This is the second post in a nine-part series for the SPECTRUM Summer Reading Group. The nine posts will be drawn from the chapters of To Change the World by James Hunter. You can find the reading schedule here.

Well, yes.  At least that is the answer provided in the first sentence of the chapter.

Hace aproximadamente un año en una reunión familiar, mis hermanos y mis padres me confrontaron acerca de cuán estresada pensaban que yo estaba. Hasta ese momento yo pensaba que probablemente sólo estaba ocupada. Me imaginaba que mi horario de pronto se aliviaría y volvería a la normalidad. Por supuesto, ese era un autoengaño de los más comunes. Pero la preocupación de muchos de mis seres queridos me obligó a pensar en el estrés, y en cómo podría manejar la situación.

About a year ago at a family gathering, my siblings and parents confronted me about how stressed they thought I was. Up till that point I thought I was probably just busy. I figured my schedule would soon loosen up and that I’d get back to normal. This was, of course, self-deception of the most common variety. But the concern of so many of my loved ones pushed me to think about stress and how I might handle it. I’d like to say that I went straight to my Christian tradition, to the principles of Scripture in order to study how to handle it, but that isn’t what happened.

This is the third post in a nine-part series for the SPECTRUM/re-church Summer Reading Group. The nine posts will be drawn from chapters of Deep Church, by Jim Belcher. You can find the reading schedule here.

As an historian of the early modern world, I frequently study and teach on the “wounds of modernity”—those assumptions, practices and values which still cause us to reel with their implications. Modernity values the measurable, efficient, impersonal, precise and technical. As humans we know that the most important things in life cannot be measured with such precision or given economic units of value.

I believe in, vote for, and want to fund public schools.

In my city, Chattanooga, there is a long history of private school education. Not only are there over 1000 students in SDA schools, but a freakishly large number of other sectarian and nonsectarian private high schools and elementary schools abound.

Karen Armstrong’s passion in The Bible: A Biography is clearly to call believers to engage prayerfully and creatively with their sacred text. She appeals to both Jews and Christians, reminding them that “midrash and exegesis were always supposed to relate directly to the burning issues of the day, and the fundamentalists should not be the only people who attempt this.”