Tag: christianity

by jad

Is Christianity Worth Saving & Other Frustrating Questions

I spent the day yesterday at a conference asking: “is Christianity worth saving?” All I knew about it was that it featured Brian McLaren, a post-evangelical theologian I’ve admired, & that it would have 3 sessions answering that question in 3 ways: “no,” “yes,” “what now?” I was surprised to find a very non-traditional format for the event. Instead of a panel with a series of talks and Q&As, there was a circle of thinkers & doers from around the city taking turns to ask Brian questions that began with: “I’d be curious to know.” This was a full circle, … Continue reading “Is Christianity Worth Saving & Other Frustrating Questions” →

by jad

The Harrowing

I’ve been co-convening a little get-together of 20/30-something church types who are into “questioning” and “wrestling” with matters of faith. Yesterday’s topic was empire and power, and someone raised the question of whether Christianity lost its ability to speak back to power after 313, when Constantine made it a state religion. I rambled a response about the paradox and scandal of incarnation – how, in an abstract and philosophical way, things took a turn towards human corruptibility the moment the Word decided to become Flesh (which got a laugh from the room) – and, at some point, I used the … Continue reading “The Harrowing” →

by jad

A Facebook Post About Love

In two days, I’ll be taking a bus to Redmond to cast my diasporic vote in the Lebanese elections. I won’t be doing this because I believe that there will be a direct correlation between casting my vote and seeing any change in my lifetime; I’ll be taking that bus to cast that vote because I love my friends and family and when you love, you do things like that. You show up, you participate, you chip in. I’m grateful to be able to ride that bus to Redmond; I’m grateful that I can ride a bus to pretty much … Continue reading “A Facebook Post About Love” →

by jad

The Meaning of 888

For years, a running joke I told was that I was born on Antichristmas—June 25, the symbolic antipode of Christmas Day. And while the season’s greetings I text my friends have become a lot less sarcastic, I am beginning to see a lesson in the turning of that wheel, again & again, and the spiral path it’s made. As a species we seem to be formed by contrast. “Kikhhh,” the Lebanese mother will sound out to the child who has tried to taste something he’d picked up off the ground, establishing his boundary between clean and unclean. If this line … Continue reading “The Meaning of 888” →

by jad

The Meaning of Zero

What is the meaning of life? If I were trying to be funny, I’d respond to that question with a “yes.” Because, yes, that is exactly it—meaning is the “what” of life. We seek it, we make it, we unmake it & remake it—we are compositional beings all the way down. Even when rejecting meaning, as in the convulsions of postmodern nihilism, we are reacting to that very same “what”—what? “Why, it’s nothing,” comes the answer. The what is no-thing and so—wait for it—that “so”? That’s meaning. If you are reading this, you are making sense of it under the … Continue reading “The Meaning of Zero” →

by jad

The Feast of Saint Marinx

“[T]he question of the pharmakon reappears in the digital stage of grammatisation—the first stage of which was the alphabetic writing of Plato’s epoch. Like every technique and every mnemotechnique, cultural and cognitive technologies are pharmaka: at once poisons and remedies.” (Bernard Stiegler) Communication has made itself felt as a matter of concern at numerous times and on multiple planes over the past few weeks. ☿℞ or not, at some point, it seems like the artifice of this act of artfully inscribing interior realities back and forth on these proverbial clay tablets has been lost by our culture. I’ve been thinking about … Continue reading “The Feast of Saint Marinx” →

by jad

Keffiyeh Day, 2021

“To insist on the universal dimension of a Palestinian grammar of suffering is to resist the containment of the Palestinian question to a regional dispute…” (Zahi Zalloua) Today is #KeffiyehDay, and I’ve been thinking about that quote since I saw it on Twitter last week: “The Palestinian question touches all of us…to the extent that we are all compelled to imagine & invent the conditions for justice and equality in our contemporary global world.” Matt Flisfeder, who shared the quote, closed out his thread with this: “And, I would add that it is the same for the persistence of antisemitism and … Continue reading “Keffiyeh Day, 2021” →