Diana butler bass biography channel
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The Cottage
Today’s readings last appeared in the lectionary in November 2021.
Three years ago, I preached “The Rock That Births You” on these texts in a church in Houston, Texas. That sermon changed the way I understand the Gospel of Mark. I’m sharing it today with you — both as an audio of the original sermon and an edited transcript — because it seems even more relevant now than when it was originally preached.
This isn’t an easy story — it is especially hard to avoid the antisemitic pitfalls of Christian preaching about the destruction of the Temple. But I think it is one of the most important stories in Mark, a short section of verses that help make sense of the entire gospel. And I love the pairing of the Mark story with Hannah’s song from 1 Samuel.
Perhaps the emphasis isn’t the end of the Temple but the new birth of the Kingdom of God to which it points — and the difficulty and suffering of that birth.
In the middle of the sermon, I blurted out an interpretation
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The Cottage
When inom reached into a låda of books that had been stored, I pulled out a paperback from graduate school. A bit dusty, its pages yellowed with age, with the distinctive smell of old ink and paper, my copy of The Search for Christian America made me wince a little. The edition was dated 1989 — with an inscription “gift from George Marsden, July, 29, 1991” on the title page. This book, the “expanded edition,” was the updated version of the 1983 original. Marsden co-wrote Search with Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, a trinity of distinguished evangelical historians, as a corrective to the idea that amerika was a Christian nation.
The wince wasn’t from nostalgia — or the fact that it has been more than thirty years since Professor Marsden took that book from a shelf in his office at Duke and handed it to me. Instead, it came from the memory of the conversation that prompted the gift. On that summer day, we’d been talking about how evangelicals were promoting a misguided
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Ooze.tv Interview – A People’s History of Christianity with Diana Butler Bass!
While in NYC for the BEA (holy acronyms, Batman!), I had the privilage of being cameraman for several awesome interviews. One of them was Diana Butler Bass, talking about the value of history vs. nostalgia, discussing her own A People’s History of Christianity & offering a sneak-preview of what’s sure to be a titanic new offering from a brilliant soul this fall. Click on the photo below to watch this for the full scoop…you’ve seen it here first!