When six corporations control more than 90% of media communications, the media does not inform, it indoctrinates. Corporate media provides selective information, often unreliable, for the express purp… — Egberto Willies and Keyan Bliss
by Ken Sehested
We must be prepared.
Things are likely to get worse
before they get better. We
must listen to the news,
from a variety of sources.
But we must not draw our
bearings from that news.
Ours is a larger horizon.
We must be prepared to
take emergency action, to
go completely out of our
comfort zones, in resisting
the Powers-and-Principalities’
sway over current events.
by Ken Sehested
Few topics are as ambiguous for people of faith as anger. All of us get angry from time to time. But something inside us tells us we’re not supposed to be angry—even though sometimes it feels right.
The Bible itself seems to be ambiguous. Jesus appears to forbid it when he says “every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” (Matthew 5:22—although a textual note adds: “Other ancient authorities insert ‘without cause’ in this verse. The rest of this text involves Jesus’ warning about insulting behavior.)
Read more ›Years ago, in putting together a special issue of Baptist Peacemaker on the topic of anger, I asked two friends (thanks again, Steve & Marion) to do a bit of research. Read through the Psalms, I asked, and compile a list of verses that speak about anger and its various synonyms—expressions of hatred, longing for vengeance, threat of retaliation, etc.
Needless to say, there is a lot there; and it’s actually shocking that the believing community’s prayer book contains such a level of vile and violent accusations and bequests. (This material is formally referred to as the imprecatory psalms.)
In his Praying the Psalms, biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says this material reveals ancient Israel doing three things. “First, you must voice the rage. Everybody knows that. Everybody in the therapeutic society knows that you must voice it, but therapeutic society stops there. Second, you must submit it to another, meaning God in this context. Third, you then must relinquish it and say, ‘I entrust my rage to you.’”
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
Introduction
Many years ago a friend wrote to ask about how to handle anger, naming a specific incident regarding
her congregation’s skewed budget habits. Of course, the incident is not unique, and the question
of what to do with anger stretches across a wide range of personal and public contexts.
Below is her question and commentary, then my response.
by Ken Sehested
It was the third of July on a cool cloudy sky
I set in for a storm in the makin'. . . .
I believe that a thought has just gotten caught
In a place where words can't surround it
It concerns the years past and the shadows they cast
And my path as I walk around it.
—John Prine, “The Third of July”
Some years ago, on a visit to the Maritime provinces of Canada, we took a history tour of St. John, New Brunswick, and learned details of a narrative I vaguely recalled. St. John’s story is uniquely tied to U.S. history.
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
U.S. President Donald Trump is a self-obsessed, infantile, demagogic and malicious huckster without a shred of moral capacity other than self-promotion.
There. Say it out loud.
Read more ›by Ken Sehested, slightly adapted from a Feasting on the Word article
A traditionalist, a modernist, and a post-modernist walk into a bar. Over shots of bourbon, the three friends discuss the prologue (1:3-14) to the epistle to the Ephesians.
[The following exchange is fictitious—though quite plausible—imagining the voices and perspectives of three particular friends.]
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
One important thing that hasn’t been said this week [about the savagery of separating of children from parents at the US-Mexican border] is that this Department of Justice policy change is in fact a form of terrorism.
The point of terrorism isn’t killing people. Terrorists make strategic use of aggressive trauma to spread fear for the purpose of affecting social or political objectives. Look up the FBI’s definition.*
Read more ›
§ “Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.”
§ “Shall we carry a flag? It is a rival to Christ.”
§ “It is absolutely forbidden to repay evil with evil.”
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
This material was delivered in 2010 to a North Carolina Council of Churches-sponsored series of clergy gatherings in various cities.
My assignment is to do a Bible study relevant to the intense conversation underway in our nation over the question of immigration. Others will offer social analysis and practical strategies. But I should mention three presumptions I bring.
Read more ›Subscribers receive full access to the entire prayer&politiks site. It’s free. Each week you will receive an automated email with a link to the new edition of the Signs of the Times column. All you provide is you name, email address and city, state or province, and country. This information is never shared with any other party. The only other agreement you make is to receive two solicitation letters per year, one in the spring, the other in the fall. (Which you are free to ignore. Your subscription is still free, and you may “unsubscribe” at any time.) This is our modern begging-bowl. Contributions are our sole source of support.