The Week in Review

Last week here at Tov Unleashed, our Substack Newsletter, we began with our first study of the preaching and pastorate of Gardner Taylor by looking at the study of his life by Jared Alcántara. We continue this book this week on Thursday, one chp a week, and this next week we look at the second major chp.

Alcántara observes that preaching about pain is a whole lot easier than preaching the middle of pain. Haddon Robinson uses the expression of preaching with a limp.

Black pastors know troubles and pains: segregation, legal injustices, bias and prejudice formed in racism and racist-shaped societies, economic disparities, the history of slavery, under-resourced schools and churches. Plus the “common” heartaches of life, like tragic car accidents and a church building burning.

Tuesday we sketched ten big ideas from Michael Sandel’s book about America’s systemic meritocracy: (he shows that this meritocracy is at the heart of our social and political tensions)

First, the market-driven globalization drove jobs out of the USA and created increasing disparities of income: those who benefited from globalization got wealthy and those who didn’t got left behind. When money measures success, the poor are (treated as) losers and, as Sandel says over and over, they internalize this judgment.

Second, our society is rooted in competition based on merit: we have a meritocracy. Winners win, losers lose. The rhetoric of rising – social mobility, if you work hard, if you are educated, you can do it – fuels the meritocracy, and has not led to great equalities or justice.

Wednesday we dipped into RWL Moberly’s book about God in the Old Testament:

Anyway, Moberly’s book tackles six adventurous themes: the wise God, the mysterious God, the just God, the inscrutable God, the only God, and the trustworthy God.

And we turned Thursday at what pastors have told me about preaching through Revelation when the audience often doesn’t agree with their reading of Revelation!

I couldn’t resist sketching a bit of the recent article on translations by Perry and Grubb, where they show that translations are connected quite often to a person’s politics — they are tribal, folks, tribal.

Traditionalist, literal translations are read more to signal conservative identity than to inform one’s faith. Just wow.

That is, they identify with conservative moral and political content (339).

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