by Wayne Schwab Love and justice are the reliable and constant guides to discern and to find God at work in our own life and in the world around us. Wherever we meet love and justice, we are meeting God at work among us. Wherever love and justice are missing, God is at work somewhere to bring them. If we…
Category: Theological Discussions
Theologies of Public Life
First in a series. The Holy Grail of the faith and work movement is to figure out how to bridge the gap between having the insight (God cares about work) and actually giving it the central place it ought to have in the church’s doctrine and discipleship. Mark Greene was right at Lausanne in 2010 when he said that the good…
Unambiguously Bad Idea: The Universal Basic Income and the Gattaca Future
Third in a series. I’ve already argued that a universal basic income would empower racism and build the wall in the short term. Some further reflection on why it would do these things will help us imagine what it would do in the long term. We are already moving rapidly in the direction of a future in which large, impersonal bureaucracies…
The Ideas That Most Offend College Students
When I taught theology, the doctrine my students found most offensive was neighbor love. The idea that you are obligated to love the person right next to you, regardless of anything they might have done to “deserve” your love, was patently absurd to them. Now I teach writing. You have to have something to write about, so my students write about…
Unambiguously Bad Idea: The Universal Basic Income and the Wall
Second in a series. Our chapel series here this semester is on reconciliation. This week, among other things, the sermon invoked Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace” and exhorted us not to seek a “cheap reconciliation.” I’m thinking about that as I sit down to explain why the universal basic income will not only give more power to racism, but also build the Wall…
Unambiguously Bad Idea: The Universal Basic Income and Racism
First in a series. A couple of speakers at the Faith at Work Summit presented the public policy idea of a Universal Basic Income as if it were unambiguously good and it had no downsides that needed to be mentioned, implying that all good people on both sides of the political aisle were, or should be, in favor of it.…
Old Testament Curricular Workshops: Insights (Part 2)
This the latest in a series of articles sharing insights from a joint curricular development initiative of the ON, the Theology of Work Project and three ON schools (Asbury, Assemblies of God and Western). Reprinted from the Oikonomia Network. My previous article provided an overview of the relevance of some broad Old Testament themes for exploring faith and work issues. This article, part two,…
Book Review: The Artist and the Trinity
On any list of my favorite authors, Dorothy Sayers is near the top. I’ve been a fan, especially of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, for years. I still remember walking into a used book store Before the Internet to see if they had any more copies of her mysteries. When I told the proprietor what I was searching for, he…
Babble On: The Impossible Future of the Nations
Sixth in a series. The epic of Babel points to the question: Where is our work taking the world? In the faith and work movement, we used to discuss all the time what Steve Garber has called “the fate of the widget.” Is our work shaping the material world to prepare it as much as we can for Christ’s return,…
Babble On: The Impossible Transformation of the Spirit
Fifth in a series. We have seen that the biblical epic of Babel does not end with the original Babel account, but is central to the call of Abram and the agony of exile. And we have seen that the epic of Babel has much to say about our daily work: Good work done well is a temptation to pride and…
The Green Room 