, sexual intimacy, etc. I was struck that the Times had failed to ask any clergy for their perspective. Which got me thinking: was the snub an oversight by the Times, or did it simply reflect the fact that clergy are not skilled (equipped?, open?) to speak publicly about sex.

Mind you it’d be a cinch to find a preacher who’d use the Times’ bully pulpit to argue in loud monotone for marriage between one man and one woman. Many of the Times’ writers, however, demonstrate much more careful words and thoughtful consideration than that, and I wondered what pastors might say publicly beyond, “marriage is good.” (I’m not saying it isn’t, by the way, just that I long for a deeper, richer, more theological conversation than most pastors react with, or at least those covered by the mainstream media.)

Thankfully, then, I later caught up on my Christian Century reading to find just that: several campus pastors reflecting on the complicated culture of dating, sex, drinking, and hook-ups at their colleges (including, my alma mater).

I recommend the series of articles, “Sex on Campus: College chaplains on the hookup culture”  at The Christian Century’s website (may require subscription). It’s all just tidbits from a larger conversation we need to have, but I’m heartened that it’s out there. I long for more holy places like my college human sexuality course to discuss sexuality, sexual ethics, culture, and faith.

I’ll close with the hopeful words of Tara Woodard-Lehman, Executive Director of the Westminster Foundation at Princeton University. Words of which, my former human sexuality professor, would be proud:

I attempt to help students cultivate a prophetic, holy imagination—one that helps them imagine a self and life that is integrated. I invite them to affirm what Rowan Williams calls “the body’s grace,” a vision of sex as an identification of one’s own body with another’s body as mutually given sources of joy and desire. I invite them to see their bodies through the sacred lens of their Creator, who names them as good, very good. Even if they can’t quite believe that it’s true, I hope that they want it to be true. And I trust that over time, by God’s grace, they will live more fully and faithfully into that new reality.

image by Matthew Bowden

In this vein, two recent popular press articles on sabbath (though they didn’t call it that) are well worth reading.

In the NY Times, Pico Iyer writes on “The Joy of Quiet,” discussing exclusive resorts that offer the allure of NO Internet or cell phone service. Particularly striking was Iyer’s visit to a Benedictine monastery where he met a MTV employee who brought his son on trips there to get away from it all.

In Slate, Katie Roiphe reflects in “Can We Really Unplug: The illusion of Internet freedom” on the popular Freedom software that locks you off the Internet for the length of your choosing.

(I’ve written on sabbath and technology in previous posts including Sabbath 2.0 and Saturday: Secular Sabbath or Christian Cop-Out?”)

Interestingly, in the church circles I observe, teaching and preaching about sabbath-keeping has gone out of style. The positive read of this is a healthy response to an over-zealous piety that can come with too much emphasis on keeping sabbath. The negative possibility, however, is that in a society where culture is about more-and-more-faster-and-faster, the church has neglected its task of preaching about the joy and benefits of practicing sabbath (and its task to acknowledge the struggles related to it as well).

So does the reflection Iyer and Roiphe’s piece (and Mark Bittman’s [here] before it) mark a cultural shift in which today’s main advocates of sabbath (or “quiet,” “rest,” “time away” whatever you call it) approach it from a spiritual but not religious perspective?

How can Christians — pastors and others alike — add their voice to the conversation in ways that welcome others? Off the top of my head, this process of dialogue comes to mind:

1. for Christians, and all, to acknowledge the challenge of today’s fast-paced uber-connected life and with it a desire by many to find periods of shelter from the hubbub
2. for Christians to listen to those who seek and find this sabbath rest from non-Christian perspectives including those that are totally secular, and those from other religious traditions
3. for Christians to plumb the depths of their own tradition and find a clarity as to what sabbath is all about (from the commandment to Jesus’ nuanced disregard for it)
4. for Christians to claim — in humility and while admitting the challenges — how living out their notions of sabbath is both faithful and life-giving for them

My instinct is that, when it comes to finding breaks from digital life — time to realign our lives towards what is good and right — the church has a lot to learn from those who practice “sabbath” without much notion of religion. I hope the conversation starts soon.

image by ivanmarn

Since I have so much time on my hands, I’m taking an Independent Study this semester: Religious Communication & Digital Life. This will count as credit towards a MA in Communication at the Univ. of North Dakota, but mainly help deepen my understanding of the field of religious comm, particularly as it concerns cyberculture studies, new media, and digital life.  (Actually, I have very little time on my hands, but I love studying this stuff so much it’d be silly not to make it official.)

