Recommended Reading 1-30-15 edition

Each week (more or less) I send out an e-mail to my congregation with my thoughts including stuff I've read over the past week that I want to pass along.  I haven't put my lists up on the blog in a good while so here are some that go back a ways, but if you missed them, they are still worth reading, clicking on, listening to or watching.

Recommended Reading from 1-30-15:

In case you missed it, here's the article in The Kansas City Star where I and four other Kansas Citians are interviewed about our thoughts on race after Ferguson.  The web version of the article has video of each of us containing material not present in the print version.

CCCUCC is  featured prominently in this week's issue of Ink Magazine in an article about weddings.  It includes a wedding this summer that I officiated at our church.  If you click on the pictures you will some good ones of our church.  Our wedding coordinator, Rick Truman, deserves credit for all his work at the weddings that take place at our church.

CCCUCC's Seminarian Bethany Meier has written two blog posts on the web site of her seminary, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, about developing her skill as a preacher.  In them, she writes about her experience preaching at our church.  Here's the first one and here's the second one.  You can also listen on-line to the sermon she gave this past Sunday on the church web site.

Recommended Reading

• Did you know MLK, Jr. supported Planned Parenthood?  
• Here's a good essay on why "Progressive Christianity" matters.
• Church historian Bill Leonard cautions Christians to "remove the beam from our own eye" before we criticize the speck in the eye of other religions--including Islam.
• Charles Blow, columnist at the NY Times had a powerful piece last week reacting to his son, a student at Yale and African American, being held at gunpoint by a police officer.  As a father of two brown boys, this story scares the hell out of me.  In reaction to this story, a writer from Salon.com used it as a starting point for critiquing white liberals' reaction to Ferguson, Eric Garner, etc. As a white liberal this one hit a little too close to home.
• CCCUCC's own Michael Smith had a column this week working from MLK, Jr's words about "the fierce urgency of now" and asking what that might be today? 
• Did you hear about the Florida police department that used mugshots of real people for target practice?  Clergy across the country have and are sending in their own pictures to those police and saying #usemeinstead.  
• A gay friend of mine and his husband tried to put their son in a local Christian preschool.  What happened next is sadly predictable.
• Just a reminder, MLK, Jr. wasn't interested in propping up middle class white America.
• I'm not sure what's going on, but I found this column by David Brooks to be really powerful (usually I have a hard time agreeing with him)--maybe it's because he is working from a short story by Ursula Le Guin.  
• This piece was really helpful to me:3 Ways to Compassionately and Responsibly Respond to Panhandling.
• This minister asks if we are a little too self-satisfied when we post about social justice issues on social media and calls us to real solidarity with oppressed people.
• I really like Father James Martin, a Jesuit and author who is also known as the "chaplain for the Colbert Report."  Now that the show is over, Martin talks about his experiences with Colbert in this interview.
• Guess what?  The NRA is wrong.  Having more guns makes us less safe not more safe.  Here are the statistics.