Category: Housekeeping

Tulsa storm update

It’s been a long week here in Oklahoma. Saturday night, we had a big storm move through Green Country, officially classified a derecho afterwards. A 20 mile storm front, containing sustained 80-90 mph winds, wreaked havoc on Tulsa. The storm damage was widespread, and here we are almost a week later still without power as crews from all the country work on downed lines and trees all over the city.

I’ve come to the end of prewritten posts to keep things going here, so things may slow down here this weekend. We’re estimated to have power back tomorrow so fingers are crossed we’ll be back home and back to normal soon.

The Politics of Charity

For those that don’t know, I do have a Substack newsletter, where I write longer pieces and essays that go straight to your email inbox. Currently, I am in the midst of a longer series examining Stanley Hauerwas’ essay “The Politics of Charity”, from his book Truthfulness and Tragedy. The essay takes on the idea that Christian political action must take on the priorities of the world, or in Hauerwas’ construction, the myth that Christians have any obligation to be effective political actors. In my essays, I am unpacking Hauerwas a bit and drawing some connections to our own time and place, where we have a church beholden to the left and right and obsessed with the political fight between the two. How do we break out of that? I think Hauerwas’ prescription of more charity and less effectiveness is a good place to start. Check it out, and subscribe to my newsletter. It is free!

bookmarks

I’ve read a lot of books over the last couple of years, including a lot of theology. In that reading, I have done a lot of underlining and highlighting and noting and dog-earing, all with some vague intention of return. I suppose it is time to be less vague about that, so expect to see here lots of book quotes and fleeting ideas from me to go with them. Especially featured will be Stanley Hauerwas, as I spent 2020-2021 reading his entire corpus of major works. Consider yourself warned, reader.