I’m pretty pumped about the course which is supervised by both a communication and religion professor at UND. In independent study fashion, however, I’ll be working a lot on my own. In blogger fashion, one of the course requirements is that I post thoughts here from time to time including reviews of each of the books I’ll be reading. These include:

• Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader eds. Gordon Lynch and Jolyon Mitchell, Routledge, pp. 296, ISBN: 0415549558
• Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Univ. of California Press, ISBN: 0520243064, pp. 333.
• Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God, Craig Detweiler, ed., Westminster John Knox, pp. 222, ISBN: 0664232779
• Campbell, Heidi. When Religion Meets New Media, Routledge, 2010, pp. 232. ISBN:0415349575
• Wilkie, Rob. The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, Fordham University Press, 2011, pp. 272. ISBN: 0823234231
• Miller, Vincent. Understanding Digital Culture, Sage Publications, 2011, pp. 264. ISBN: 1847874975

Of course, that’s just a smattering of what’s out there, and I’m aware the core literature in the field is shifting/still being discovered/not yet written. So, I’d love to hear what you’re reading, and take suggestions as to what I should add to the list.

In related news: next week I’ll be attending the Digital Religion Conference hosted by University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Media, Religion, and Culture. I’m eager to make new connections, have some great conversations, and drink some delicious Boulder-area beer. If you’re reading this, and would be there and up for that, let’s connect. (Tweet @ajc123 email adamjcopeland at gmail)

Many aspects of Bonhoeffer’s remarkable life compelled me. First and foremost, I enjoyed learning about the man whose theology I had only really encountered in snapshots — quotes from Cost of Discipleship, snippets of his Advent and Christmas sermons, prayers, etc. I had a taste of Bonhoeffer’s strong words and generous spirit, but not the context in which to view them. For example, though I constructed an Advent worship service last year around Bonhoeffer’s Advent/Christmas sermons, I didn’t understand that they were written during the Nazi party buildup in Germany, while Bonhoeffer was already plotting with the opposition and organizing the Confessing Church.

Second, I was very intrigued with the window into the holocaust that Metaxas’ gives the reader. I have studied a bit of the history of WWII, but mainly from American perspectives. Certainly I’ve run into many moral components of the holocaust in philosophy, ethics, and religion courses, but it is so difficult to get the full context of what was happening in Germany at the time. Bonhoeffer allows a window into the slow rise of Hitler and the Nazi party that I didn’t previously know much about.

Finally, Bonhoeffer the man is wonderful to read about because he is so damn well-rounded and, well, extraordinary. A skillful pianist, poet, theologian (but even better pastor), preacher, philosopher, historian, son of a brilliant scientist, speaker of many languages, singer, humorist, family man, prophetic Christian, and more, the sheer breadth and depth of Bonhoeffer’s knowledge and skill astounds me. I’m left wondering: do we simply not make women and men that way any more, or was Bonhoeffer truly set apart?

I wholeheartedly recommend Bonhoeffer. At 624 pages, it takes a bit to read, but I always found myself looking forward to picking it up again. (Oh, and by the way, I think Bonhoeffer, were he living today, would definitely be a prodigious blogger. He was constantly writing to hundreds of friends, family members, and colleagues, both individually and in circular letters.)

I’ll close with a quote from the pastor himself:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

Metaxas, Eric; Timothy J. Keller (2010-04-20). Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (p. 241). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

In last week’s news roundup on NPR, NY Times columnist David Brooks said, “I think the Tea Party is like, 11 percent of the country. My estimate is that Occupy Wall Street is 2 or 3 percent of the country in what they actually want to do.” I’m not sure what Brooks thinks “they actually want to do,” but last night a fairly mixed group of young adults — Christians, atheists, seekers, seminarians, pastors — was definitely more than appreciative of the movement. Here’s why.

First, we considered how OWS might connect to Jesus’ notion of the “kingdom of God.” (See Brian McLaren’s piece here.) Conversation hinged on what a new version of the world might look like, one in which there is less income inequality, everyone has a voice, and diminished injustice. We considered, also, how the Kingdom of God is something that is not only coming in the future, but something that we can glimpse here and now. Perhaps OWS can remind and inspire Christians to live out that kingdom mentality.

