
"Pastor, pain in the ass, and one of my favorite people on the planet." -@nishweiseth • Author / Books: MAN ENOUGH (2015) & MORE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE (2019)
Fishers, IN
Joined December 2011
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“We’re saving God.”
That’s not how it works.
And if you think that’s how it works, you can’t be “saving Christianity.”
"We're saving Christianity. We've saving God. We've saving the family unit. We're saving this nation. I mean, DEI is out of the window…”
- Eric Trump, son of President Donald Trump. @atrupar.
The Christian Right is finding out that the Trump administration’s treatment of those seeking legal immigration has been atrocious. What happened to Sey is awful, but his story is not uncommon under this administration.
Nate Pyle retweeted
A lot of political arsonists on this site are getting burned by the fires they helped start.
Nate Pyle retweeted
I propose we move from:
“You’re not a true Christian if you vote for ________.”
To:
“You’re not a true Christian if you don’t follow the Sermon on the Mount.”
It’s time we measured Christian faithfulness not by political allegiance but by allegiance to Jesus & his teachings.
Nate Pyle retweeted
One reason many Evangelicals easily separate the President’s character from his policies is they’ve long been conditioned to separate character from belief.
For too many, how you live matters less than whether you believe the “right” things.
A destructive form of Christianity.
The most reliable constituency of the most unethical and corrupt president in history. It’s truly sad and disappointing.
President Trump is losing ground among many of the voters but Reuters/Ipsos polling and interviews with white evangelical Christians show they remain his most reliable constituency and could prove crucial in the November 3 midterm elections reut.rs/3VPjRYv
White evangelicals could prove crucial in midterm elections - Politics
We are becoming what we despised.
Exclusive: The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House reut.rs/4i3T4iz
Don’t have to be a Lions fan to enjoy this great read.
Brian Branch is expected back soon, and Lions fans hope that he's the same old Brian Branch. But he's not. My story on a transformation. nytimes.com/athletic/7597689…
Matthew’s thought are helpful and worthy of considering.
As a rule, human beings should never film or televise (much less "livestream") another person's death--regardless of whether they are being executed in the name of justice or not.
Death is not an ordinary moment in a person's life: it strips us of all else we have been and done, leaving us naked before the immediacy of God. Death does not merely terminate our life, but consummates it: the manner of our death is the crown on all our acts, or it is their final shame. There are deep reasons why Western society, including Christians, have often given people's last words additional weight in our narrative of our lives--including, in some conditions, additional legal weight. In dying, we journey into the hand of God--a journey that no one can make for us.
The honor that we have traditionally given to the moment of death is built on a fundamental awe and respect for the value of life. How we die--and how we kill--clarifies how we think about life as nothing else can.
The respect we owe to life is inherently degraded when we film people dying. Screens inherently participation in the voyeurization of our life together, which cannot but trivialize everything they depict. There is a reason why, even as our media has secularized, the deep instinct to keep death off our screens has persisted. Our forbearers who were originally confronted with decisions to film the execution of Nazis decided against doing so. The most barbaric of our foes reject this norm--and it is part of their barbarism that they do.
Execution and the responsibilities of public justice by no means nullify the respect we owe to the criminals--at least not for those who affirm the natural law or for Christians, for whom the obligations to engage in retribution must be bound by an unwavering affirmation of the value of the offender.
The obligations of justice are to be executed with 'equity,' epieikeia or clemency, as Aristotle and Aquinas knew and as Christians have long affirmed. The offender never loses his claim upon us, even when capital punishment is imposed. Broadcasting death dehumanizes the offender and, ironically, so destroys the very rational basis that is required to make punishment just. It intrinsically participates in the barbarism that terrorism thrives on.
There is no obligation on the state to broadcast its executions in the pursuit of its justice, then, regardless of who the offender is or what they have done. The argument that some have set forth, that doing so is necessary to demonstrate the seriousness of the crime, is astonishing for what it permits: if terrorists torture someone before killing them, should the state also torture them--and broadcast such torture, so that terrorists are "warned"?
The invocation of public executions from the Old Testament offers this practice no warrant either; the formative power of being required to participate by way of stoning is different in kind than that of viewing others killing, as even the Pharisees understood in John 8. The ethical question cannot be answered without attending to the nature of public communication and the differences between their world and our own.
All that can be said from within the scope of the natural reason, I think. Christians have themselves additional warrant to prescind from such barbarisms, namely, our obligation to exhort the state to extend mercy in its demonstration of justice. At a minimum, such a demand requires allowing sinners to meet God without the whole world watching. No one in their final moment on earth should be an object lesson for the state, even if they deserve the punishment they receive.
Christian tradition (John 7:53-8:11) holds that Jesus himself stopped a Biblically justified public execution.
So when people say the Bible clearly commands or justifies public execution they’re not showing their work.
Christians can differ on their beliefs about the death penalty.
What should be universal is that mercy should be the predominate the Christian impulse.
Mercy does not dominate this app.
A Protestant Reformation won’t save you from differing positions on capital punishment. Claiming there is a “clear teaching of the Bible” purposefully flattens the whole of Christian history wrestling with the death penalty.
This from the same administration that is cutting student loans to students pursuing religious studies.









