Teachers say they often feed students who come to school hungry

By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY

 

"This may be the land of plenty, but many children are going to school hungry, and teachers often give students food to help them make it until lunchtime, according to a new national survey of 638 public teachers."

[Full Article]

Rob Bell - Giving Us All A Wonderful Opportunity

by Brian D. McLaren
http://tinyurl.com/4n5fdtr

What's quite pathetic, as I see it, is that many critics won't even begin to get Rob's real point. (I've read the book, so I'm not just going by conjecture....) It's not that he's being given a multiple-choice test between a) traditional exclusivism and b) traditional universalism, and he's choosing b) instead of a). Rather, it's that Rob has come to see that the biblical story is bigger and better than a narrative about how souls get sorted out into two bins at the end of time.

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The right wing of Evangelicalism will, I imagine, require people to answer the "Bell question," and in so doing, pass or fail the latest litmus test. Those who fail will be purged - which appears to be the purpose of John Piper's already-infamous tweet, "Farewell, Rob Bell." (Fare "well?" - is this a sign of sympathy? It could have been - "You're going to hell, Rob Bell!" - Ah, perhaps John Piper is a closet universalist too? - Just kidding, of course.) Many, subjected to these litmus tests, will capitulate and throw Rob under the bus, even though in their heart they think he's onto something. Others will try to stake out a pseudo-middle position, respectable with conservatives without being needlessly mean-spirited towards Rob, but they'll make sure to distance themselves from him. Hopefully more than a few who in the end disagree will do so in a fair, honest, charitable way, having truly and openly considered what Rob is proposing.

Rev. Peter J. Gomes Is Dead at 68; A Leading Voice Against Intolerance

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN 

The New York Times
http://tinyurl.com/4vkwe4b

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard minister, theologian and author who announced that he was gay a generation ago and became one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance, died on Monday in Boston. He was 68.

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One can read into the Bible almost any interpretation of morality, Mr. Gomes liked to say after coming out, for its passages had been used to defend slavery and the liberation of slaves, to support racism, anti-Semitism and patriotism, to enshrine a dominance of men over women, and to condemn homosexuality as immoral.

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“Religious fundamentalism is dangerous because it cannot accept ambiguity and diversity and is therefore inherently intolerant,” he declared in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 1992. “Such intolerance, in the name of virtue, is ruthless and uses political power to destroy what it cannot convert.”

In his 1996 best seller, “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart,” Mr. Gomes urged believers to grasp the spirit, not the letter, of scriptural passages that he said had been misused to defend racism, anti-Semitism and sexism, and to attack homosexuality and abortion. He offered interpretations that he said transcended the narrow context of modern prejudices.

Thoughts About Rob Bell, John Piper, and Justin Taylor

by Jason Boyett

5. But here's where Taylor's and Piper's responses annoy and frustrate me: They are so absolutely certain that they are right. Because Rob Bell seems to be indicating that hell might not be a place of eternal suffering -- or might not exist at all in the way traditional Christianity thinks of it -- then they say he is flat-out wrong. Dangerously wrong. False-doctrine wrong. Opposing-the-Gospel wrong. But you know what? The Bible is really squishy on the subject of hell. The everlasting-torment hell of Dante and Jonathan Edwards doesn't exist at all in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus talks about hell a lot, but sometimes in ways that a reasonable person could interpret metaphorically (like when he calls it Gehenna, after a real-life burning trash heap outside Jerusalem). And for centuries, some Christians have tried to make the case that, when Paul says Christ died for all, he really meant it. Not some. All.

[Full Article]

Farewell Rob Bell (or, John Piper's Inferno)

by Christopher LaTondresse 
Founder and CEO, Recovering Evangelical

The Huffington Post

"Farewell Rob Bell."

With this three word Tweet, John Piper -- senior pastor at Bethlehem Baptist church in Minneapolis, Minn., and elder statesman of the neo-reform stream of American Christianity -- triggered an online firestorm over the weekend. Within 24 hours "Rob Bell" became a trending topic on Twitter, fueled by a steady point/counterpoint barrage of new Tweets and blog posts that amounted to a whole lot of heat, but not much fire.

The fact that this controversy became the most dissected piece of news in the evangelical world at the same time the regime of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was escalating violent attacks on its own people this weekend offers a sobering commentary on the priorities (and irrelevance) of too-many evangelical leaders.

But I digress; that's another blog post entirely. [...]