Second, since the OWS folks seem to be living out certain intentional practices such as offering hospitality, food, prayer, tearing down of golden calves, and so on, we wondered with Elizabeth Drescher how OWS might be seen as a spiritual practice. Folks were less open to this notion, as they didn’t see religious identity as a determinative aspect to most folks’ participation in the protests. Certainly there are exceptions (such as the Protest Chaplains), but I was personally intrigued how folks seemed to be willing to make a distinction like, “People do this not because they’re Christian, but because they’re fed up with injustice.” I don’t like that distinction one bit, but it seemed to drive several persons’ thinking and went over without much debate.

Third, the move of OWS to “kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society,” as Nathan Schneider considers here, was quite compelling to folks. Our young adults needed almost no time to point out different idols of wealth, power, prestige, celebrity, nationality, even unquestioned democracy that needed to be called to account. (Of course, it’s always easier to point out the false idols of others than it is to claim your own hangups.)

Finally, we ended with a brief consideration of how sin (both personal and societal) might be way to put Christian language to the brokenness OWS folks are protesting.

At the end of the night, my uneasiness about the OWS topic has subsided, only to be replaced by another troublesome reality. Our conversation went so well, tapping into much of Christian theology and the Bible, that I mourned the fact such polite, wide-ranging, political conversation would be difficult to host in many mainline churches. But then again, according to the young adults gathered last night, it’s not Christians who push this justice stuff anyway.

image by Rob Sheridan

Brooks builds his column on the work of Christian Smith and colleagues. Smith’s previous book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults has been on my wish list for some time. Now I’ll have to add his latest as well, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood.

In his column Brooks opines that young adults these days apparently lack the wherewithal to speak about moral issues. As someone who hosts conversations for young adults to speak about moral issues, two responses immediately come to mind. One: young adults who attend Theology Pub absolutely love speaking about moral issues. Two: we are not particularly well versed in how to speak about them.

I could blame this all on standardized testing in grade schools. I could complain about colleges requiring too few philosophy and ethics courses (grad schools too, for that matter). I could lambast parents for not passing along resources for taking on moral subjects. But I won’t.

What I will do, however, is refuse to blame young adults themselves for not having been given the resources to take on moral questions — it’s not their fault that faith communities, schools, and parents failed them. Let me repeat that: it doesn’t do us any good to blame 20 year-olds for not having the moral sensibilities we wish they had. (And Brooks, by the way, does well to refuse to do so — mostly.)

I look forward to reading Smith’s book, but I’ll do so uneasily. When I somehow find the time to pick it up, I’ll do so with this question at the forefront of my mind: Is it that young adults truly have fewer moral resources with which to deal with moral questions than previous generations, or is it that today’s questions are so much more complex that young adults need more skills and understanding to just tread water in our consumeristic pluralized technologically-advanced globalized world?

After all, it’s much easier to teach and theologize that “murder is wrong” than it is to discuss unmanned drone strikes in remote border areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan during an unfunded “war on terror” lasting over ten years.

image by Linden Laserna

This post comes to you live from Louisville, Kentucky where I’m attending a meeting of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song (PCOCS). For several years now, PCOCS has met to select the contents, format, etc. of the next collection of Presbyterian songs and hymns – the next hymnal.

We’ve focused this particulary three-day meeting on the psalms, and I have a few reflections. First, a bit of history. The previous Presbyterian hymnal published in 1990 had many psalms set to music and contained in a particular section of the hymnal ordered by psalm number (rather than topical, ordered by use in worship, or some other arrangement). For a number of reasons the psalms, generally speaking, were the least sung and least popular section of the previous hymnal. This for a denomination whose roots are in psalm singing.

There are plenty of other reasons the psalms in the 1990 hymnal were less than popular – and we could certainly discuss whether popularity is the point – but I want to reflect briefly on a few other issues related to singing the psalms.

Singing a psalm from the Bible that has been set to music is singing someone else’s song as your own. This happens when singing any piece of music written by someone else, I suppose, but I feel it more strongly when I sing a psalm. Singing what God’s people have sung for thousands of years connects me to those people in a way singing a newly composed text doesn’t quite reach. And it also brings up some tricky problems when the messages of the psalms don’t fit into our neat theological categories today.

For instance, one psalm paraphrase we looked at had the phrase, “May God confirm your heart’s desire / and bring to fullness all your plans.” I found this psalm’s message curious because of how often we speak in Christian parlance today about following “God’s plan” but the psalm sings about God confirming our plans.

