These are like Super Christians to me. The normal, mundane, persnickety types of Christians are the ones I grew up with and was never very impressed by. Not that I don’t love my mother. I think she’s a good person, but the big changes she made when she was ‘born again’ was giving up decorating for ‘pagan’ holidays. Other than family and friend obligations she’s never gone out of her way to really help the unfortunate. However she’s a working-woman with three kids and elderly in-laws so how much can I ask her to do?
Besides my mother I knew an older woman from her church who taught immigrant children English.
Minus those two ladies, every other Christians I’ve met were preachy but never went out of there way to be help those less unfortunate. Probably because the Christians I met were always the unfortunate ones with cancers, drug and alcohol problems and jailbird family members.
Point is I’ve never met Christians who tried to help in-need people. They tried ‘saving their souls’ with nagging and threats of hell but that doesn’t feed anyone or keep people warm at night.
It was nice to see the shortcomings of Christians listed by a Christian; because if they do it it’s not offensive it’s just true.
“He argues that the familiar condition of “compassion fatigue” gets refigured among them as “the gaps between one’s moral ambitions and the conditions of existence that reinforce and simultaneously threaten to undermine them at every turn” (Elisha 2008b:155)
(para 1, page 2)
“Most of the remaining nine communities in the proposal’s geographic radius emulate and approximate what Setha Low (2003) described as “fortress America,” a collage of gated and walled new-growth residential developments that fuel class and race segregation. Kevin’s decision to settle in Middletown was very much about bypassing the places that, in the conservative–evangelical– megachurch imagination, are more likely candidates for starting a new church.”
(para 3 page 5)
I was forced to go to a Megachurch once. After someone told my mother it was actually a cult she stopped dragging us to that specific church.
“[Bart] hadn’t really known a poor person for 15 years.” The result was a retreat to “sadness” and the decision to step down as program director. After doing so, he and his wife—as well as their 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son—“moved to a rich Philly suburb” where he “felt like a stranger.” Two years later, in 2005, they decided “as a family” that they needed to recommit to the “original idea”
(para 1 page 8)
And here’s where the white guilt comes in. It’s nice to see someone get a reality check but there’s something stupid about giving up opportunities at better living just to not insult someone else.
“[T]wo ministry interns working for WHF got caught in the middle of gunfire on their way home one night. Luckily, the souvenir bullet holes were restricted to car doors.”
(para 3 page 9)
The fear that most of my family has went I go to Gentilly.
[I]quipped, “I see CVS found their way in.” Before I could attempt a laugh, Bart responded, “Thank God for it,”
(pare 5 page 9)
Honestly I like seeing CVSs too. Is the loss of homely charm a bigger shame than people not getting basic commodities and then some for reasonable prices?
“Purity subsumes order, control, sanctity, and holiness; and danger connects dirt, disorder, and pollution. “As we know it,” Douglas says, “dirt is essentially disorder” (1966:12), and “God’s work through the blessing is essentially to create order” (1966:63).”
(page 11 para 6)
Do I not want Christians to exist? I like the idea of people having moral order. What I really want is backwards hypocrisy to not come in large numbers. I can settle for giving condoms to teenagers trying to practice abstinence.
My new word of the day is citemene, which refers to shifting villages in mind of finding new places to cultivate.
I know my mother has been to churches that talk about mission projects to
