Weird Christianity is on the rise in America: younger Christians, many newly converted, who reject mainline "liberal" denominations as too accommodating to secularism, but who also reject "the fusion of ethnonationalism, unfettered capitalism and Republican Party politics that has come to define the modern white evangelical movement."

Politically diverse and eager to find a home, Weird Christians often end up landing in Catholic, Orthodox, or other high church settings. If you're not familiar with this phenomenon, this short article offers a mini catalogue of "Weird Christian" voices worth listening to, including Rod Dreher and Leah Libresco Sargent.

Read "Christianity Gets Weird" over at The New York Times. You can also read the story of Burton's conversion from magic to Christianity over at Catapult or listen to her recent talk about America's new religious landscape (in conversation with Steven Smith and Ross Douthat).

In our last issue, psychologist Curt Thompson helped us understand why Zoom is so exhausting. This week, Jeffrey Bilbro summons two metaphors to help us see why it's so unsatisfying: tinned fruit and prosthetic limbs.

The fruit metaphor comes from C.S. Lewis: "Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities. But one meets people who have actually learned to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh.” How can we keep video chat from doing this to us?

Enter the prosthetic limb image from Wendell Berry's novel Remembering, a story where farmer Andy Catlett loses his right hand to a corn picker. As Berry writes:

His life had been deformed. His hand was gone, his right hand that had been his principal connection to the world, and the absence of it could not be repaired. The only remedy was to re-form his life around his loss, as a tree grows live wood over its scars. From the memory and a sort of foreknowledge of wholeness, after he had grown sick enough finally of his grieving over himself, he chose to heal.

Bilbro suggests that the discomfort of video chatting should remind us of what is deformed in both our society and our soul. We "choose to heal" by remembering that we were made for embodied connection. Let your next video chat be "a reminder of the ideal goods for which we yearn."

Read "Wendell Berry and Zoom" over at The Front Porch Republic. Follow up with Wendell Berry's remarkable short novel Remembering.

On February 23, an unarmed runner was pursued and shot by two men in a Brunswick, Georgia suburban neighborhood. Until this week, the killers did not face arrest or murder charges. Why?

Journalist David French unpacks the known evidence, applies the law to those facts, and concludes that Arbery's killers must be charged. He closes the roundup of evidence by noting that this killing is part of a pattern: "the long and evil history of American lynchings features countless examples of young black men hunted and killed by white gangs who claimed their victims had committed crimes."

Facing this injustice head on, Anglican priest Esau McCaulley offers a stirring lament and proclamation of Christian hope, drawing from the testimonies of nineteenth century slaves and abolitionists:

Instead of pinning their hopes on corrupt rulers, they articulated a theology of the kingship of God. The Psalms, Israel’s hymnbook, are full of passages that say things like, “My whole being will exclaim, ‘Who is like you, Lord? You rescue the poor from those too strong for them, the poor and needy from those who rob them.’”

When kings and rulers would not bring about justice, the disinherited put their hope in God. This is the root of black faith in this country: when faced with the denial of justice we set our hopes on a higher court, a more definitive vindication.

For the Christian, this vindication came in the person of Jesus Christ.

Read "A Vigilante Killing in Georgia" over at The Dispatch and "Ahmaud Arbery and the America That Doesn’t Exist" at theTimes.

Andy

Phillip

The most haunting comment Phillip has ever heard after a sermon is, "Well, I used to love that passage." Oof! He's thought about this while gearing up for a sermon series on Elijah. Calling in reinforcements with Leithart and Provan for reinforcement.

Reading: Nearing the finish line with After Virtue (patience is, well, you know) and cracking open Dane Ortlund's Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers with two guys from church. Also, the new issue of Comment ("The Stories We Tell").

Listening: After Phillip's newly-walking daughter wakes up from her afternoon nap, they've been listening to All Creatures, a new album of spiritual folk songs for kids and grown ups from Rain for Roots. So good. If you have kids, what music do you like to listen to with them?

Yet we’re not completely paralyzed. We can still taste the goodness and dignity of even the smallest exercise of authority and competency that brings order to our world, and even some small bit of delight.

Why do we yearn for this? Conformed to the Image of His Son proposes a vital link between the work of being human and the vocation we have as God’s image-bearing creatures. The proper use of authority is central to our human vocation. It is our glory.

Jacob argues against the assumption that when Paul speaks of our future glory he has in mind some state in which our lowly, earthly bodies will be transformed into some sort of luminous, shining splendor (e.g. “when we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun”). Instead, she patiently demonstrates how this glory is about our God-given vocation to properly exercise authority to bring about the flourishing of creation, to join with Christ in his resurrection rule, and bring order to chaos in the now and the not-yet. 

The book is quite technical and scholarly, but the overall message is clearly articulated and compelling. Jacob’s exciting book offers a powerful reorientation to Paul’s most beautiful and complex letter. You can also listen to Jacob talk about the book over at the BibleProject podcast.

– Joshua Chestnut (Southborough L'Abri)

How can I keep up with all this reading?

• Download Pocket on your phone or browser. Pocket lets you save any link to your device to read later. 
• For those of you who have time mto listen to something but not to read, download AUDM (thanks, Emma). Pocket will do that for you too, as will browser extensions like Read Aloud.

Why don't I get every issue of Three Things?

Catch up on the last three issues.

1. Blinded by Science, Zoom Fatigue, and Anxious Parenting
2. Anxiety, Apocalypse, and Pandemic Neighbor Love
3. How will this pandemic change you?
4. More past issues. 

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