(By the way, since PCOCS works with texts with author’s names intentionally omitted I cannot cite them here which is fine because our work isn’t finished yet. So even if you somehow know the psalm I reference here, nobody knows whether it’ll be in the next collection. So please don’t freak out on me.)

Other psalms come up against other narratives of the Bible so that we can use the Bible as speaking different and sometimes conflicting messages at different times. This is obvious for any Bible reader, but seemed particularly tricky when working with psalms.

For instance, one psalm sets up how creation praises and responds to God then says, “None questions what you do.” But many of us do question God – which seems reasonable, right? And some of the psalms – a lot of the psalms – do the same thing!

Finally, some psalms get at the old challenge of works righteousness theology: “Those who trust the Lord are filled; all the good wrought by their labor / Is their gain, so God has willed.” Maybe this one gets at the challenge of simply explaining any theological concept in rhyming verse, but it struck me as particularly curious.

Though I’ve many more thoughts, I must cut this sort and run back to the meeting now. Unless I hurry, I’ll have to sing a song: “Please accept my apology / blogging stole such time from me.” Peace.

When I served as a parish pastor, every week the bulletin reported how much money was collected during the previous week’s offering. It also noted “total offering collected for the month” in relation to the budget. Reporting these numbers was a tradition in our congregation and is common in this area, but I always felt a little uncertain about this practice.

On the one hand, it’s really helpful for members to know the state of the church’s budget. Noting as much each week might also remind the less assiduous folks to bring their pledges. But on the other hand, I wondered what that line in the bulletin communicated to visitors, especially those without much money. We didn’t report each week how many times we served Jesus, or fed the hungry, or glimpsed the Kingdom. We reported how much money we collected, or not.

Numbers matter, but they’re not the point. Interpreting numbers can get pretty tricky pretty fast.

I recently read with great interest an article on the Online Conference Dashboard instituted by Bishop William Willimon of the Northern Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. Each Monday pastors supervised by Willimon report statistics on the online “dashboard” about membership, attendance, baptisms, professions of faith, outreach (people serving), outreach (people served), and apportionment dollars paid. Willimon checks out the stats each Tuesday, but it’s all public. You can see the reports here. It’s no great surprise that the approach has reportedly generated its fair share of controversy (though Google turned-up relatively little).

As a mission developer, I make monthly online statistical reports to supervisors at the national church, but the questions are such that I can’t imagine the data is any help whatsoever in interpreting our ministry at The Project F-M. As a former student of Florida’s schools where the statewide standardized test (the FCAT instituted before No Child Left Behind) is often the tail wagging the dog, I have a natural aversion to bureaucrats and statistics. But…

But when people ask how our ministry is going, I often say how many people attended our last event. But when I give my monthly report to our Board, I dutifully report exactly who I met with the previous month. And, if we ever were to the point where someone wished to be baptized, you better believe I’ll take note.

So though I admit a natural skepticism towards Willimon’s dashboard, though I insist it tells too little a story, I do give the conference credit for taking note, for (literally) taking account of their ministry — and for doing so especially in the context of what was (but, I understand, is no longer) a declining conference in terms of overall membership statistics. And, sure, the speed, the public nature, and the frequency of the reports might help combat pastoral laziness and burnout.

[On a side note, I'm not convinced all churches need to grow numerically. I do think, though, they should support other new church plants and innovative ways of ministry even if they themselves are an ideal size.]

The Mary Jacobs article gives a good quick take on some other issues — not all positive –  associated with the dashboards, but the whole thing has me thinking: what questions might I like to ask other than the basic membership, giving, and service stats? What questions might I consider particularly telling for congregations? Here’s a few of my ideas, and I’d love to read some of yours in the comments.

Alternative Questions for the Conference Dashboards

• For how many of your enemies did you pray in the last week?
• How many times did you push yourself to an uncomfortable place for Jesus’ sake?
• How often did you find yourself closed-off to the Spirit doing a new thing?
• How many Bibles have you worn out from study?
• How often did you pray your Facebook feed?
• How often do you respond to a sermon with a specific question or action?
• Is your faith static, or are you pushing for new ideas, new activities, new insights of the Spirit?
• How often did you make numbers and statistics your idol?
• To how many people did you show and tell that Jesus Christ is Lord?