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  • Your God is Too Small: Introduction

    Your God is Too Small: Introduction
    2024/07/29
    Deconstruction from evangelicalism and conservative Christianity has trended for more than a decade in among millennials in the United States. It’s rooted in the disconnect our generation has felt between the Jesus we believe is love and peace, and the often fundamentalist leanings of our upbringing that seem now to espouse dogmatic partisanship and hate. Christena Cleveland writes, “Imagination is theology; we can only believe what we can imagine.” This series will focus on helping us tear down the harmful and decaying artifices of a god that doesn’t deserve our belief and help us reconstruct a system of hope and faith that does deserve our following.
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    5 分
  • Your God is Too Small: A Personal Jiminy Cricket

    Your God is Too Small: A Personal Jiminy Cricket
    2024/07/29
    What happens when we mistake our inner voice – our conscience – for God? At the best we may recognize that doing good to other people is better than doing wrong. But how is that good and wrong defined? Who sets its parameters? That can lead to the worst parts of our inner dialogue, wherein we believe that the inclinations we feel are good and virtuous even when they propel us toward horrific acts.
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    11 分
  • Your God is Too Small: Grand Old Man of Law and Order

    Your God is Too Small: Grand Old Man of Law and Order
    2024/08/04
    Evangelical Christianity in the United States has been enamored by a God of white respectability since before the nation’s founding: a God that looks, acts, and speaks like a good white man. It’s cliched to discuss images of God as an elderly gentleman with a flowing white beard casting lightning bolts against evil from atop a gold-lined cloud, and that image no longer captures the imagination of people for whom God is fundamentally about law, order, and righteousness. For that, many white evangelicals envision their God as a middle-aged white man in a police uniform, valiantly defending their sensibilities with a thin blue line of pre-integration nostalgia.
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    19 分
  • Your God is Too Small: Minnesota Nice, Meek and Mild

    Your God is Too Small: Minnesota Nice, Meek and Mild
    2024/08/11
    The God-who-is-nice presides over a Christian culture that decries social upheaval of any kind. It recognizes that there are traditions that must be kept intact for the social order to thrive. These are traditions that are often rooted deeply in racism or sexism, such as normative gender roles like the stay-at-home Mom or “boys will be boys.” It’s a God that is the mascot for communities that are white-washed and dyed in the red-white-and-blue, communities whose watchwords are “traditional values.”
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    17 分
  • Your God is Too Small: Pale Galilean

    Your God is Too Small: Pale Galilean
    2024/09/08
    The future of Christianity must look past a God who cares almost exclusively about the morals of the self, demonstrated in an overblown fury over the lack of morals in our neighbor. And it must move beyond the bland self-deprecation that limits creativity, imagination, and ingenuity in the public sphere in favor of a false humility.
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    17 分
  • Your God is Too Small: Captured, Tamed, and Trained

    Your God is Too Small: Captured, Tamed, and Trained
    2024/11/05
    We must accept our own negotiation of the Bible and faith because, in doing so, we allow all parties involved in biblical interpretation and the work of following Jesus to be their fullest selves. It is okay to disagree with the Bible. It is okay to not believe. When we afford ourselves and others the permission to accept the inadequacy of our own religious perspective, the text can be what the text was meant to be. Jesus can be what Jesus was meant to be. And we can be who we were meant to be.
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    15 分